Breaking: Obama DOE Says Study Shows Fracking Fluids Don’t Migrate
Those who hate fossil fuels and want to stop all shale drilling because of their irrational beliefs are logic-challenged. Witness their claim/belief that fracking fluid (99.5% water and sand, 0.5% chemicals) pumped a mile or more below the surface will magically travel up to the surface and contaminate groundwater supplies. Never mind that 80% of the fluid disappears into small cracks a mile down. Never mind there’s a mile of solid rock between the fluid and the surface. Never mind there have been more than 50,000 horizontally fracked wells since the early 2000s with not a single case of water contamination from migrating frack fluid. And never mind there have been more than 2 million vertically fracked wells worldwide over the past 60+ years with not a single case of water contamination from migrating frack fluid. Anti-drillers cling to their irrational faith that fluid migration has and continues to happen and hucksters like Josh Fox of Gasland and Gasland 2 fame are all too willing to feed their delusion.
Enter the federal government–specifically the Dept. of Energy (DOE) under Barack H. Obama, no friend of the oil and gas industry. Exactly one year ago the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) in Pittsburgh began an experiment of injecting tracer chemicals in fracking fluid at an undisclosed drill site with eight wells in Greene County, PA. (The driller cooperating with NETL to conduct the experiment is unidentified, although MDN has a pretty good guess as to who it is–see below.) The NETL monitored (and continues to monitor) the eight wells over the past year and although the data is still preliminary, what have they found? No migration of fracking fluid toward the surface. Zero. It’s called science–but don’t tell Josh Fox and the nuts who believe him…
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