Bay Scientists Want to Continue Fracking Studies

Well, knock me over with a feather! Scientists want to continue to study something! Have you ever heard a scientist say "We're done with that; we know everything"?

Scientists recommend further monitoring of natural gas extraction sites

Natural gas resources underlie almost half of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, but some of the regulations that govern Bay cleanup do not take extraction-related pollution into account.

According to the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC), more research is needed to track the environmental effects of natural gas extraction and to help jurisdictions determine whether or not they must implement conservation practices to offset potential pollution loads and meet the Bay pollution diet.

The enviroweenies are desperate to stop fracking before people wake up and realize how relatively environmentally innocuous it really is.  They failed to prove that it was polluting drinking water, or  causing dangerous earthquakes, and recent advances suggest that methane emissions due to fracking will be much lower than originally projected, which is not shocking, as it is a waste of the primary resource being sought. 

The pollution diet, or Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), limits the amount of nutrient and sediment pollution that can enter the Bay from across the watershed. According to STAC, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has the potential to change local pollution loads, as natural gas extraction increases the erosion of sediment into local rivers and withdraws water from area sources, altering aquatic habitat and river flow.

In a factsheet released this week, STAC outlines the recommendations that the panel made following a workshop on shale gas development. STAC recommends that the Bay Program incorporate natural gas drilling into the Bay Watershed Model, which estimates the amount of nutrients and sediment reaching the Bay. STAC also recommends that the industry, scientific and policy-making communities continue to research shale gas development and implement conservation practices to lower natural gas extraction’s cumulative impact on the Bay.

Read more about the environmental effects of shale gas development in the watershed.

With the relatively direct effects originally touted as industry killer being eliminated, the action now moves on to more indirect effects, which have the (from the researchers point of view) fortunate properties of being more difficult to document, and requiring larger, more interdisciplinary teams to address. With luck, they'll be able to fund a giant team of scientists to study the indirect effects of fracking until cold fusion becomes the energy source of the future.