Photo: Bosc d'Anjou/Flickr
Though it's long been suspected, and it's been documented both scientifically and anecdotally, we now have even more evidence that fracking does indeed increase the the risk of water supplies being contaminated with stray gases. A new Duke University study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences all but confirms it.
When researchers looked at the water supplies of homes within one kilometer of a fracking well, average levels of methane were found to be six times higher than at homes farther away from the wells. Methane was detected in 82 percent of the 141 water samples taken. Ethane concentrations were 23 times higher, with propane detected in 7 percent of water samples.
This is the first time a study has found direct evidence of ethane and propane contamination related to fracking wells.
Prof. Robert Jackson, the study's lead author, concludes that "The methane, ethane, and propane data, and new evidence from hydrocarbon and helium content, all suggest that drilling has affected some homeowners' water. In a minority of cases the gas even look Marcellus-like, probably caused by poor well construction."
As for the primary influence on levels of the gases found in water, Jackson noted that "distance to gas wells was, by far the most significant factor."
In other words, the closer the fracking well was to a water source, the more potentially harmful gases it was likely to contain.
The report is well-timed, just after President Obama's long-awaited climate change speech, in which he essentially declared war on coal by, in large part, intending to substitute it with natural gas, increasingly obtained by fracking. This is what's been going on for the past several years. It's largely responsible for the significant drop in US carbon emissions—far more than any real ambition to combat climate change, rhetoric aside.
There's no doubt, or should be no doubt at least, that coal is categorically a bad thing for the environment. But that hardly means that more natural gas is really a decent solution, especially when that gas comes from fracking.
It's tempting to think that fracking is a useful step in the right direction towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions enough to prevent dangerous climate change, but studies like this suggest that it might not be.
Writing in 2012 in Environmental Research Letters, Nathan Myhrvold says, on effect of replacing coal with natural gas, on a 100 year time frame:
You have to use the energy system of today to build the new-and-improved energy system of tomorrow, and unfortunately that means creating more emissions in the near term than we would otherwise. If countries were to start right away and build really fast, so that they installed a trillion watts of gas-fired electricity generation steadily over the next 40 years, that would still add about half a degree Fahrenheit to the average surface temperature of the Earth in 2112—that's within a tenth of a degree of the warming that coal-fired plants would produce by that year.
The Duke report itself concludes:
Technologies that offer only modest reductions in emissions, such as natural gas and [...] carbon capture and storage, cannot yield substantial reductions in temperatures this century. Achieving substantial reductions in temperatures relative to the coal-based system will take the better part of a century, and will depend on rapid deployment of some mix of conservation, wind, solar, and nuclear.
Whether you look at the potential contamination of drinking water, or its ability to significantly reduce temperature rise this century, there's not a lot of good coming from fracking.