THE CASE FOR HYDROFRACKING - Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 45

What Impact Has Hydrofracking Had on Water Supplies?
A 2011 MIT report coauthored by Ernest Moniz, President Obama's new secretary
of energy, found that natural gas exploration has, overall, had a good environmental
record. 43 This gladdened the industry, of course, which maintains that hydrofrack-
ing takes place thousands of feet below the water table, and the chemicals it uses
are typically separated from groundwater by impermeable rock. Supporters note
that over 20,000 wells have been drilled in the past decade, and that only a few
instances of groundwater contamination have been reported, all of them due to
breaches of existing regulations. “The data show the vast majority of natural gas
development projects are safe, and the existing environmental concerns are largely
preventable,” Scott McNally, an environmental engineer who has worked for Shell,
blogged for Scientific American . 44
In 2011, then-EPA administrator Lisa Jackson testified to the Senate that she
was unaware of “any proven case where the fracturing process itself affected wa-
ter.” 45 In 2012, officials from the Department of the Interior told Congress that “we
have not seen any impacts to groundwater as a result of hydraulic fracturing.” 46
An average shale well uses a lot of water—some 1.2 to 5 million gallons over
its lifetime 47 —but, the industry says, that number is not as alarming as it might
sound. To put it in perspective, all of the shale wells drilled and completed in 2011
used 135 billion gallons of water, which was equivalent to 0.3 percent of total US
freshwater consumption, according to an analysis by TheEnergyCollective.com (an
independent forum supported by Siemens and Royal Dutch Shell). 48 Yet agricul-
ture used 32,840 billion gallons of water annually (243 times more water than hy-
drofracking for natural gas), and golf courses used about 0.5 percent of US fresh
water.
Furthermore, the volume of water used by hydrofracking compares favorably
to that used to produce other forms of energy. According to ConocoPhilips, natural
gas uses about 60 percent less water than coal and 75 percent less water than nuc-
lear power generation. 49
What Is the Halliburton Loophole, and How Do Drillers Respond to
the Charge That It Conceals the Chemicals Used in Hydrofracking?
When hydrofracking opponents complain that public health is put at risk by the
2005 ruling under which companies are not required to disclose some of the chem-