Does fracking cause water contamination? Anti-drillers have repeated the claim so often, and the claim has been picked up and repeated and amplified by the mainstream media so often, that it’s now almost an article of faith. Axiomatic. Self-evident. At a minimum, a wide swath of Americans who don’t know much about oil and gas drilling have their suspicions that fracking may indeed contaminate water–primarily because of the negative media coverage they’ve heard.

Keith Hall, director of the Louisiana Mineral Law Institute and an assistant professor of law at Louisiana State University has written an excellent article appearing in the online Ohio State Law Journal Furthermore. The article is titled, “Hydraulic Fracturing Contamination Claims: Problems of Proof” (full copy embedded below). In the article, Hall addresses the problems of landowners in attempting to prove that fracking (or oil and gas drilling) has contaminated their water. He concludes it this way:
Read More “The Thorny Issue of Proving Water Contamination from Fracking”