It's heartening that the EPA appreciates that.Read the full article here by Hiroko Tabuchi (The New York Times) And drilling techniques will only get better and safer and cleaner. Gone are the days of the Petroleum Torpedo and Downhole Bazooka. But the EPA study makes it very clear that when fracking is done in the right way it can be done safely. And when they do the companies that caused them must be held responsible. When you're dealing with such enormous volumes, spills will happen. We use 20 million barrels of oil and roughly 80 billion cubic feet of gas every day to run our cars, make electricty, and as a feedstock for myriad plastics and chemicals, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. Our economy and way of life are built on oil and gas. The follow-on multiplier effect is far greater. And that $100 billion only represents the lower cost of gas. That's $100 billion a year that stays in this country to spur jobs and create an industrial rennaissance, rather than gets sent overseas. As I wrote three years ago in " The Arithmetic of Shale Gas" Americans are saving more than $100 billion a year thanks to cheap natural gas.
The savings for the country from that is massive. Now we have so much gas that we'll soon start exporting it. A decade ago we faced the prospect of having to import vast amounts of natural gas from the Middle East. Hate the oil and gas industry all you want, but the drilling boom has done great things for this country. No doubt oil and gas companies will be relieved that the EPA does not appear to be laying the groundwork for any kind of federal-level regulation of drilling. On, they say that pressure from oil and gas companies " crippled" the EPA's efforts. “Now the Obama administration, Congress, and state governments must act on that information to protect our drinking water, and stop perpetuating the oil and gas industry’s myth that fracking is safe.” “Today EPA confirmed what communities living with fracking have known for years, fracking pollutes drinking water,” said Earthworks Policy Director Lauren Pagel in an emailed statement. It would be just as realistic for us all to trade in our cars for unicorns. They believe in a world powered solely by wind turbines and solar panels. They don't even like zero-carbon nuclear. They rail against shale drilling, coal mining and all fossil fuels. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File)īut that won't satisfy the fractivists. And the agency rightly explains that a small number of accidents must be taken in the context of a massive industry. The report explains that all of these accidents are avoidable with the application of proper drilling and casing techniques. Something similar happened in the Mamm Creek gas field in Colorado. In Bainbridge, Ohio an inadequately cemented cased allowed gas to pollute a drinking water aquifer. Near Killdeer, North Dakota a string of casing inside a well burst during fracking and spilled fluid onto the surface and possibly into a water aquifer. One time some fracking fluid spilled into a Kentucky creek. Harder to handle are underground incidents. Surface spills should be relatively easy to remediate.
Then they get cleaned up and life goes on. It's never ok for spills and accidents to happen. The EPA looked at spills that occurred between 20 and found that assuming 25,000 to 30,000 new wells fracked each year, we can expect as many as 3,700 spills, with a median spill volume of 420 gallons. The EPA explains that the riskiest part of the fracking process involves moving those chemicals and getting them ready to be mixed with the fracking water. These days the average well is shot with more than 3 million gallons of water laden with about 9,000 gallons of chemicals. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells." The EPA says that among those mechanisms it found "specific instances" that "led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells.
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