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by thatswrong0 4689 days ago
It was a news article. I just grabbed the first relevant link pertaining to "gasland tap water fire". Because I apparently was using the wrong keywords: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasland#Negative

> In an article for Forbes magazine, Dr. Michael Economides, a professor of engineering at the University of Houston, commented on the Gasland scene of "a man lighting his faucet water on fire and making the ridiculous claim that natural gas drilling is responsible for the incident. The clip, though attention-getting, is wildly inaccurate and irresponsible. To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock. Any interchange between the two, if it were possible, would have happened already in geologic time, measured in tens of millions of years, not in recent history."

2 comments

> To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock.

Impermeable except for, you know, the several thousand foot long shafts that are drilled through that rock in the process of fraking.

>To begin with, the vertical depth separation between drinking water aquifers and reservoir targets for gas production is several thousand feet of impermeable rock. Any interchange between the two, if it were possible, would have happened already in geologic time, measured in tens of millions of years, not in recent history

It is true that drink wells are ~100 feet and these fracking wells are thousands of feet deep but I'm not sure that completely rules out the possibility of gas escaping a well and making it into drinking water.