By Jillian Kay Melchior
Friday, June 05, 2015
If it bleeds, it leads — a useful mantra for making sense
of the Environmental Protection Agency’s comprehensive new study of fracking’s
effects on America’s water supply.
The EPA has grown especially politicized under the Obama
administration, so it’s a good bet that if it had found a clear-cut instance
where fracking had devastated a city’s water, it wouldn’t be shy about saying
so.
Instead, the report — which took four years and likely
cost millions of dollars to complete — blandly concludes that “we did not find
evidence that [hydraulic fracturing has] led to widespread, systematic impacts
on drinking water resources in the United States.”
In fact, the study never definitively identifies a single
case where the fracking process itself — as opposed to mishaps or negligence —
resulted in water contamination.
In the absence of a smoking gun, the draft report
debunks, in the most bureaucratic language possible, environmentalists’
alarmist claims that fracking is routinely poisoning the water supply. This
must pain the EPA, which also extensively highlights the many risk factors
already widely identified and successfully mitigated by the energy industry,
including surface spills and improper well construction.
As the EPA notes, at least 25,000 to 30,000 new fracking
sites have been created since 2011, and older wells were also fracked. Such
energy extraction is so common, the report finds, that more than 9.4 million
people have lived within one mile of a fracking site since 2000, and 6,800
sources of public drinking water rest that close to such a site.
Though fracking is clearly widespread, the EPA found only
a handful of cases where activities surrounding fracking “led to impacts on
drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells.”
But even that isn’t what it initially sounds like. These
findings “may also be due to other limiting factors,” including “the presence
of other sources of contamination precluding a definitive link between
hydraulic fracturing activities and an impact.”
The report’s hedging doesn’t end there: “Impacts are
defined as any change in the quality or quantity of drinking water resources,”
the EPA notes, adding that “drinking water” includes “anybody of ground water
or surface water that now serves, or in the future could serve, as a source of
drinking water for public or private use.” That definition, it adds, “is
broader than most federal and state regulatory definitions of drinking water
and encompasses both fresh and non-fresh bodies of water.”
In other words, the “impacts” described are not
necessarily water contamination, and the water supplies examined aren’t
necessarily currently or soon to be used by humans.
The energy sector itself will admit that surface-level
spills can contaminate water. Such contamination is not unique to fracking or
any other industrial process. But even so, out of 151 spills the EPA
identified, fracking fluids reached surface water in only 13 instances — and
“none of the spills of hydraulic fracturing fluid were reported to have reached
ground water.”
In a similarly unsurprising discovery, the EPA reports
that insufficient or deficient well casing can pose risks to the water supply.
The energy industry is well aware of this, which explains why “most wells used
in hydraulic fracturing operations have casing and a layer of cement to protect
drinking water resources.”
The EPA did identify 600 wells — out of a whopping 23,000
— that did not use cement near groundwater — but it also notes that “the
absence of cement does not in and of itself lead to an impact.”
The agency does acknowledge a few cases where well
deficiencies “have or may have resulted in impacts to the drinking water
resources.” But these incidents have more to do with “construction issues,
sustained casing pressure, and the presence of natural faults and fractures”
than the fracking process itself.
The new report comes in the context of a widespread environmental
push to shut down fracking. New York, California, Maryland, and Vermont have
all enacted statewide bans or moratoriums. Additionally, at least 23 states
have seen local or county bans or moratoriums; in total, at least 400 places
have adopted some sort of restriction on fracking.
Overwhelmingly, these regulations are justified by
fracking’s purported hazards to the air or water. The EPA’s report shows how
scientifically unfounded these claims remain, despite their widespread
acceptance among environmentalists and their liberal allies.
Altogether, the EPA report’s most earth-shattering
revelation is that the energy industry has operated responsibly and safely,
contrary to the hysterical allegations of green groups who oppose fracking. The
Obama administration, long the foe of traditional energy, must have admitted
this with great reluctance.
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