An extensive study conducted by a Syracuse University professor has shown that central New York water quality has not been negatively affected by intense “fracking” operations in northern Pennsylvania and southeastern Ohio.

Don Siegel, the department chair and an earth sciences professor at SU, and his five-person team concluded from their study that the groundwater quality around the “frac units” on the Marcellus and Utica Shale fields, in Ohio and Pennsylvania respectively, met the standard.

Siegel’s study falls in line with similar studies on the matter performed by the EPA and the United States Geological Survey. Siegel and his team tested more than 21,000 samples of groundwater over the course of their study with some of the samples coming from depths that exceeded federal requirements by more than 500 feet, according to a Sept. 14 Ohio.com article.

The study was accepted by ScienceDirect in June and will be published in December in Applied Geochemistry magazine.

The environmental effects of “hydraulic fracturing,” or fracking, were the main concerns of this study. Fracking is a process by which natural gas, a fossil fuel, is drawn up from shale rock deposits located deep below the earth’s surface.

Natural gas is captured by applying pressure to the shale deposits with streams of highly pressurized water, sand and chemicals. The Chesapeake Energy Corporation has been harnessing natural gas in the two areas included in the study since 2007, and was responsible for hiring the contractors that took the water samples for Siegel and his team.

“I was contacted by Chesapeake and asked if I would guide them in interpreting the basic science that would come from this unprecedented, large dataset,” Siegel said in an email. “They funded me privately and put no constraints on what would be published, ‘pro-fracking’ or not.”

In additions to concerns about the contamination of drinking water, Sharon Moran, an associate professor of environmental studies at the State of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, said that common concerns surrounding fracking operations include “forest fragmentation and the disposal of waste.”

“Fracking waste is sometimes radioactive,” Moran said in an email. “Where to treat the waste is a concern because most waste treatment plants are unequipped to handle such materials.”

Groundwater samples surrounding the Marcellus and Utica shale fracking sites tested positive for high levels of metal contamination. But Siegel’s study found that “natural geological formations” in the area were responsible for the anomalies.

Siegel explained that the results from the study were “neither unusual nor surprising and are consistent with previous results in both areas … Taken both before and after unconventional gas development began.”

According to Chesapeake’s website, the Marcellus and Utica shale fields are both their largest and fastest expanding sites for natural gas extraction. Between the two, there are more than 1,200 drilling sites and 1.23 million acres of land.

Fracking operations were outlawed in New York state this past June due to local disapproval of the practice, but Siegel maintains that Chesapeake has, for the most part, conducted their operations responsibly.

“Of course there have been several errors in drilling,” said Siegel. “However, that number is relatively small considering the size of their drilling effort; and the EPA came to the same conclusion in their five-year report on the operation as well.”

Despite this sentiment, Moran remains skeptical of allowing fracking within New York state lines due to a lack of federal precedents and knowledge surrounding the relatively new practice.

“The industry’s strategy of doing an end run around the key federal law, the Safe Drinking Water Act, has placed additional burdens on regulators at the state and local levels,” Moran said. “So the public is correct to keep insisting that regulators develop sensible strategies that manage risks in prudent ways.”

Published on September 27, 2015 at 8:34 pm

Contact Chris: cplucey@syr.edu