fracking is
the most frightful environmental nightmare since Japan’s Fukushima
nuclear-power plant melted down amid an earthquake and tsunami in March
2011.
In Promised Land, Matt Damon’s new anti-fracking film funded
by the United Arab Emirates, one character demonstrates this production
technique’s “dangers” by drenching a toy farm with household chemicals
and then setting it ablaze.
In the pro-fracking film FrackNation, one Pennsylvania homeowner absurdly claims that fracking polluted his well water with weapons-grade uranium. (For details, watch AXS-TV on Tuesday, January 22, at 9 p.m. EST.) FrackNation also is in limited theatrical release at the Quad Cinemas in New York City and at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, Calif.
In an agitprop poster from the group New Yorkers Against Fracking,
the Statue of Liberty furiously topples natural-gas drilling towers with
her torch as energy-company big rigs flee in horror.
These warnings might be believable if fracking regulators seemed even
slightly worried. Instead, federal and state environmental officials
appear positively serene about hydraulic fracturing, a decades-old
technology that uses sand and chemically treated water to shatter shale
deposits 5,000 to 8,000 feet below the water table and liberate natural
gas from the ruptured rocks.
“In
no case have we made a definitive determination that the fracking
process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater,” Environmental
Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson stated last April. In May 2011, she told the
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: “I’m not aware of
any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”
The
EPA tested drinking water in Dimock, Pa., which ecologists claim
fracking has tainted. “EPA has determined that there are not levels of
contaminants present that would require additional action by the
Agency,” it concluded last July. Regional administrator Shawn M. Garvin added:
“The Agency has used the best available scientific data to provide
clarity to Dimock residents and address their concerns about the safety
of their drinking water.”
“A
study that examined the water quality of 127 shallow domestic wells in
the Fayetteville Shale natural-gas production area of Arkansas found no
groundwater contamination associated with gas production,” the U.S.
Geological Survey announced Wednesday.
“Methane is the primary component of natural gas,” the report observed.
“What methane was found in the water, taken from domestic wells, was
either naturally occurring, or could not be attributed to natural gas
production activities.” USGS director Marcia McNutt elaborated: “This
new study is important in terms of finding no significant effects on
groundwater quality from shale gas development within the area of
sampling.”
“Significant adverse impacts on human health are not expected from
routine HVHF,” or high-volume hydraulic fracturing, according to a
February 2012 preliminary reportfrom
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation. Governor Andrew
Cuomo (D., N.Y.) has pondered this issue since 2010 and promises further
contemplation, including another draft of what DEC now calls an
“outdated summary.”
“New York would be crazy not to lift the moratorium” against fracking, former governor Ed Rendell (D., Pa.) told theNew York Post in
November. The former chairman of the Democratic National Committee
continued: “I told Governor Cuomo I would come to testify before any
legislative committee. . . . It’s a good thing to do.”
“I do find it stunningly hypocritical to buy gas that comes from
fracking wells somewhere [else] in the U.S. and then say fracking is
bad,” John Hanger, Rendell’s former secretary of environmental
protection, remarked in the Post. “If you’re saying no to gas,
you’re saying yes to more coal and oil.” Hanger, a Keystone State
Democratic gubernatorial contender, latelylauded the
benefits of gas fracking: “Using more natural gas has slashed US carbon
emissions and toxic air pollution — lead, mercury, arsenic, soot — in
the nation’s air by displacing large amounts of coal and oil. That
cleaner air saves thousands of lives every year. And no nation in the
world has cut its carbon emissions more than the US since 2006. Indeed,
thanks in substantial part to shale gas, US carbon emissions are back to
1995 levels and fell about another 4 percent in 2012.”
“We have never had any cases of groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing,” Elizabeth Ames Jones said in
2011. The then-chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, which
supervises natural gas, added: “It is geologically impossible for
fracturing fluid to reach an aquifer a thousand feet above.”
“We
have drilled 3,500 wells in Arkansas and explored every complaint of a
compromised well,” Lawrence Bengal, director of the state’s Oil and Gas
Commission,noted in 2011. “We have found no fracturing fluid in any of those well complaints.”
While California last month unveiled new disclosure and monitoring rules for fracking, Tim Kustic, the Golden State’s oil-and-gas supervisor, told the San Jose Mercury News:
“There is no evidence of harm from fracking in groundwater in
California at this point in time. And it has been going on for many
years.”
“We’ve
used hydraulic fracturing for some 60 years in Oklahoma, and we have no
confirmed cases where it is responsible for drinking water
contamination — nor do any of the other natural gas–producing states,”
Bob Anthony, chairman of the state’s public-utilities commission, wrote in August 2010.
“In
the 41 years that I have supervised oil and gas exploration,
production, and development in South Dakota, no documented case of
water-well or aquifer damage by the fracking of oil or gas wells, has
been brought to my attention,” said the
Department of Environment’s Fred Steece. “Nor am I aware of any such
cases before my time.” Steece commented in a June 2009 New York DEC
document that cites regulators from 15 states who identified zero examples of fracking-related water pollution.
“Facts matter,” says Robert Bryce, a Manhattan Institute senior
fellow and author of four books on energy. “Over the past six decades,
the fracturing process has been used more than 1 million times on
American oil and gas wells. If it were as dangerous as the
anti-drilling/anti-hydraulic fracturing crowd claims, then hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of water wells would have been contaminated by now.
That hasn’t happened.” Adds Bryce, who also appears in FrackNation:
“The simple truth is that the shale revolution is the best possible
news for the U.S. economy, and it’s coming at a time when good economic
news is desperately needed.”
The officials quoted here are neither gas-company executives nor
petro-publicists. These are public servants who oversee this industry,
and many work or have worked for red-tape-loving Democrats. Nonetheless,
they are unafraid of fracking. Clearly, frackophobes have nothing to
offer but fear itself.
* New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a Fox News contributor, a
nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service,
and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and
Peace at Stanford University.
If frackophobes are to be believed, natural-gas
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