In March of this year, Syracuse University Professor Dr. Donald Siegel published the results of an extensive research study that found fracking of Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania does not cause methane in water wells (see Syracuse U Study: Fracking Doesn’t Cause Methane in PA Water Wells). It was an enormously important work because it’s real science, based on the largest known database of well water samples, over 11,000 of them, taken by Chesapeake Energy both before and after drilling happened. Siegel has used Chessy’s enormous data set once again–this time over 20,000 samples–to conduct a second study. Siegel has just published that study in the peer reviewed journal Applied Geochemistry. The new study is titled “Pre-drilling water-quality data of groundwater prior to shale gas drilling in the Appalachian Basin: Analysis of the Chesapeake Energy Corporation dataset” (abstract below). The new study finds that the quality of water in private water wells near fracked shale wells in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia–across the entire Marcellus/Utica region–is the same after shale drilling as it was before shale drilling. That is, shale drilling has no effect on the quality of water in private water wells close to shale drilling activities…
