Fracking wastewater found to contaminate lakes
by: Russel Davis
NaturalNews.com
Monday, July 17, 2017
Hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking, is an unconventional method of extracting oil and gas. The practice has paved the way for increased production of domestic oil and gas in the United States. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, fracking now accounts for more than one-half of oil production and two-thirds of gas production across the country.
Fracking’s market share is expected to increase over the next few years because it promotes shifting the focus away from coal — a move that is guaranteed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, fracking can still be a harmful practice — large volumes of wastewater from fracking sites were found to have released a plethora of toxic chemicals and compounds into surface waters, leading to the contamination of a Pennsylvania watershed.
A study published online in Environmental Science and Technology, the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society, revealed that treated wastewater from a hydraulic fracturing site has heavily contaminated a Pennsylvania watershed with billions of gallons of toxic chemicals. Furthermore, according to a Pennsylvania report, 10,000 unconventional oil and gas wells in the Marcellus Shale produced as much as 1.7 billion gallons of wastewater — which are treated haphazardly by wastewater treatment facilities before being dumped into the lake’s surface — in 2015 alone.
A closer look at the detrimental effects of fracking on Penn Lake
As part of the study, a team of researchers from the Pennsylvania State University, Colorado State University, and Dartmouth College examined water samples from the lake to examine the potentially detrimental effects of improper wastewater management. The research team collected samples of sediments and porewaters from a lake downstream where two fracking wastewater facilities operate nearby.
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