Obama's Fracking Vendetta

Fracking is, to our economy, a god send. The modern fracking technique has only been in use since 1998, and has led to a budding energy revolution for our nation. A big part of its success is that it hasn't been saddled by crushing federal regulation.

Fracking is, to radical environmentalists and Arab oil potentates, a curse that must be shut down at all costs - and they are certainly not above cooking the books to make it happen. Nor are they above making use of propaganda. The just released film "Promised Land" a film written by the noted scientist, Matt Damon and that explores all the unproven evils of fracking, was bankrolled by the UAE.

As anyone in the radical green movement will tell you, he quickest way to shut down any sort of activity is to get our government to regulate it to the point that it is no longer economically feasible. The environmentalists have done it with refineries, they are in the midst of doing it with coal, and now their sites are set on the enormously successful practice of fracking.

Enter Obama's EPA. It has already been caught cooking the books on fracking in Texas. It is now doing it again in Pavillion, Wyoming. On 8 Dec., the EPA issued a draft finding that fracking there was causing groundwater contamination.

The problem for the EPA - another branch of the government (one that may well find itself under new leadership soon) the U.S.G.S., conducted their own tests right alongside the EPA, and their findings are at polar ends of the spectrum. This from the WSJ:

The Pavillion study involves two water wells drilled by the [EPA] in 2010 to test groundwater quality. Experts from the Wyoming Water Development Commission and elsewhere sharply criticized the EPA's results on several grounds, including that EPA investigators didn't follow their own guidelines on the timeliness of the testing and the purity of the water samples. The federal Bureau of Land Management said that "much more robust" testing would be needed to properly draw conclusions.

So the EPA agreed to test the wells again, in April and May of last year 2012. In October, it claimed again to have found contaminated water. But this time there was a new wrinkle: The U.S. Geological Survey had conducted tests alongside the EPA, and its investigators reported different results. Unlike the EPA, the USGS failed to find any traces of glycols or 2-butoxyethanol, fracking-related chemicals that could cause serious health issues if they entered the water supply at levels the EPA considers contamination.

Meanwhile, the USGS found significantly lower concentrations of other materials identified by the EPA—including phenol, potassium and diesel-range organics—which might not have resulted from the fracking at all. The phenols were likely introduced accidentally in the laboratory, for example, and potassium might be naturally occurring or the result of potash contained in the cement used to build the EPA wells.

The USGS also noted that in constructing the monitoring wells, the EPA used a "black painted/coated carbon steel casing," and EPA photographs show that investigators used a painted device to catch sand from the wells. The problem is that paint can contain a variety of compounds that distort test results—so it is poor scientific practice to use painted or coated materials in well-monitoring tests.

After initially neglecting to disclose this information, the EPA eventually acknowledged it, but only while attempting to deflect criticism by releasing more test results and claiming that its data are "generally consistent" with the USGS findings. These actions only muddied the matter and postponed the peer-review process until after Jan. 15.

As the Tulsa-based energy and water-management firm ALL Consulting concluded: "Close review of the EPA draft report and associated documents reveals a number of concerns about the methodology, sampling results, and study findings and conclusions. These concerns stem from apparent errors in sampling and laboratory analysis, incomplete information that makes it difficult to assess the validity of the results, and EPA's failure to seriously consider alternative explanations for the results of its investigation. . . . Taken together, these concerns call into question the validity of EPA's analytical results and their conclusions regarding the sources of the reported contamination."

Anyone want to bet that none of this stops Obama's EPA from finalizing their finding to justify extensive regulation of fracking. That is their holy grail, and actual science is secondary. And the left calls us "anti-science." When Newt Gingrich said during the primaries that the EPA was beyond salvage and needed to be replaced, he was spot on. It is agenda driven and corrupt.

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