By Deroy Murdock
Friday, January 11, 2013
If frackophobes are to be believed, natural-gas fracking
is the most frightful environmental nightmare since Japan’s Fukushima
nuclear-power plant melted down amid an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
In Promised Land, Matt Damon’s new anti-fracking film
funded by the United Arab Emirates, one character demonstrates this production
technique’s “dangers” by drenching a toy farm with household chemicals and then
setting it ablaze.
In the pro-fracking film FrackNation, one Pennsylvania
homeowner absurdly claims that fracking polluted his well water with
weapons-grade uranium. (For details, watch AXS-TV on Tuesday, January 22, at 9
p.m. EST.) FrackNation also is in limited theatrical release at the Quad
Cinemas in New York City and at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, Calif.
In an agitprop poster from the group New Yorkers Against
Fracking, the Statue of Liberty furiously topples natural-gas drilling towers
with her torch as energy-company big rigs flee in horror.
These warnings might be believable if fracking regulators
seemed even slightly worried. Instead, federal and state environmental
officials appear positively serene about hydraulic fracturing, a decades-old
technology that uses sand and chemically treated water to shatter shale
deposits 5,000 to 8,000 feet below the water table and liberate natural gas
from the ruptured rocks.
• “In no case have we made a definitive determination
that the fracking process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater,” Environmental
Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson stated last April. In May 2011,
she told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: “I’m not aware
of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”
• The EPA tested drinking water in Dimock, Pa., which
ecologists claim fracking has tainted. “EPA has determined that there are not
levels of contaminants present that would require additional action by the
Agency,” it concluded last July. Regional administrator Shawn M. Garvin added:
“The Agency has used the best available scientific data to provide clarity to
Dimock residents and address their concerns about the safety of their drinking
water.”
• “A study that examined the water quality of 127 shallow
domestic wells in the Fayetteville Shale natural-gas production area of
Arkansas found no groundwater contamination associated with gas production,”
the U.S. Geological Survey announced Wednesday. “Methane is the primary
component of natural gas,” the report observed. “What methane was found in the
water, taken from domestic wells, was either naturally occurring, or could not
be attributed to natural gas production activities.” USGS director Marcia
McNutt elaborated: “This new study is important in terms of finding no significant
effects on groundwater quality from shale gas development within the area of
sampling.”
• “Significant adverse impacts on human health are not
expected from routine HVHF,” or high-volume hydraulic fracturing, according to
a February 2012 preliminary report from New York’s Department of Environmental
Conservation. Governor Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.) has pondered this issue since
2010 and promises further contemplation, including another draft of what DEC
now calls an “outdated summary.”
• “New York would be
crazy not to lift the moratorium” against fracking, former governor Ed Rendell
(D., Pa.) told the New York Post in November. The former chairman of the
Democratic National Committee continued: “I told Governor Cuomo I would come to
testify before any legislative committee. . . . It’s a good thing to do.”
• “I do find it stunningly hypocritical to buy gas that
comes from fracking wells somewhere [else] in the U.S. and then say fracking is
bad,” John Hanger, Rendell’s former secretary of environmental protection,
remarked in the Post. “If you’re saying no to gas, you’re saying yes to more
coal and oil.” Hanger, a Keystone State Democratic gubernatorial contender,
lately lauded the benefits of gas fracking:
Using more natural gas has slashed US carbon emissions
and toxic air pollution — lead, mercury, arsenic, soot — in the nation’s air by
displacing large amounts of coal and oil. That cleaner air saves thousands of
lives every year. And no nation in the world has cut its carbon emissions more
than the US since 2006. Indeed, thanks in substantial part to shale gas, US
carbon emissions are back to 1995 levels and fell about another 4 percent in
2012.
• “We have never had any cases of groundwater
contamination from hydraulic fracturing,” Elizabeth Ames Jones said in 2011.
The then-chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, which supervises natural
gas, added: “It is geologically impossible for fracturing fluid to reach an
aquifer a thousand feet above.”
• “We have drilled 3,500 wells in Arkansas and explored
every complaint of a compromised well,” Lawrence Bengal, director of the
state’s Oil and Gas Commission, noted in 2011. “We have found no fracturing
fluid in any of those well complaints.”
• While California last month unveiled new disclosure and
monitoring rules for fracking, Tim Kustic, the Golden State’s oil-and-gas
supervisor, told the San Jose Mercury News: “There is no evidence of harm from
fracking in groundwater in California at this point in time. And it has been
going on for many years.”
• “We’ve used hydraulic fracturing for some 60 years in
Oklahoma, and we have no confirmed cases where it is responsible for drinking
water contamination — nor do any of the other natural gas–producing states,”
Bob Anthony, chairman of the state’s public-utilities commission, wrote in
August 2010.
• “In the 41 years that I have supervised oil and gas
exploration, production, and development in South Dakota, no documented case of
water-well or aquifer damage by the fracking of oil or gas wells, has been
brought to my attention,” said the Department of Environment’s Fred Steece.
“Nor am I aware of any such cases before my time.” Steece commented in a June
2009 New York DEC document that cites regulators from 15 states who identified
zero examples of fracking-related water pollution.
“Facts matter,” says Robert Bryce, a Manhattan Institute
senior fellow and author of four books on energy. “Over the past six decades,
the fracturing process has been used more than 1 million times on American oil
and gas wells. If it were as dangerous as the anti-drilling/anti-hydraulic fracturing
crowd claims, then hundreds, perhaps thousands, of water wells would have been
contaminated by now. That hasn’t happened.” Adds Bryce, who also appears in
FrackNation: “The simple truth is that the shale revolution is the best
possible news for the U.S. economy, and it’s coming at a time when good
economic news is desperately needed.”
The officials quoted here are neither gas-company
executives nor petro-publicists. These are public servants who oversee this
industry, and many work or have worked for red-tape-loving Democrats.
Nonetheless, they are unafraid of fracking. Clearly, frackophobes have nothing
to offer but fear itself.
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