For years, the energy industry has argued to the nation’s courts and Congress that the federal law which protects drinking water shouldn’t be applied to hydraulic fracturing, the industrial practice which is essential to extracting the nation’s vast natural gas reserves. In 2005 Congress finally passed a law prohibiting such regulation.
Now it has been discovered that part of the argument: most of the millions of gallons of toxic chemicals which drillers inject underground are removed for safe disposal, and aren’t discarded inside the earth, doesn’t apply to drilling in many of the nation’s booming new gas fields.
As much as 85 percent of the fluids used during hydraulic fracturing is being left underground after wells are drilled in the Marcellus Shale, the massive gas deposit which stretches from New York to Tennessee. Problem.
So for each modern gas well drilled in the Marcellus and places like it, more than three million gallons of chemically tainted wastewater get left in the ground forever. Drilling companies say that chemicals make up less than 1 percent of that fluid. But by volume, these chemicals still amount to 34,000 gallons in a typical well. Problem.
These facts raise questions as to why the Safe Drinking Water Act should not be applied to hydraulic fracturing.
Congress is considering a bill that would repeal the exemption, and has directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to consider a fresh study of how hydraulic fracturing may affect drinking water supplies.
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