Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States

Hydraulic fracturing, Hydrofracturing, hydrofracking, fracking or fraccing

By Glen Martin. He is a Santa Rosa-based environmental journalist.

Food and Water Watch – a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that opposes fracking – is also skeptical of the oil industry’s numbers. “The best estimates we have indicate each frack takes from 500,000 to 4 million gallons (up to twelve acre-feet),” says Adam Scow, director of California operations. “Full-blown exploitation of the Monterey Shale could result in as many as 30,000 new wells. You’re talking about a lot of water.” (…)

Earlier this year, the federal EPA backed away from the issue in Wyoming. After the agency found tainted water near Encana Corp. gas wells in 2011 and 2012, a U.S. Geological Survey study reported different results. In June the EPA handed off the investigation to the state, which plans to rely on research funded by Encana’s U.S. oil and gas subsidiary.

Last month, Duke University researchers announced that samples collected from 2010 to 2012 near a fracking wastewater treatment facility in Pennsylvania contained elevated levels of radium, salts, and heavy metals.
The oil companies have reflexively discredited any study linking groundwater pollution to fracking, maintaining that the shales they target are too deep to pose any threat to reserves of potable groundwater, usually found closer to the earth’s surface.

Both the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and the EPA make inspections during offshore fracking procedures, but it’s left largely to the industry to report oil spills and leaks. (Shortly after details of the offshore fracking operations were revealed, the EPA said in a statement that the procedures had not imperiled the environment or human health.)

The Center for Biological Diversity’s Kretzmann says the offshore fracking incidents – all conducted without environmental impact reports – prove that the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) oversight is lax. The “Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement appears to have looked the other way and failed to study or address the dangers of fracking,” he comments by email. “A federal agency must perform an Environmental Impact Report before allowing fracking. The law is clear on that.” (…)

Other consequences of fracking could be earth-shaking – literally. In July, a paper in the peer-reviewed Science journal concluded that fluid injections from fracking and geothermal operations could induce earthquakes measuring between 4 and 5 on the Richter scale. In a subsequent press release, lead author Nicholas van der Elst of Columbia University warned that fluid injection “was driving faults to their tipping point.”
In a companion article in the same issue of Science, U.S. Geological Survey seismologist William L. Ellsworth stated that numerous Midwest earthquakes in 2011 and 2012 may have been triggered by the underground injection of fracking wastewater into nearby disposal wells, including a 5.6 temblor in central Oklahoma that injured two people and wrecked 14 homes. (…)