People gravitate to the truth, often slowly, as Galileo famously found.
It took four years for the best-funded environmental agency in the world, to opine on a sixty-year-old technology. The Environmental Protection Agency recently released a study on fracking. What did it find? Drum roll please!
The EPA found that hydraulic fracturing has the potential to contaminate water. Only they found no evidence of a threat in the real world including in heavily populated areas. [link to ten facts you need to know] http://energyindepth.org/national/ten-important-things-to-know-from-epas-1000-page-groundwater-study/
Wait a minute! That’s what we said. And we told you for free. One imagines opponents lighting their taps on fire they are so upset.
The EPA had to know this would be unpopular with the Obama base and it’s not likely a coincidence they softened the blow. They said just because a million wells didn’t prove a problem is no proof that a million and one won’t. Thus opponents can keep orbiting the truth and hope that the next well will vindicate the now widely ridiculed Gasland. My suspicion is the EPA study will ultimately banish Gasland producer Josh Fox to the, Hare Krishna type, fringes of environmental activism.
I acknowledge the EPS found real cases where related activities have temporarily contaminated water . Like for example an accident while producing a well with normal techniques. Or surface handling spills. Or failures in conventional drilling practices etc.
For the purposes of their study the EPA ignored the Webster’s dictionary and redefined fracking to include conventional drilling and conventional production techniques. The companies and energy workers who perform hydraulic fracturing don’t do those things too. But environmental activists have demanded that truckers and drillers be held responsible for the heresy of fracking (my mother has yet to be blamed in spite of raising me). The EPS obliged them.
In the end the EPA found that our industry is run by people, and sometimes those truckers, drillers and yes even those fracking frackers can make mistakes. They just didn’t find many of them.
Wait a minute! That’s what we said. And we told you for free.
That the oil and gas industry is more hi tech than hi-tech can be surprising to non oil and gas people. Yet for activists that’s the inconvenient truth. Being the best in the world is a truth Canadians should be very proud of, not criticized for.
Orbit that!
