“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 45

precautions, the big tremors were entirely avoidable. 65 But earth-
quakes were only the latest in a long litany of ills that were increas-
ingly at ributed to the operations surrounding natural gas production
from shale.
Worries tended to zero in on two areas. h e biggest environmen-
tal concern came down to water. Some people worried about possible
leaks of toxic fracking l uids and natural gas escaping from wells into
water supplies. It didn't help that many companies refused to disclose
the full list of the chemicals they used, and even those that did reveal
their formulas ot en insisted such disclosure should not be mandatory.
Most in the industry have long insisted that leaks don't happen, argu-
ing that wells are isolated from their surroundings by thick layers of
concrete, and that the various contaminants found in peoples' water
supplies come from other sources.
h e science is still indeterminate on whether any contamination
stemming from underground has actually been happening. h ere's still
no compelling evidence that fracking l uids themselves have leaked from
wells, and there are good theoretical reasons to believe they won't. (h e
one case that's ot en pointed to, which happened in Pavilion, Wyoming,
doesn't involve a shale gas well at all.) h e trickier question is whether
methane itself might have migrated into water wells. h ere, the evidence
is mixed. In the most careful and prominent study to date, four Duke
University scholars compared methane levels in drinking water near
hydraulic fracturing activities with those elsewhere, and they found that
being near drilling made high methane concentrations more likely. 66 h e
problem is that there are two explanations for this: drilling is contami-
nating water supplies, or drilling is occurring in areas where there's a lot
of methane around. h is second explanation isn't implausible, because
drillers gravitate to areas with a lot of natural gas, which is mostly meth-
ane. More work is undoubtedly needed.
Industry is quick to point out that methane contamination doesn't
make water unsafe to drink. But once you need to explain away l am-
ing drinking water, you've already lost much of the bat le for public
acceptance. It also doesn't help that excessive methane contamination
can lead to explosion hazards in people's homes. In any case, drillers
know how to avoid methane leaks: they can use bet er well casing that