The Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that it cannot decisively say if fracking poses a threat to drinking water after saying in a previous draft that it did not pose any harm, according to a finalized assessment.
The study comes after a cadre of scientific advisers in August scolded the agency’s draft report for stating that hydraulic fracturing, the process of injecting water and sand in rock deep underground to force oil and natural gas out, poses no apparent harm to communities’ drinking water where the drilling method is prevalent.
“We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States,” the draft report said, adding that the contamination that has occurred has been “small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells.”
However, Tuesday’s report did not include the statement that fracking was not harmful, based on feedback from the EPA Scientific Advisory Board that the agency must quantify that statement with data, said Thomas A. Burke, EPA science adviser and research and development chief, on a call with reporters.
In the final review, EPA concluded that fracking can raise the possibility of harm to drinking water in specific circumstances. But because of lapses in the data, the report could not conclude that fracking poses harm across the board in every circumstance nationwide.
“Generally, comprehensive information on the location of activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle is lacking, either because it is not collected, not publicly available, or prohibitively difficult to aggregate,” EPA said in releasing the report.
“In places where we know activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle have occurred, data that could be used to characterize hydraulic fracturing-related chemicals in the environment before, during, and after hydraulic fracturing were scarce,” the study said.
“Because of these data gaps and uncertainties, as well as others described in the assessment, it was not possible to fully characterize the severity of impacts, nor was it possible to calculate or estimate the national frequency of impacts on drinking water resources from activities in the hydraulic fracturing water cycle.”
