MDN In-depth: New Duke Study on Brine Migration into Aquifers

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Duke UniversityGrad students at Duke University have issued a new “peer-reviewed” paper/study/report, this time addressing the question of whether or not fluids from thousands of feet down in the Marcellus Shale layer can actually migrate upward through thousands of feet of solid rock and contaminate groundwater aquifer supplies. The new study is titled, “Geochemical evidence for possible natural migration of Marcellus Formation brine to shallow aquifers in Pennsylvania.” A full copy is embedded below for MDN subscribers. You may recall more than a year ago the same Duke department issued a study looking at whether or not methane migrates from natural gas drilling to local groundwater supplies and concluded that where’s there’s drilling, there’s an increase in methane migration (see this MDN story). So is this “the other shoe dropping” from Duke? The final nail in the coffin that proves anti-drillers have been right all along?

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