ICYMI: Another Investigation Found That Fracking Doesn’t Pollute Drinking Water

Matt Vespa | January 16, 2016 3:00 PM

Right before Christmas, there was another study from Wyoming showing that fracking doesn’t pollute drinking water. Once again, environmentalists have been discredited with their theory that the decades-old method of extracting natural gas via hydraulic fracturing isn’t messing with people’s water. In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that they were no longer going to supply Dimock, PA with alterative drinking water supplies after their review found the level of contaminates were naturally occurring, and that treatment systems could reduce the level of contaminants in a handful of homes (all five) where they did have some health concerns. Yet, their overall investigation found that the levels of containments didn’t reach levels that would require further federal action. In short, fracking wasn’t polluting the water. Moreover, a Yale study later confirmed that fracking doesn’t pollute ground water.

Wyoming regulators have found hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, did not likely contaminate water supplies in the town of Pavillion four years after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted its own botched investigation.

State officials published findings Monday showing groundwater contamination near Pavillion was not likely caused by fracking, but instead by gas that naturally seeped into groundwater wells. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) says the “[e]vidence suggests that upward gas seepage… was happening naturally before gas well development.”

“It is unlikely that hydraulic fracturing fluids have risen to shallower depths intercepted by water- supply wells,” DEQ writes in its 30-month investigation of Pavillion’s water. “Evidence does not indicate that hydraulic fracturing fluids have risen to shallow depths intersected by water-supply wells.”

“The likelihood that the hydraulic fracture well stimulation treatments… employed in the Pavillion Gas Field have led to fluids interacting with shallow groundwater… is negligible,” DEQ adds.