Matt Damon (and his Qatari backers) must be crying in their beers/non-alcoholic beverages about this turn of events.
A landmark federal study on
hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from
the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water
aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site, the Department of
Energy told The Associated Press.
After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the
chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface
stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking
water, geologist Richard Hammack said.
It has only been a year but so far so good. There are other problems like poor well designs and finding out what to do with waste water that need to be addressed. It seems that the waste water problem might be solved because some companies will just recycle the water so that they can keep drilling with it. It actually saves money to recycle the water instead of trucking it out to injection wells and then paying more to have it put back into the earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment