Mark Ruffalo holds up a jug of contaminated well water from Dimock, Pennsylvania, during a New Yorkers Against Fracking rally in Albany, New York. (photo: Flickr)
EPA
Scientists Call Foul on Study Showing Fracking Has Little Impact on Water
Quality
By Lorraine Chow, EcoWatch
09 January 16
The
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) advisors are calling foul on the
agency’s highly controversial study that determined hydraulic fracturing, or
fracking, has not led to “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water
resources in the U.S.”
This
specific conclusion is being called into question by members of the EPA Science
Advisory Board, which reviews the agency’s major studies, Bloomberg reported.
The
EPA’s conclusion requires clarification, David Dzombak, a Carnegie Mellon
University environmental engineering professor who is leading the review, told
Bloomberg. A panel headed by Dzombak will release its initial
recommendations later this month.
“Major
findings are ambiguous or are inconsistent with the observations/data presented
in the body of the report,” the 31 scientists on the panel said in December
2015.
Possible
changes to the report could spell trouble for the oil and gas industry that
recently celebrated the ending of a 40-year-old crude oil export ban in December
2015. According to Bloomberg, “a repudiation of the results could reignite
the debate over the need for more regulation.”
Fracking
involves the pumping of highly pressurized water, sand and chemicals into
underground rock formations to release trapped oil and gas. The controversial
drilling process has spurred a boom in U.S. oil and gas production and driven
down gas prices across the country. However, numerous environmental
complications have arisen from fracking, including pollution of water
and air, landscape destruction and even earthquakes.
Five
years ago, Congress commissioned the U.S. EPA to study the impacts of fracking
on drinking water. After analyzing more than 950 sources,
including previously published papers, state reports and the EPA’s own
research, the agency released a draft analysis in June 2015 that indeed
found numerous harms to drinking water resources from fracking. As EcoWatch reported, the U.S. EPA found
evidence of more than 36,000 spills from 2006 to 2012. That amounts to about 15
spills per day somewhere in the U.S.
However,
the report’s misleading and widely reported
conclusion—“there is no evidence fracking has led to widespread,
systemic impacts on drinking water resources”—has not only downplayed
fracking’s effects on drinking water resources, it was also seen by many
in the pro-drilling camp as the EPA’s thumbs up to the drilling industry. For
instance, a Forbes writer summed up the
study with this headline: EPA Fracking Study: Drilling Wins.
According
to Bloomberg, the review panel could ask the U.S. EPA to rescind this main
conclusion or clarify it by saying that the “widespread, systemic” impacts from
fracking are relative to the number of wells drilled.
Pennsylvania
State University professor Elizabeth Boyer, a member of the Science Advisory
Board, noted that the “widespread, systemic” top line was “widely quoted and
interpreted in many different ways,” EnergyWire reported. “The executive summary and press
materials should be carefully reworded” for clarity, she said.
Some
panel members also said that more weight
should be given to the “severity of local impacts” on water supplies.
Some
environmental advocates want the final U.S. EPA document to include additional
information on “high-profile cases of fracking contamination inexplicably left
out of the study,” Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter said in a statement, pointing
to drilling sites in Dimock, Pennsylvania; Parker County, Texas; and
Pavillion, Wyoming.
Hauter
added that EPA Science Advisory Board’s official review of the study
on fracking and drinking “may seem surprising, but it shouldn’t be to
anyone who actually read the original study thoroughly.”
“There
was a clear disconnect between the EPA’s top-line spin—that there was no
evidence of ‘widespread, systemic’ impacts on drinking water from fracking—and
the content of the actual study, which highlights data limitations, open
questions, and clear evidence of local and severe impacts,” Hauter said. “This
disconnect raises serious questions about political tampering with scientific
conclusions in the release of the draft study.”
Unsurprisingly,
Big Oil and Gas are unhappy with the Science Advisory Board’s review. American
Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard blamed the panel’s criticisms
on environmental activists opposed to fossil fuels.
“The
science should be settled,” Gerard said at a news conference Tuesday. “There
are a handful of people who are not happy with the outcome and they continue to
drive their agenda based on ideology, not based on the science.”
The
agency will use the comments from the advisory panel as well as those submitted
by the public “to evaluate how to augment and revise the draft assessment,” EPA
spokeswoman Melissa Harrison told Bloomberg. “The final assessment will also
reflect relevant literature published since the release of the draft
assessment.”
Meanwhile,
a new paper published Jan. 6 in the Journal of Exposure Science and
Environmental and Epidemiology only emphasizes why further evaluations on
fracking fluids are a must.
After
analyzing 1,021 chemicals used in fracking, Yale School of Public Health
researchers found that many of the substances have been linked to reproductive
and developmental health problems, and the majority had undetermined toxicity
due to insufficient information, Phys.org reported on the study.
The
research team said in their paper that further exposure and epidemiological
studies are urgently needed to evaluate potential threats to human health from
chemicals found in fracking fluids and wastewater created by fracking.
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