“We found no direct evidence that hydraulic fracturing itself had contaminated groundwater.”
The New Scientist reports:
Don’t blame fracking for environmental problems associated with extracting gas from shale. That’s the message of a new report from the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, released on the opening day of the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, Canada.
The US is riding the wave of a shale gas boom driven by fracking, or hydraulic fracturing – in which the rock is injected with water, sand and chemical additives at high pressure to release trapped methane.
Other nations are keen to follow this lead, and lead author Charles “Chip” Groat hopes the report will help regulators worldwide separate “fact from fiction”. Reviewing existing studies, Groat’s team could find no evidence linking groundwater contamination to fracking operations many hundreds of metres below…