Why are people so afraid of fracking? Regulators familiar with the technology seem positively serene about hydraulic fracturing, National Review Online columnist Deroy Murdock writes. In countering the hysteria stirred up by activists, Murdock thoroughly and systematically dismantles every argument against fracking.
Murdock notes that the U.S. Geological Society, the Environmental Protection Agency, New York's Department of Environmental Conservation and others all say there's been no confirmed cases of fracking contaminating drinking water.
It is geologically impossible for fracturing fluid to reach an aquifer a thousand feet above," Elizabeth Ames Jones, the then-chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, said in 2011.
We have drilled 3,500 wells in Arkansas and explored every complaint of a compromised well, Lawrence Bengal, director of the state s Oil and Gas Commission, noted in 2011. We have found no fracturing fluid in any of those well complaints.
Fracking has been used over 1 million times on American oil and gas wells over the past six decades, Murdock quotes Manhattan Institute senior fellow Robert Bryce as saying. "If it were as dangerous as the anti-drilling/anti-hydraulic fracturing crowd claims, then hundreds, perhaps thousands, of water wells would have been contaminated by now. That hasn t happened.
"Clearly," writes Murdock, "frackophobes have nothing to offer but fear itself."
