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Page added on September 29, 2012
USGS Report Shows No Evidence Linking Hydraulic Fracturing to Water
The two reports released by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Wednesday provide no evidence that hydraulic fracturing has created impacts to groundwater, an EnCana Corp. spokesperson told Rigzone Friday.
“Furthermore and more importantly, [Environmental Protection Agency] has provided no sound scientific evidence that drilling has impacted domestic drinking water wells in the area,” said spokesperson Doug Hock in an email statement.
On Wednesday, the USGS released reports outlining tests it had conducted in April on two U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) monitoring wells at Encana’s Pavilion gas field in Wyoming.
Hock said there was nothing surprising about the USGS results, noting that USGS did a credible job of sampling, said Hock.
“More importantly, however, is the fact that USGS only sampled one of the two EPA monitoring wells (MW). This goes to the heart of concerns raised previously by state and federal agencies as well as Encana,” said Hock.
The USGS report seemed to indicate that the agency declined to sample MW02 because the well could not provide a sample that was representative of actual water quality conditions, Hock said.
EPA has said that the USGS results are “generally consistent” with their own prior sampling, Hock noted. However, Encana’s comparison of EPA’s sampling of MW01 with the USGS sampling of the same well provides “a good reality check” on this statement.
A comparison of EPA reported detections in EPA Well MW01 and USGS results show that the USGS results are inconsistent with the EPA results on the levels of toluene, xylenes, isopropanol, diethylene glycol, triethylene glycol, 2-Butoxyethanol and acetone. The USGS did not detect these in its tests.
For two components – potassium and DRO – the USGS results show significant decreases in concentrations versus the EPA results, according to a comparison by Encana of EPA and USGS data.
With regard to its claims related to hydraulic fracturing, EPA has contended that the elevated pH levels are due to potassium hydroxide, which is sometimes used in hydraulic fracturing. However, potassium hydroxide was not used in hydraulic fracturing jobs in the Pavilion field and would actually have been detrimental to the types of fracs done in the Pavilion, said Hock.
“The elevated pH is more logically explained by the fact that EPA used cement slurry in setting the casing of its monitoring wells and screens without the use of a bentonite plug to keep the cement from leaking into the well itself,” said Hock.
The plus is required for monitoring well construction for USGS and the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.
“The slurry entering the well is also the reason that clean samples couldn’t be obtained from MW02,” said Hock.
7 Comments on "USGS Report Shows No Evidence Linking Hydraulic Fracturing to Water"
SilentRunning on Sat, 29th Sep 2012 2:28 pm
Excuse me?
Looking at one monitoring well constitutes a sound scientific study?
That’s like saying “we measured the speed of one car that was traveling at less than the posted speed limit – therefore all cars travel less than the speed limit – ergo speeding does not occur anywhere in the USA.
SOS on Sat, 29th Sep 2012 2:33 pm
Excuse me? Its obvious there is no conection. A typical water well is no more than 300 feet deep. It may even be fracked to provide the owner with a good water flow.
A fracked well is thousands of feet below that, the column is lined and the hole is sealed at various levels to control the fack.
I would ask not to be foolish like a Ludite when examining and evaluating technologies. Its not like the petroleum engineers invented the internet or anything. Fracking has been around since the first wells were drilled. When reading please dont color evidence with pre conceived pavlovian responses.
Plantagenet on Sat, 29th Sep 2012 4:27 pm
Excuse me? Slickwater frakking—-adding huge amounts of cancer-causing chemicals to the fluids used in frakking—has only been around for less than a decade.
Its not unreasonable to want to be certain these chemicals aren’t entering the ground water.
SOS on Sat, 29th Sep 2012 6:21 pm
There is not one shred of evidence, if you dont count the fabricated stuff opponents have used, that the fracking process causes any harm what-so-ever, Its a blessing.
Huge amounts of cancer causing chemicals? Care to eleborate on that hyperbole? I say they add small, controlled amounts (far less then you imply) of useful chemical on the enviromentally approved list (far less toxic than you imply) with much, much larger amounts of water and sand than you would have us believe.
The fluids, as diluted as they are, are pumped downhole through a pipe. From there this highly diluted slurry of abrasives, sand and water is put under tremendous pressure as it passes through one way valves that are controlled at the surface. Any seam large enough to allow the water slurry to enter is enlarged. The fracking process does not penetrate substrata above the payzone.
There is simply not enough energy injected downhole to frack with that kind of scope much less frack the thousands of feet of layer after layer of rock etc to get close to any water bearing zone being used. Reason tells you this is true, you have to abandon reason to think otherwise.
Fracking has been around since the first wells started to slow down and we had our first peak oil panic in the early 1900s. Explosives are still popular, especially for those water wells.
Rick on Sat, 29th Sep 2012 6:35 pm
“USGS Report Shows No Evidence Linking Hydraulic Fracturing to Water”
All I can say is BS!
Norm on Sat, 29th Sep 2012 6:37 pm
SOS is one of the 5 identical sons of Mitt Romney. He is heavily invested into oil stocks, and is a sociopath. As such, he only cares about getting more and more money for himself, and does not care about the social drawbacks of poisoning some rural farmer’s drinking water. So long as SOS gets more and more money from his oil stocks, then he is happy. He does not care about the common good of society, because he is a sociopath. He also probably attends some sort of church on Sundays, to justify his belief system and that life is good for him, and who cares whats happening to others (such as the people with poisoned wells who are dying of cancer and other problems, don’t care, just want more money).
DMyers on Sat, 29th Sep 2012 11:10 pm
I’ll tell you why they didn’t sample Well2. They didn’t think they would like what they would find there. This may even be worse than the NIST study of 911. These are studies made to order.
In the first place, how can you still honor a study that has diminished its sample size by fifty percent? That has to destroy the study design and logic.
In the second place, how can you give any credibility to a study where the investigators polluted a well, and then declined to use it due to their own pollution of it? The slurry done it. Then, what they tell you without meaning to is that they also polluted Well#1 with slurry. For some reason, the slurry pollution didn’t present a problem in Well#1. No explanation.
To explain myself, it is stated that the EPA attributed heightened PH levels [alkalinity] to the presence of potassium hydroxide, a fracking chemical. The spokesman, Hock, says that high PH was due to the spilling of slurry into the well. He’s talking about Well#1, which was the sample for the study. Sorry, I can’t put much faith in a study where they pollute their sample but then go ahead and use it anyway.
The discrepancies between this study and the EPA study cry out for additional unbiased and competent studies. What did EPA find? “ .. toluene, xylenes, isopropanol, diethylene glycol, triethylene glycol, 2-Butoxyethanol and acetone.” USGS found NONE of these. Since these are poison organics that should never be present in drinking water, these divergent findings need to be explained and reconciled. Perhaps the presence of the highly alkaline slurry corrupted the tests for the other chemicals. USGS also showed reduced presence of potassium. I don’t know, but the test for the the alkaline potassium may have been corrupted, as well, by the presence of the alkaline slurry.
Does it end up, take your pick? If you want poison organics in the water you go with EPA and if want no poison organics in your water, you go with USGS. The USGS study should be scrapped and slurried. Insufficient and corrupted study samples do not good science make. And rather than proclaiming there is no scientific evidence of fracked up drinking water, give us some good scientific evidence that it isn’t fracked up. If a month after they start fracking down the road, my well water starts to have a scent of organic solvents, and this has never happened in thirty years I lived here, that’s good respectable scientific evidence, whether I can afford the qualitative analysis or not.