NatGas in PA Water Wells w/Marcellus Fingerprint NOT Shale Gas

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peer reviewA newly published peer reviewed study in the February Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) offers new research that we believe comes close to, if not fully, exonerating Cabot Oil & Gas over the now infamous case of methane migration into water wells in a small area of Dimock, PA. The new study has no connection to Cabot. It is written by three experts and uses (gasp) actual science–you know, in the field data? The data comes from “more than 2,300 gas and water samples collected from 234 gas wells and 67 private groundwater-supply wells” in northeastern PA and is the largest such data set ever analyzed. What did the authors find? Shallow (near the surface) methane with the same identical chemical “fingerprint” as deeper Marcellus Shale gas is naturally occurring in large quantities in northeastern PA. That is, the shallow methane under the microscope looks exactly like the methane found more than a mile below the ground, but it isn’t gas from the Marcellus because the methane near the surface that looks just like Marcellus gas, with the same chemical “fingerprint,” was lurking in water wells long before there was any shale drilling in the area.

This is truly huge news, but don’t expect mainstream media outlets to cover the story because a) they like Josh Fox and prefer to prop up his fictional movie called Gasland, b) the issue requires readers to actually think and use the left brain to grapple with issues of science, c) this new, real research utterly refutes the pathetic “research” published by Duke University in two different papers that took the lazy way out and tried to hang Dimock’s stray gas methane on Cabot, and d) it doesn’t fit the “drilling is evil” narrative the mainstream media prefers to push…

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