Much of the reporting on fracking is a confused mess, which must leave many people wondering exactly what's going on. One day there's a news story or newly released study implying that fracking is causing earthquakes or groundwater contamination; the next day there's a different study or story asserting there is no clear connection.
No wonder last March the Gallup Polling Co. found that an equal number, 40%, supported and opposed fracking.
One problem is that people, and especially reporters, frequently confuse fracking with wastewater injection.
Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," has been around for decades. It's a process whereby water, mixed largely with sand and a small amount of chemicals, is forced into shale rock located miles underground.
The mixture breaks up the shale and allows the trapped oil and natural gas to be extracted. Drillers then recapture that wastewater mixture and dispose of it deep in the ground, sometimes in a previously existing well, known as wastewater injection wells.
Whenever an earthquake happens, the public and the media immediately want to blame fracking. But there is no evidence that fracking causes earthquakes. During a spate of relatively minor earthquakes in Irving, Texas, just northwest of Dallas, last winter, the media and public immediately assumed fracking was to blame-except there was no active fracking close by.
Moreover, geologists pointed out that fracking usually occurs at depths of 6,000 to 10,000 feet, while seismology tests conducted by federal agencies indicated the earthquakes appeared to be coming from about 18,000 feet deep or deeper.
Geologists pointed out that Dallas sits atop an ancient mountain range, and the earthquakes are most likely the result of that fault line that runs through part of Texas and Oklahoma.
Lately, some scientists have published a few studies suggesting that wastewater injection wells might have been the cause of some of the earthquakes in North Texas and other places.
The speculation — "speculation" because no one really knows — is that wastewater injected near a fault line could cause the tectonic plates to slip resulting in a minor earthquake.
The media immediately published unhelpful stories claiming fracking caused the quakes, and in one case the study authors felt compelled to make a statement that they were investigating wastewater injection, not fracking.
But it appears these earthquakes are also originating 16,000 to 18,000 feet deep, and yet injection wells usually only go a third of that distance. So while you can't rule out injection wells as the cause, they aren't the most likely culprit.
Incidentally, both Connecticut and Alabama have been experiencing numerous earthquakes recently, and there is no fracking or wastewater injection in those states.
The other issue that has captured headlines over the past several years is that fracking is contaminating the drinking water in many places. In response to these concerns, Congress required the Environmental Protection Agency to study the situation. After a four-year process the EPA just released its report, concluding:
"We did not find evidence that these mechanisms (fracking and other drilling processes) have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.
"Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells."
The EPA's finding makes perfect sense, even though it upset many in the environmental community. Groundwater and aquifers tend to be a few hundred feet below the surface, while fracked and injection wells are thousands of feet deep — well below the bedrock that would keep chemicals from rising to groundwater levels.
There have been some examples of the cement casings that surround a well's borehole leaking small amounts of oil, gas or chemicals. But as the EPA study indicates, those are isolated incidents and are easily fixed. Moreover, these are wellbore integrity and maintenance issues and are not limited to fracked wells.
Summing up, the scientific evidence does not support the media confusion and hyperbole. Earthquakes and occasionally contaminated groundwater existed long before fracking, which appears to be a safe industrial process.
Some environmentalists may not be happy with the science, but everyone else should be because it means that the energy boom that has spurred the U.S. economy for several years can and should proceed unhampered by erroneous attacks.