11 Things “Ban Fracking” Activists Don’t Want You to Know about the EPA Report on Fracking and Groundwater
Thu, June 18, 2015
1. This is (by far!) the most comprehensive study on fracking to date: 1,000+ pages, 950 sources, years in the making.
2. The EPA expanded the definition of “fracking” to include stuff that isn’t, well, fracking – and it still didn’t find any widespread systemic impacts to groundwater.
3. This is a big deal, because the study notes that “millions of people” live near fracked wells.
4. There were only a “small” number of things the study found that could lead to impacts on drinking water – and they weren’t fracking. (In fact, the report says: “Vertical separation between the production zone and drinking water resources protect drinking water.”)
5. Well casing failures are extremely rare. (The EPA even cites and debunks activist-approved studies exaggerating this risk by Ingraffea, Dusseault, and Muehlenbachs.)
6. The EPA found no instances of the fracking process contaminating water and no “pathways of migration” for thermogenic methane. (Again, EPA cites and contradicts a popular activist-touted study, this time from Duke University.)
7. The amount of water used for fracking is “relatively small fraction of overall water use” compared to other uses like agriculture.
8. The EPA couldn’t document groundwater contamination from spilling of fracking fluids.
9. With their most important talking point debunked, fracktivists could only claim that President Obama’s EPA was a political tool of the energy industry. No, really. They did. Desperate much?
10. What’s it say about anti-fracking activists when they can’t be happy about good news?
11. The issues identified by the EPA as potential risks to water resources are subject to strong state and federal regulatory oversight.