The New York Times recently published a deplorable piece of “reporting” addressing hydraulic fracturing. The article demonstrates the serious risks from uninformed regulatory intrusion that the U.S. natural gas industry will continue to face until government regulators stand up and defend the science supporting this well studied process.

While I doubt that the Times will publish either my submitted letter to the editor or the open letter below, I thought it was important that readers of more reputable outlets have the opportunity to learn the facts:

Public Editor

The New York Times

620 Eighth Avenue

New York, NY 10018

Your recent article’s out-of-context quotes and glaring half truths suggests that the reporter Ian Urbina had reached his conclusion on the safety of natural gas production long before compiling research or conducting interviews (“Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers,” Feb. 27). Rather than offering readers substantial news on an important issue, Urbina’s story simply repackages old information to create sensational and preposterous new accusations against a commodity crucial for our country’s energy future.

For starters, Urbina’s claim that “wastewater [from unconventional gas well fracturing] contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for [wastewater] treatment plants to handle” is irresponsibly sensationalized. In fact, standards for NORM (naturally occurring radioactive material) have been observed for years.

While many people do not know it, numerous activities, including basic construction such as digging a basement, uncover tailings that contain radioactive materials that naturally occur in the ground. The radiation levels observed in these tailings or at treatment plants do not indicate risks to human health, since, as Urbina notes, radioactivity, “can be blocked by thin barriers, including skin, so exposure is generally harmless.” The true threat to human health is from drinking water levels that rise above safe parameters. Urbina’s reports admit there is no evidence that this is the case.

For those unfamiliar with natural gas extraction, here’s some background. Extensive hydraulic fracturing (“fracking” in field parlance) enables us to tap into massive amounts of natural gas from U.S. fields, resulting in many-fold increases of recoverable reserves compared to previous methods. However, fracking of oil and gas production wells is not new. For more than 60 years, oil and gas workers have completed about two million fracking jobs worldwide, safely and without adverse environmental impact.

Over that time, the scale of fracking for unconventional gas production has grown and, in turn, has generated proportionally more wastewater. For Pennsylvania alone, Urbina’s story claims this amount of water would be “enough to cover Manhattan in three inches.” This statistic, while impressive on its own, is disingenuous in the article’s context.

The industry trend is to recycle wastewater from fracking jobs in increasingly sizeable amounts. In fact, based on your own reporting, the industry has increased their recycling threefold over the last 18 months alone, significantly lessening the burden for further wastewater treatment and disposal. Urbina again ignores these efforts and fails to provide this important context. Showing his bias, he actually uses these numbers to further criticize the industry in a follow-up article, saying the impressive gains are not as high as some have claimed, and therefore irrelevant.

Urbina’s piece also echoes the unsubstantiated notion (popularized by this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland”) that fracking somehow leaks natural gas into drinking water aquifers. After investigating the particular incident featured in the film in which a Colorado resident ignites his tap water with a small flame, scientists at the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission concluded: “There are no indications of any oil- and gas-related impacts to your water well … Methane gas is common in water wells in Colorado. It occurs naturally … as a gas in coal or black shale seams [and] as a byproduct of the decay of organic matter.”

Despite the wealth of industry experience and federal research on the process, the Times article concludes, “But the hazards associated with natural-gas production and drilling are far less understood than those associated with other fossil fuels, and the regulations have not kept pace with the natural-gas industry’s expansion.”

The implication of this deplorable reporting is to halt drilling activity until any unknowns are completely resolved and new regulations are put in place. This is an absurd approach that even the Obama administration does not support. In fact, the administration has agreed that all evidence demonstrates drilling can safely continue while further study is pursued.

Sensationalism and scare tactics are dangerous when dealing with such complicated and technical matters. It’s important the public clearly understand the one indisputable fact in all of this: halting hydraulic fracturing will also halt the many benefits that result from natural gas production — mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, reduced mercury output from coal, reduction of U.S. energy imports, creation of American jobs, and many more.

Sincerely,

Michael Economides

Professor of Engineering

The University of Houston