How does fracking pollute water

The team checked the Mandaree water intake as well, Vengosh says, but did not find any elevated levels. One concern is an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act, known as the Halliburton loophole , that exempts industry from having to disclose the chemicals it uses in fracking and prevents the EPA from regulating fracking fluids.

The loophole was established in an energy bill passed by the Bush-Cheney administration in and has been in effect ever since. The oil and gas industry is also exempt from federal EPA hazardous waste regulations and Superfund regulations , which exclude waste associated with the exploration, development, and production of crude oil and natural gas.

Drilling fluids, produced water, and other waste are not disposed of as hazardous and are exempt from the hazardous-waste cleanup process when it comes to spills or leaks. The industry has been exempt from these regulations since the s, when the EPA temporarily proposed that oil and gas waste was not hazardous. This ruling became permanent in when the agency determined that the cost of treating the waste would slow production. The organization FracTracker Alliance calculated hundreds of brine and crude oil spills throughout the region.

More recently, a 34,gallon wastewater pipeline spilled north of New Town in June this year and two pipeline spills deposited 21, gallons of wastewater into a Missouri River tributary in The EPA has determined that the portions do not currently serve as a source of water and will not serve as one in the future, allowing the oil and gas industry to use the aquifer for extraction and disposal of waste.

Once used, that portion of the aquifer can never be used for drinking water in the future. For Finley-DeVille, solving fracking and wastewater comes down to these regulations.

Since its start, she and her husband, Walter DeVille, have worked with the nonprofit environmental organization Dakota Resource Council and with Earthworks, among others, to campaign for more regulations and more information on what contaminants are involved in fracking.

Fort Berthold POWER sued the Bureau of Land Management in after the agency rolled back the methane waste prevention rule , which is meant to reduce venting, flaring, and leaking from oil and gas operations. This rollback was struck down in Currently, the organization is fighting the recent rollbacks of the National Environmental Policy Act NEPA , a year-old law that requires federal agencies to evaluate the environmental impacts of their actions, such as permit applications or land and water management.

The new rollbacks limit this review and community input. President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to reverse these rollbacks. Troutman, at Earthworks, says the regulatory loopholes must be closed to prevent further spilling, clean up current spills, and address drinking water contamination. This past summer, New York became the first state to close the hazardous-waste loophole, meaning that oil and gas waste will now be treated as other hazards.

Pennsylvania and New Mexico are looking to do the same. Just this month, Williams County, northwest of the Fort Berthold Reservation, extended a yearlong moratorium on a proposed landfill for radioactive oilfield waste by six months, with the county board of commissioners citing a desire to consider options for regulations and restrictions first.

Finley-DeVille, for her part, recently took an even bigger step toward change as well, running for state senate in November. The quest for clean land, air, and water is far from over. About 10 percent of the mixture contained methanol, DiGiulio said. So the presence of methanol in the Pavillion aquifer would indicate that fracking fluid may have contaminated it. But methanol degrades rapidly and is reduced within days to trace amounts. Commercial labs did not have the protocol to detect such small traces, so DiGiulio and his colleagues devised new procedures, using high-performance liquid chromatography, to detect it.

They devised techniques for detecting other chemicals, as well. By then, Pavillion was roiling in controversy as EPA and residents collided with industry. EPA had drilled two monitoring wells, MW01 and MW02, in , and its testing had found benzene, diesel and other toxic chemicals. They pointed to a technical disagreement between EPA and the U. EPA realized it needed a consensus on its water testing methodology.

They retested the monitoring wells in April This time, they also tested for methanol. But EPA never released those results to the public. Industry representatives repeatedly pointed out that EPA had not published a peer-reviewed study on its findings.

In December , state regulators published a draft of their findings. It stated that fracking had not contributed to pollution in Pavillion, according to the Casper Star Tribune. The report said the groundwater is generally suitable for people to use. He felt he had to finish his work. It is important that the work be seen by other scientists and enter the peer review realm so that other scientists will have access to virtually everything.

All of it was publicly available, waiting for the right person to spend a year crunching the information. More research is needed. The sampling wells contained methanol.

Syracuse University : No evidence that fracking altered water quality in Appalachian Basin. Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality : Scientists show fracking had no impact on water-supply wells in Pavillion, Wyoming. This result is encouraging, because it implies there is some degree of temporal and spatial separation between injected fluids and drinking water supply.

Geological Study : Fracking and other gas-production activities had no effect on groundwater quality in Arkansas.