Seven Fracking Horror Stories, Tested Against the Actual Record

A man holds a lighter to a running kitchen faucet. The water catches fire. The audience gasps, the music swells, and a documentary about a drilling boom has just found its poster. Nobody in the theater asks the three questions that matter: what was in the water before the drilling started, how deep was the well, and who checked.

Folks, I like a good scary movie as much as anyone. But policy is not made by scenes in a movie, and the people who live near the wells deserve better than slogans from either camp. So here is what I propose to do. I will take seven of the loudest claims about hydraulic fracturing and test each against the public record. Where the claim collapses, I will say so. Where the critics have a point, I will say that too, because a conservative who cannot admit a real problem is not worth listening to.

My thesis is simple. The honest answers are mostly on our side, and the real problems are the kind that good state regulation, careful engineering and plain enforcement can fix. You do not need a ban to deal with a bad cement job.

The ground rules for the test

First, definitions. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the process of pumping fluid and sand down a well at high pressure to crack rock and prop the cracks open so oil and gas can flow. It is one step in building a well. Drilling, casing the hole, cementing it, fracturing it, producing from it and disposing of the wastewater are all separate steps with separate risks. Half of the confusion in this debate comes from using the word "fracking" to mean the whole industry.

Second, a distinction I will keep drawing: the factual claim versus the value claim. Whether a well contaminated a water supply is a factual question. Whether the risk is worth the benefit is a value judgment. I will try to keep them apart.

Claim one: fracking is a reckless new experiment

The claim: nobody knows what this technology does because it is brand new.

The record: commercial hydraulic fracturing began in 1949, which makes it older than the interstate highway system. Treatments were pumped into wells in Oklahoma and Texas that year, and the practice spread through conventional oil and gas fields over the following decades. It is more than seventy years old.

What is new is the combination. Pairing slickwater fracturing with long horizontal wells made it possible to produce gas and oil from shale at scale, a story told in The Texas Wildcatter Who Spent Twenty Years Cracking the Shale Code. That raised the volume of activity enormously, and volume brings real impacts such as truck traffic and wastewater. But the central technique is old.

Verdict: mostly false. The technique is old. The scale is new, and scale is a fair thing to regulate.

Claim two: fracking makes tap water flammable

The claim: drill nearby and your faucet will burn.

The record: methane, the main component of natural gas, can occur naturally in groundwater. It was documented in water wells in parts of the Appalachian region and elsewhere long before anyone drilled a shale well. A flame at the faucet can be a sign of biologically produced gas or gas from shallow pockets.

That is not the end of the story, and I will not pretend it is. State regulators have found cases where gas migrated from a gas well that was poorly constructed into nearby water wells. Pennsylvania's environmental regulators cited an operator in the late 2000s over gas migration tied to faulty well construction. In those cases the culprit was the well's casing and cement, not the fracturing step thousands of feet below.

Verdict: mixed. Flammable water has natural causes in places, and bad well construction has caused real contamination in others. The deep fracturing step is rarely the cause. The cement job is.

Claim three: the "Halliburton loophole" lets drillers do whatever they want

The claim: a secret giveaway in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, so it is unregulated.

The record: the first half is true. The 2005 law, signed by President George W. Bush in August of that year, changed the definition of "underground injection" in the Safe Drinking Water Act so that it excludes hydraulic fracturing, with an exception for fracturing that uses diesel fuel. That took fracking out of the federal underground injection permitting program. The nickname comes from Dick Cheney's earlier career at Halliburton, a company in the fracturing business.

The second half is false. The exemption was narrow. It addressed one federal program. Drilling was and is regulated by states, which license wells, set casing and cement requirements, inspect sites and enforce penalties. The Clean Water Act, rules on spills, air rules and many other laws still apply to oil and gas operations. State oil and gas agencies in producing states like Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and North Dakota have been overseeing wells for generations.

Where do critics have a point? Federal law does not require a uniform national disclosure of fracturing ingredients, so the quality of the rules depends on the state you live in. That is a legitimate complaint about patchwork, and I'll come back to it under claim seven.

Verdict: misleading. The exemption is real but narrow, and the claim that fracking is unregulated is wrong.

Claim four: fracking fluid will creep up thousands of feet into your aquifer

The claim: the fluid pumped down the well will migrate upward through rock and poison your drinking water.

The record: geography is on the side of the wells. Water supplies sit near the surface. Shale formations are far below. Here is a hypothetical to make the distance concrete. Suppose a drinking water aquifer sits 500 feet below your farm, and the shale layer being fractured sits at 5,000 feet. The gap is 5,000 − 500 = 4,500 feet. The roof of the Empire State Building is 1,250 feet above the sidewalk, so a 5,000-foot well is four Empire State Buildings (4 × 1,250 = 5,000) stacked on top of each other, pointing down. The depth varies a good deal from one formation and one location to another, and some shale plays are shallower than that, so this is a picture, not a measurement for any particular well.

The cracks created in fracturing are generally limited in height, and layers of rock between the shale and the aquifer act as barriers. That is why the fracturing step itself is seldom the story in contamination cases.

But look at what is not a barrier: a hole. An old abandoned well that was never plugged properly, or a modern well with a bad seal, can create a pathway where rock would not. That is the legitimate concern, and it leads directly to the next claim.

Verdict: mostly false for the rock, with an important exception for holes. Rock is not the problem. Poorly sealed wells, old or new, are.

Claim five: the steel and cement never fail

Let me flip this one around, because it comes from the other direction. The industry sometimes talks as if well construction is foolproof. It is not.

A modern shale well is built in layers. Crews drill a hole through the shallow zone and set steel casing, which is pipe, and pump cement into the space between the pipe and the rock. The surface casing is meant to be set below the deepest freshwater zone and cemented so groundwater is isolated from the well. Deeper strings of pipe and cement follow. Texas, for one, has long had rules governing casing and cementing depths, and other producing states have their own.

The system works when the cement job is done right. When it is not, gas or fluid can move along the outside of the pipe. Failures happen. That is not a claim from a movie. It is a basic engineering fact: cement can be poorly placed, pipe can corrode, and a seal can fail.

Verdict: the critics have a point. The remedy is not a ban. It is inspection, testing of cement bond, strong state rules, and meaningful penalties for operators who cut corners. And, by the way, the operator who cuts corners is also the best argument against the industry. Responsible companies should want him fined.

Claim six: fracking is causing earthquakes in Oklahoma

The claim: the shale boom shook Oklahoma.

The record: Oklahoma did see a dramatic jump in felt earthquakes starting around 2009. A magnitude 5.6 quake struck near Prague, Oklahoma, in November 2011, and a magnitude 5.8 quake struck near Pawnee in September 2016. Scientists, including the U.S. Geological Survey, linked the increase largely to the injection of very large volumes of wastewater into deep disposal wells, particularly into a formation called the Arbuckle.

Notice what that means. The quakes were tied mainly to the disposal of salty water that comes up with oil and gas, not to the fracturing step. Disposal wells are a different animal. They are regulated by the states under the same federal drinking-water statute that includes the underground injection control program. A small number of felt quakes have been tied by regulators to the fracturing step itself in places such as Ohio and western Canada, but those are the exception.

Here is the part that should make conservatives proud. Once the connection was clear, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, a state agency, directed operators to cut injection volumes and, in some areas, plug back wells. Earthquake activity then fell. A state regulator identified a problem, acted on it, and the shaking decreased. That is federalism working, and it did not require a statute from Washington.

But the critics are right about one thing: homeowners in that region had real damage, and the response took years. Faster action would have been better.

Verdict: half true. The wastewater, not the fracturing, was the main driver. It was real, it was harmful, and it was fixable with state action.

Claim seven: the companies hide what they pump

The claim: nobody knows what chemicals go into the ground.

The record: since 2011, a public registry called FracFocus, run by the Ground Water Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, has let operators report the ingredients used in fracturing a well, and a number of states require operators to use it. The mixture is overwhelmingly water and sand, with a small share of additives. Disclosure rules vary from state to state.

But the critics have a point. Many state laws allow a company to withhold the identity of a specific ingredient as a trade secret. That can frustrate a doctor trying to treat a patient, or a neighbor trying to test their well for the right substances. The sensible fix is a rule that lets the state regulator and emergency responders see the full list, while the public record protects the formula's value to the company. Many states have moved toward something like that, and any state that has not should.

Verdict: partly true, and fixable. Disclosure exists, but trade-secret exemptions leave gaps. Check your state's rule.

What the federal water study actually said

Now to the report both sides love to quote. In December 2016 the Environmental Protection Agency issued its final assessment of the potential effects of the hydraulic fracturing water cycle on drinking water resources. It had been a long project, ordered by Congress.

Here is a detail that both sides tend to skip. A draft released in June 2015 included a statement that the agency had not found evidence that these mechanisms had led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. After criticism from EPA's own Science Advisory Board, which asked for clarity about what that sentence meant, the final report dropped it. The final report instead concluded that fracturing activities can affect drinking water resources under some circumstances.

Note what those circumstances were. The agency pointed to: water withdrawals in areas or times of low water availability, spills of fracturing fluids and wastewater, injection into wells with inadequate mechanical integrity, injection directly into groundwater resources, inadequate treatment and discharge of wastewater, and disposal in unlined pits.

Read that list again. These are surface spills, bad wells, bad treatment and bad disposal. They are ordinary industrial risks. They are the kind of risks we manage in refineries, chemical plants and grain elevators, and none of them is a reason to shut down an industry that heats American homes and provides high-paying jobs. They are reasons to inspect, enforce and fine.

If you want to follow how federal rulemaking collides with Congress's role, see The Court Did Not Ban Clean Air. It Told EPA to Ask Congress First.. If you want to know whose land the wells sit on and who is paid, see Who Owns the Oil Under Your Farm, and Why America Answers Differently. And if a survey crew shows up on your own acreage, A Survey Crew Is on Your Land, So Here Is Your Pipeline Playbook is your playbook. For the larger question of how to weigh safety rules against what they cost, read Regulation protects us, so why count the cost? Because someone pays it.

The bottom line

• Fracking has been used commercially since 1949. What is new is the scale, and the real hazards are ordinary industrial ones: bad cement and casing, spills, and wastewater disposal.
• The "Halliburton loophole" is a narrow exemption from one federal program. States regulate wells, and the claim that fracking is unregulated is false.
• The critics have real points on well integrity, disposal-well earthquakes in Oklahoma, and trade-secret gaps in chemical disclosure. Conservatives should say so and push for strong state enforcement, because responsible operators win when bad ones are punished.
• If you live near a well, ask your state oil and gas agency what the casing and cement rules are, whether the operator reported its ingredients, and how to get your water tested before drilling begins.
• When someone waves a flaming faucet at you, ask three questions: what was in the water beforehand, how deep was the well, and who inspected it?