In the past two years alone, a series of surface spills, including two blowouts at wells operated by Chesapeake Energy and EOG Resources and a spill of 8000 gallons of
fracking fluid at a site in Dimock, Pa., have contaminated groundwater in the Marcellus Shale region.
Not exact matches
«By measuring naturally occurring ammonium and iodide in numerous samples from different geological formations in the Appalachian Basin, including flowback waters from shale gas wells in the Marcellus and Fayetteville shale formations, we show that
fracking fluids are not much different from conventional oil and gas wastes,» said Jennifer S. Harkness, lead author of the study and a PhD student
at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.
In the 121 - page draft report released today, EPA officials said that the contamination near the town of Pavillion, Wyo., had most likely seeped up from gas wells and contained
at least 10 compounds known to be used in
frack fluids.
But according to a panel of geologists
at the AAAS Annual Meeting, the culprit isn't hydraulic fracturing, or «
fracking,» in which geologists crack open subsurface rocks to extract oil and gas; instead, it's the processes associated with pumping wastewater and other
fluids back into the ground.
They looked both
at wells used for enhanced oil recovery — in which
fluid is injected to flush lingering oil from a depleted reservoir — and
at those used to dispose of wastewater from conventional oil and gas extraction or from hydraulic fracturing (
fracking).
The 600 - plus - page report that resulted looks
at a variety of ways
fracking could have an effect on local drinking water: withdrawing millions of gallons of water needed to
frack a well, improperly mixing chemicals with the water
at the well, injecting that
fracking fluid into the ground
at high pressure to fracture rock as much as two miles beneath the surface, handling the contaminated water then produced by the well and finally improperly storing or disposing of that water.
A separate study
at Cornell University recently identified yet another mechanism increasing the risk of carrying contaminants from the path of the
fracking fluids into clean groundwater reservoirs: the same properties that make the
fluids effective
at fracking help
fracking fluids dissolve contaminants like heavy metals that up until now have clung safely to soils in the form of colloids.