Fracking

Kliphnote: As I have said in the past, I'm for oil and gas exploration as long

as it's environmentally safe.

IBD Editorials

Science Doesn't Find Fracking A Drinking-Water Danger

 Posted 02/21/2012 06:37 PM ET

Energy: The left thought it found in fracking the leverage it could use to further hinder domestic oil and gas production. But fracking isn't an environmental cataclysm. An independent university report confirms this. 

Fear of fracking, a process used to draw fossil fuels from shale, is based in part on speculation that it harms drinking water.

Opponents say the fluids used in hydraulic fracturing taint groundwater.
Researchers at the University of Texas, however, say they have "found no direct evidence that fracking itself has contaminated groundwater."

The report was released at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's just-finished annual meeting. In ScienceNOW, which is published by the AAAS, lead researcher Charles Groat noted "that the $380,000 report was independent from the natural-gas industry and conducted only with university funds."
ScienceNOW reports the study's "underlying white papers were peer-reviewed" and "the Environmental Defense Fund was consulted on the overall scope and design of the study." That information is important. The left cannot moan that the report is a whitewash paid for by the hated energy industry.

The findings should be no surprise. The use of noxious chemicals in fracking is actually rare.

"No matter what you may read, hydraulic fracturing does not involve pumping toxic chemicals under high pressure near public aquifers," Stephen Holditch, head of the petroleum engineering department at Texas A&M University, wrote in January on fuelfix.com's blog. "There has been some use of diesel fuel as an additive to hydraulic fracturing fluid in the past — but the use of diesel is quickly being eliminated in the field."

Holditch says that "some 99.5% of what is commonly used in fracking" is simply "a composition of pure water and quartz sand."

He noted the other agents that make up the remaining 0.5% are typically guar gum (also used to thicken food products), detergents (like those found at home for washing dishes and clothes) and bactericide (think of the chlorine that treats drinking-water supplies).
Given the facts, the Environmental Protection Agency should stop trying to demonize fracking.

After all, it was EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, not an energy industry shill, who admitted publicly last year that she was "not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water."