The fracking industry likes
to call its product “natural gas,” but the natural consequence of its
activity is the production of billions of gallons of cancer-causing
wastewater.
The new collaborative study
was conducted by scientists at esteemed institutions in both the U.S.
and China and found that so-called “flow back” fracking wastewater
induced malignant changes in human bronchial epithelial cells consistent
with the cancerous phenotype.
The same fracking wastewater
was injected into mice, with 5 of the 6 developing .2 cm to .6 cm tumors
as early as 3 months after injection, and with the control mice forming
no tumors after 6 months. The authors concluded that their results
indicate “flow back water is capable of neoplastic transformation in
vitro,” i.e. fracking wastewater is capable of producing cancer in
mammals.
In order to understand how,
and to what extent, this fracking wastewater is produced, read the
following background information:
Natural gas is believed to
possibly be a bridge to transitioning from coal dependence.
Currently natural gas fuels nearly 40% of the U.S. electricity
generation, and the Marcellus Shale formation in the Appalachian
Basin is on the forefront of gas-shale drilling for natural gas
production in the United States (Pritz, 2010). Mining natural gas is
not new, but the volume has soared in recent years because the new
technique of high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing (HVHHF).
The concern surrounding the environmental, public health and social
impacts of this method has increased accordingly. HVHHF is an
advanced technology that injects water, sand, and other ingredients
at very high pressure vertically into a well about 6000 to 10,000 ft
deep (Penningroth et al., 2013). The high pressure creates small
fractures in the rock that extend out as far as 1000 ft away from
the well. The pressure is reduced after the fractures are created,
which allows water from the well to return to the surface, also
known as flow back water (Veil, 2010). The flow back water contains
complex proprietary chemical mixtures, but also naturally occurring
toxins such as metals, volatile organics, and radioactive compounds
that are destabilized during gas extraction (Warner et al., 2012).
On average, about 5.5 million gallons of water is used on average to
hydraulically fracture each shale gas well, and 30% to 70% of the
volume returns as flow back water (Veil, 2010). Currently discharge
options of flow back water are: inject underground through an onsite
or offsite disposal well; discharge to a nearby surface water body;
transport to a municipal wastewater treatment plant or publicly
owned treatment works; transport to a commercial industrial wastewa-
ter treatment facility; and/or reuse for a future hydraulic
fracturing job either with or without some remediation (Pritz,
2010). Some commercial wastewater disposal facilities accept flow
back and discharge the water after treatment under their own
national pollutant discharge elimination system permits (Veil,
2010).
The implications of the data
presented above are truly harrowing. Pennsylvania, alone, has over 7,700
active wells in use at present. Over 4,000 violations have been
reported, and over 6 million in fines paid out thus far. The operation
of these Pennyslvania wells require about 42 billion gallons of water,
and according to the figures above, would together produce between 1.4
and 6 billion gallons of flow back wastewater.
Despite the massive scale of
toxic pollution generated by the fracking industry, they have been
highly successful in deceiving the public by calling its product
“natural gas” — a typical green-washing technique.
The truth is that the Marcellus Shale formation in the Appalachian
Basin, which is by far the #1 producer of “natural gas” in the US, and
which uses the increasingly widespread fracking technique known as
high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracking (HVHHF), is responsible for
producing not only massive fracking chemical and heavy metal pollution,
but radioactive waste as well. Read my report, “Fracking
Creates Massive Radioactive Waste Problem,” to learn about how the
fracking of the Marcellus Shale is releasing highly carcinogenic
radioactive waste into the environment on an unprecedented scale.
The new study addresses the
radioactivity concern by noting that their test wastewater, “may not be
truly representative as it was aged prior to the physical–chemical
characterization necessary in this set of experiments; and thus neither
significant amount of radioactivity or organic compounds was present.”
In other words, the carcinogenicity of fracking pollution may be far
higher than observed in this study if radioactive components are taken
into account.
The primary “carcinogenic”
elements identified in the test wastewater were barium and strontium,
which are two alkaline minerals that mimic calcium in living organisms
and therefore are freely taken up by cells. These elements are naturally
found in the Marcellus Shale, but are released in far higher than
natural concentrations into wastewater as contaminants only after
fracking.
The study concluded:
Our work has provided the
first line of evidence that Marcellus Shale flow back water induces
malignant cell transformation in vitro. The BEAS-2B cells exposed to
flow back water up to six weeks appeared to be transformed and
exhibiting altered morphology as compared to parental cells. The
present work also provided Ba and Sr as hydraulic fracturing-related
target pollutants in addition to the more classically- studied
fracking contaminants (i.e., radioisotopes and methane) for further
investigation. Research to determine whether fracking-associated
pollutants can migrate to private or public drinking wells, to
identify early warning indicators of exposure and effect, and to
identify suitable remediation approaches are urgently needed.
Descriptive and analytical epidemiological studies along with animal
model studies will help to better understand the health impact
associated with unconventional shale gas production.
To learn more about the
hazards of fracking, watch the movie “Gasland” below: