Fracking Nation

Fracking Nation
Environmental ?concerns over a ?controversial mining method could put America's largest ?reservoirs of clean-burning natural ?gas beyond reach. Is there a better way ?to drill??

Tracy Bank was concerned. A geochemist, she makes her living studying how water interacts with rocks. And four years ago, when she arrived at the State University of New York at Buffalo, water was definitely interacting with rocks.

Buffalo is perched on the edge of the largest known reservoir of natural gas in America, a geologic formation known as the Marcellus Shale (pdf). The 95,000-square-mile slab, which lies under sizable portions of West Virginia, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, could contain up to 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—enough to meet the nation’s natural gas needs for at least two years. Owing to this bounty, the areas above the shale are now in the grip of an unprecedented gas-drilling boom. The gas is extracted using a method called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique that involves pumping millions of gallons of water laced with ?chemicals deep underground to blast open the shale and release the gas trapped inside. The blasting is what got Bank worried.

Fracking has already drawn considerable scrutiny from environmental groups, unhappy homeowners, and teams of lawyers who blame the drilling method for polluting pristine rivers, turning bucolic farmlands into noisy industrial zones, and leaking enough methane to make ordinary tap water as flammable as lighter fluid. Bank is now bringing attention to yet another problem: radiation. Her research shows that high-pressure fluids striking the shale could dislodge naturally occurring radioactive compounds such as uranium and strontium, putting groundwater at risk of contamination.