“Every [contamination incident] we identified was caused by a failure of the integrity of the well, and almost always it was the cement job.”
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Some energy companies, state regulators, academics and environmentalists are reaching consensus that natural-gas drilling has led to several incidents of water pollution—but not because of fracking.
The energy officials and some environmentalists agree that poorly built wells are to blame for some cases of water contamination. In those cases, they say, wells weren’t properly sealed with subterranean cement, which allowed contaminants to travel up the well bore from deep underground into shallow aquifers that provide drinking water…