Irritating that fracking gets all the headlines. You wouldn't even notice it if it were happening under your feet right now. Drilling is what you will notice.
I used to work at a company that was hired to do air monitoring on fracking sites. I wouldn’t want to live near one.
I also think it’s outrageous that the government allows any sort of mineral extraction on conservation sites, regardless of pollution. That’s not the intent of conservation land.
> After numerous rounds of testing by both the state of Wyoming and EPA, there is no evidence that the water quality in domestic wells in the Pavillion Field has changed as a result of oil and gas operations; no oil and gas constituents were found to exceed drinking water standards in any samples taken
There's not a single chemical used industrially that can't be found in some amount in the water supply. Wake me up when something exceeds safe levels.
> Since 2012, a trove of new data had accumulated from USGS, EPA and state regulators. He obtained EPA’s methanol testing results through a Freedom of Information Act request and downloaded the rest of the information from the Wyoming oil and gas regulator’s website. All of it was publicly available, waiting for the right person to spend a year crunching the information.
> The end result: a peer-reviewed study that reaffirms EPA’s findings that there was something suspicious going on in Pavillion. More research is needed.
> The sampling wells contained methanol. They also contained high levels of diesel compounds, suggesting they may have been contaminated by open pits where operators had stored chemicals, DiGiulio said.
I've seen fracking proponents earnestly arguing that the pollution in local water supplies wasn't from the fracking, but from the other associated activities e.g. wastewater disposal and some of these open-pit storage options. Kind of important that those associated activities literally only exist due to the fracking!
It's definitely true that in well-run sites with well-regulated wastewater and inspection regimes, fracking can happen with very little impact on groundwater or surface water -- it's also definitely true that there's a very strong profit motive for operators to cut corners and that in many places, they're in bed with the regulators which leads to a lot of otherwise avoidable pollution. It's alluring to claim that fracking is safe because it can be performed safely -- but the reality on the ground is much more mixed.
Fewer people would have issues with resource extractors if they bonded over sufficient funds for a full remediation of all the damage they could do in the course of their operations.
They never do, because the liabilities there are almost unbounded, and doesn't gel with the fly-by-night can't-squeeze-blood-from-a-deadbeat nature of most drillers.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1100682108
[Pennsylvania and New York] "we document systematic evidence for methane contamination of drinking water"
The average concentration of the methane detected in the water wells near drilling sites fell within a range that the U.S. Department of Interior says is dangerous and requires urgent “hazard mitigation” action.
P.s. pretty please stop fighting pipelines if you care about the environment. Trucking and shipping of oil are vastly dirtier, with more spills and in absolute best cases, the pollution from rail shipment.