What the frack do we know? Not much, it turns out [View all]

[xchrom]

http://grist.org/climate-energy/is-your-drinking-water-fracked-who-the-hell-knows/

Remember the scene in the movie Gasland where the guy lights his tapwater on fire? No? Here it is:

That footage helped ignite the grassroots movement against fracking, a controversial technology that shoots a slurry of water mixed with sand and laced with toxic chemicals into underground shale formations to shatter the rock and release natural gas.

The only problem with this by-now-iconic image is that the faucet pyrotechnics may actually have been made possible by a natural phenomenon: The guy’s house is perched thousands of feet above a double seam of coal, according to the Colorado Department of Environmental Protection, and methane from underground coal and gas formations occasionally bubbles up through cracks in the earth and into people’s water wells — no fracking required. (Kids in Pennsylvania have apparently been torching their water for generations.)

Then again, the flaming tapwater may indeed result from fracking in the Colorado man’s neighborhood. The point is, nobody knows.