Those fracking headlines

Posted 8/21/12

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on June 4 released a long-awaited study on hydraulic fracturing. Both sides of the fracking debate claimed victory. The headline on the story from …

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Those fracking headlines

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on June 4 released a long-awaited study on hydraulic fracturing. Both sides of the fracking debate claimed victory. The headline on the story from ecowatch.com said, “Long-Awaited EPA Study Says Fracking Pollutes Drinking Water. The headline from the Washington Times said, “EPA finds fracking poses no direct threat to drinking water,” and called the study a “serious blow to environmentalists….”

After reading the 24-page executive summary of the report, it is hard to agree with the headline of the Washington Times.

Many news reports about the study, including the one from the Associated Press and an account read on a local radio station, quoted a line from the summary that said the EPA researchers did not find, “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” But many reports also ignored the previous paragraph, which said, “We have identified potential mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing could affect drinking water resources,” and those mechanisms exist both above ground and below ground.

Further, just after the no “widespread systemic impact” statement, the sentence reads, “We found specific instances where one or more of these mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The cases occurred during both routine activities and accidents and have resulted in impacts to surface or ground water. Spills of hydraulic fracturing fluid and [so-called] produced water in certain cases have reached drinking water resources, both surface and ground water.”

The report also says the number of cases of well contamination was small compared to the number of fracked wells. That’s good to know, but if the well happens to be one that provides an individual consumer with water, the relationship of bad wells to good wells is not going to matter much to that consumer.

More from the report: “Between 2000 and 2013, approximately 9.4 million people lived within one mile of a hydraulically fractured well. Approximately 6,800 sources of drinking water for public water systems were located within one mile of at least one hydraulically fractured well during the same period. These drinking water sources served more than 8.6 million people year-round in 2013.

“Although proximity of hydraulic fracturing activities to a drinking water resource is not in of itself sufficient for an impact to occur, it does increase the potential for impacts. Residents and drinking water resources in areas experiencing hydraulic fracturing activities are most likely to be affected.”

The report also estimated the range of chemical spills related to wells and said among wells drilled in Pennsylvania the range was 0.4 to 12 spills for every 100 wells drilled. This is surely significant, especially when considered cumulatively.

The report also addressed the possible impacts of human exposure to some 450 chemicals out of more than 1,000 used in fracking. It said of the chemicals that had available estimates of the impact on humans, the possible adverse impacts include, “carcinogenesis, immune system effects, changes in body weight, changes in blood chemistry, cardiotoxicity, neurotoxicity, liver and kidney toxicity, and reproductive and developmental toxicity.”

Further, the report said that fracking could deplete water supplies in some areas because of the enormous amount of water used in the process. Fracking activities in the U.S. used about 44 billion gallons of water a year in 2012 and 2013.

So there is much to be concerned with in the report, even though it didn’t even begin to address other serious impacts of fracking, like air pollution, or the global climate crisis.

Perhaps most importantly, the conclusions reached by the report are not very meaningful because most drilling companies declined to participate with the study, and EPA was not able to legally compel them to do so. So, according to the language of the study itself, the finding of no “widespread widespread, systemic impacts” of fracking on drinking water is hardly definitive.

The report says, “This finding could reflect a rarity of effects on drinking water resources, but may also be due to other limiting factors. These factors include: insufficient pre- and post-fracturing data on the quality of drinking water resources; the paucity of long-term systematic studies; the presence of other sources of contamination precluding a definitive link between hydraulic fracturing activities and an impact; and the inaccessibility of some information on hydraulic fracturing activities and potential impacts.”

The website insideclimatenews.org published a report in March 2015 that said all but one drilling company ultimately refused to cooperate with baseline studies of water before and after drilling. The one company that did take part, “Chesapeake Energy, chipped away at the scope of the plan over two years of talks, limiting when and where the EPA could monitor water, the EPA documents show.”

So, five years after Congress told EPA to study the issue, EPA and the public don’t really know a lot more now about the impacts of fracking than before the study began. And until and unless information about fracking, both pre-, during, and post-drilling is fully disclosed, that problem is not about to go away.

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