Science Vs - Fracking

Episode Date: July 27, 2016

We often hear stories about fracking that go like this: a gas company comes to a small town, starts drilling wells, and then terrible things start to happen. People get sick. Water burns from taps. Earthquakes ruin houses. And the climate will soon be destroyed. But, is fracking really a disaster unfolding? To find out, Science Vs speaks to Prof. Robert Jackson, Asst. Prof. Peter Rabinowitz and Prof. Bob Howarth. We’re also joined by Pennsylvanian resident James Hughes and Seneca Resources’ Rob Boulware and Doug Kepler.  Credits:  This episode has been produced by Wendy Zukerman, Caitlin Kenney, Heather Rogers, Kaitlyn Sawrey. Edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Production assistance by Austin Mitchell. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Recordings from the Town Hall meeting in 2014 are from NPR's WHYY reporter Katie Colaneri, and the team at NPR’s StateImpact Pennsylvania. Thank you.  Big thanks to the Gimlet hive mind for comments, plus the Zukerman family.  Music written by Bobby Lord. Sound design and music by Matthew Boll. Engineered by Austin Thompson. Sponsors: For 10% off your new Squarespace site click here and punch in Science Vs at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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When we hear stories about fracking, they often go like this. A gas company comes to town, starts drilling wells, and then terrible things start happening. James Hughes says this is exactly what happened to him when the fracking company Seneca Resources came to his town in Pennsylvania. Seneca shows up at my doorstep and says, we're drilling wells on your property. It was the biggest nightmare I ever went through. They moved into my property,

knocked out my water well. This is from a town hall meeting held in 2014 when a local township was so freaked out about Seneca's operations that they were deciding whether or not to hire a lawyer to fight them. They knocked out my water well, knocked out my neighbour's water well, turned the pond pink. By the time they gave me my new water well, it was on fire for six months. My family couldn't visit, couldn't have running water, and it broke my heart. So meanwhile, during this time, I composed a song called She Thumbed It. Please, we've got an attorney on the phone. Just tell us, give us a result. This is what fracking has driven Americans to do.

Gas and oil. Write more folk songs. Actually, I think this is more prog rock. Just the lack of acoustic guitar. But this song, of course, is not peer-reviewed research. And neither is a lot of the conversation happening around fracking. Fracking is a disaster unfolding across Pennsylvania of unprecedented proportions.

Hydraulic fracturing is spreading across the globe. Whoa! Jesus Christ! Unbelievable! A river on fire! Whoa! The river's on fire! Oh, jeez. The thing is, the anti-frackers love to use hyperbolic statements and halve truths, but they aren't alone.

On the other side of this debate, the pro-frackers are pulling their own kind of crap too. And to demonstrate, here's a conversation that I had with fracking company Seneca Resources. This is Doug Kepler, the Vice President of Environmental Engineering, and Rob Bulware, who works in media relations. I don't think there ever... I don't believe there has been a problem with fracking.

The problems that you hear in the media, those all related back in some fashion to something that had to do with the actual drilling of the well, not the fracking of the well. When we say fracking, as journalists, as the media, and in the public, we mean the entire process of getting gas from underground to your home. I spend a lot of time trying to correct it because that's an incorrect use.

Am I the problem here? No, seriously, you have created an unbelievably serious problem with this perception thing. They are answering the question, has there ever been a problem with fracking, to only address the very specific and been a problem with fracking, to only address the very specific and very technical definition of fracking, cracking the rocks. Not the whole process of fracking, which would include drilling a well, getting the gas out of the well, and all sorts of stuff that most people think of when they think of fracking. If you want to have a process talk, then you can have a process talk. But the whole negativity on fracking is what becomes so wary. No, you want to have a process talk, then you can have a process talk. But the whole negativity on fracking is what becomes so wary.

No, we want to have a process chat. So the entire process of fracking, has there ever been water contaminated as a result of the entire process of fracking? You're talking about from drilling to... Let's see, again, drilling to yes. So if you're going to say drilling but not fracking. Ugh.

So that's Seneca Resources, the very same company that inspired Chief Thundercloud. Whatever happened... No, there's no need to play that again. Enough with the folk songs. Enough with the Wagner soundtracks and the shady definitions. We're here to look at the science. Today, we're looking at how fracking affects four major things.

Our water, our health, earthquakes, and finally, our climate. Let's start with a detailed look at how fracking actually works. Our frackers, Seneca's Rob Bulware and Doug Kepler, offered to give us an up-close look at one of their fracking sites in north-western Pennsylvania. The fracking site itself is actually inside a national forest, which means that as you drive in, you see tonnes of trees and beaver dams

and even Pennsylvania's state bird, the ruffled grouse. Oh, look, Doug. You see it, Doug? It's a grouse, isn't it? Right back there. See? But as you approach the frack, things look a little different. We see a couple of huge cranes connected to a bundle of narrow pipes. And it's right here that water gets pushed under the surface at intense pressures, which is what cracks the rock to release the natural gas.

We're actually fracking right now underground. So there is a five-inch diameter pipe that that water is being pumped through. We're pumping about 4,000 gallons per minute of water through that pipe. So a tremendous amount of water in a very quick time. The pressure from that is what breaks the rock. Gimlet producer Caitlin Kenny is here with me. We're right under our feet right now. Big old rocks are breaking. Yes, and it... I can't feel anything. But it's not just water going down that pipe.

There's also sand and chemicals. There's a conveyor belt that takes all the sand to the blender where the water in those tanks is blended along with the chemicals and then they're pumped down whole. The sand is used to keep the cracks in the rocks open so that the gas can flow out, while the chemicals, they do a couple of things. A bactericide is added to prevent bacteria growing down the hole and to get the fracking fluid moving very quickly through a very narrow pipe, they add friction reducers. And this brings us to the first fear that people have about fracking. Can these chemicals

get into our drinking water? When rocks are being cracked more than a mile underground, which is below drinking water supplies, studies have shown that there is a very low risk of the fracking chemicals seeping up through the rocks, up into your drinking water. It could happen, but one study estimated that it would take several thousand or even millions of years. And the thing is, one report estimated that 95% of fracking wells in America are being fracked this far below the surface. In Australia, though, where fracking is happening higher up,

it is riskier. So that's cracks in rocks. But there is also the potential of chemicals leaking into our water through cracks in pipes. But how often does that happen? Well, a study found that in Pennsylvania, 6% of pipes had some kind of problem. So it's not widespread, but it is happening.

So that's what's happening below ground. But the biggest risk of contamination, it seems, is happening above ground on the surface. Doug from Seneca explains that once you've cracked the rocks open to release the natural gas, the gas comes up and the pressure from the gas carries the fracking water back up with it. So you had shoved the water down there? We pump it down under pressure to fracture the rock

and then the pressure of the gas carries the water back up out of the ground with the gas and then we separate the gas from the water. And this water, which has the fracking chemicals in it plus salts and heavy metals from underground, is now known as wastewater. Anyway, you've got all this wastewater that's up at the surface and it gets trucked or piped away from the fracking site

and then Seneca has to figure out what to do with it. Right now, they're storing some of it and they showed us the storage site. It looked like three giant water coolers. So this is how many gallons? Each one of those three tanks holds two million gallons of water. That is a f***load of water. It is a lot of water.

When you look at the entire fracking industry, it's billions of gallons of wastewater per year. And while the shiny tanks that we saw looked watertight, not all fracking sites are storing their wastewater this way. Sometimes fracking companies use pits, large holes that they've dug in the ground and then lined with a plastic. Now, this plastic is thick, but still it can rip, allowing wastewater to leak. Also, when you're schlepping vats of wastewater plus vats of fracking chemicals around, there's just lots of chances for spills.

But here's the question, and it's a really important question. Yes, there's lots of chances for leaks and spills, but how often do they actually happen? It's time to talk to our expert. The bullfrog. This is Robert Jackson, a professor at Stanford, and he's one of the top experts on fracking in America. He also does some very impressive frog poetry. This is the green tree frog. Oinky boink boink. So remember when I said at the beginning of the show that both sides of this debate weren't being straight with the fracts?

Well, that can make it hard to know who to trust on this fracking debate. But Robert Jackson, he's my guy. I do trust what he says. And it's not because of the frog poetry. Well, it's partly because of the frog poetry, but it's also because of this. Honestly, I get beat up from everybody depending on what a particular study says. When we publish a study that says we find no evidence of contamination of drinking water in a place like the Fayetteville Field, I get calls and emails from people saying, you know, how can you say that? And, you know, you only looked at 100 or 150 houses and this

and this and that. And I promise you, every time I say that we find water contamination or publish a map of 6,000 leaks in Washington, D.C., I get beat up from people in industry who say you're fear mongering, you're promoting the, you know promoting the decline of our industry and all that. I get it from all sides. So, leading researcher in the field pisses off both sides of this debate. What does he say about how often fracking contaminates water? It does contaminate drinking water. It has contaminated drinking water.

But most of the time, it doesn't. So it can happen, it doesn't happen very often. But when it happens to you or your neighborhood or you think it could happen to you, it's something to be afraid of. And I think that's what people latch on to. So most of the time, it's completely safe. Once in a while, it isn't. It's really hard for scientists to put a figure on what that once in a while is. A report made public by the Environmental Protection Agency last year put the number at between 100 to 3,700 spills from fracking each year in the United States.

Let's think about that for a second. The EPA doesn't know if there are 100 or 3,700 spills. We're going to put a sound effect on that, right? Cool. From fracking each year. Why so much uncertainty? Well, there's a few reasons. But one of them is that if scientists go to a town and test the water and find out that it's dodgy,

if no one tested that water before the frackers came to town, then the scientists can't say for sure what made it dodgy. Some things are just naturally in the water. They come from the rocks and the geology nearby. And currently, we don't have a lot of this independently gathered baseline data. Add to this, it's notoriously difficult to get fracking companies

to acknowledge spills and to explain what happened. Seneca does this too. Take, for example, when we asked Doug from Seneca about whether fracking chemicals had ever contaminated water. He and Rob denied it. That hasn't, I don't think, I don't think we could find a documented case of that. But we could. We used the internet and found that there were 270 instances where an oil and gas company had affected someone's water supply in Pennsylvania. In each of those cases, the Department of Environmental Protection, or DUP, sent a letter confirming the contamination to the company that was responsible. And Seneca was called out in a handful of those letters. When we talked to Seneca

about this, they kept denying that their chemicals were responsible for contaminating people's water. And that's when we finally took out the letters. Okay, so like...like this. Have you guys seen these letters? From the Department of Environmental Protection in Pennsylvania. This is to Seneca. Now, for a visual on what you're about to hear, this was happening in Rob's car right outside the fracking site. The conversation went on for a while and by the time I took the letters out of my backpack,

it was actually so tense that the windows had steamed up, Titanic style. So just the fact that you have one of these letters doesn't mean we actually polluted something. It means that they were responding to a complaint that was made. I think this says that actually it did determine that there was a pollution, a contamination caused by the pollution. Let me see what's this one. This is, again, Warsaw Township, Jefferson County, 2009.

Increased levels of sodium chlorides in total dissolved solids. This looks like there was some type of impact at that time, because the sodium would have come from the drilling itself. I don't remember what it was, but it appears there was a temporary impact on this one. But again, I wasn't looking at the types of things we're doing now and what you're talking about. But that is included. When you read the EPA report on hydraulic fracturing

and the effects of it, we are talking about from the surface spills, we're talking about exactly where something might go wrong. And you even mentioned... I stand firm on what we've done at S exactly, like, where something might go wrong. And you even mentioned, like... I stand firm on what we've done at Seneca, that we have not had those issues. And you read the letter in it? No, because this is not fracking. That's what I'm saying.

It wasn't, and it didn't have the process of fracking within it. No, we fracked as well. But this was not anything that had to do with fracking. It looks to me as though, with that, it would have probably been some type of surface spill next to a, was it a spring again? Yeah, it was a spring on that. And why were there spills into people's water supply? Why did it happen?

And they were related to surface spills. Yeah, it was a very careless act by a contractor on the location that spilled that one that temporarily impacted that spring. So, yes, it did happen i'm not making light of it um it wasn't willful it was an accident but this was this was one incident that happened that year out of 300 and some wells that were drilled and it didn't happen every year but i would say we probably averaged maybe one or so some years maybe two some years maybe not but maybe one a year something like this would happen with a 300-well program when the regulations were very lax

compared to what they are now. So that's what it takes to get these guys to agree to publicly confirmed facts that you can find on the internet. Now, about those regulations Doug mentioned at the end, we're not going to go into the details of how regulations on fracking have changed in different parts of America or the world. But regulations on fracking continue to get tighter. And looking around us today at Seneca's storage site

and the fracking site, you can see the effects of them. Here at the site, there was lining under everything. Those water coolers that were filled with waste, they were sitting on what looked like a giant kid's swimming pool made out of metal, and then under that was another layer of protection. You have to have containment in case a tank would have some type of failure.

And all of this was designed to stop a leak if, say, something busted out of one of those water containers. Conclusion. Chemicals used in fracking can contaminate drinking water. They leak through damaged pipes or spills up on the surface. But from what we know, these instances are rare. OK, so the scary stuff used in fracking doesn't get into drinking water very often.

But when it does, will it make you sick? After the break, I drink some fracking doesn't get into drinking water very often. But when it does, will it make you sick? After the break, I drink some fracking chemicals and we find out. No, I'm definitely not going to do that. But we will talk to scientists about the potential health risks. Welcome back to Science Versus. So we talked about how fracking chemicals can get into your water and we're going to get to the environmental impacts of fracking just a bit later. But let's start where we left off. The scary stuff in fracking can get into drinking water.

But if that happens, will it make you sick? Some of you listening have seen scary footage of people lighting their water on fire and they say fracking is to blame. Footage like this. Unbelievable, a river on fire. In this video, an Australian politician fashioned after Steve Irwin lights a match and puts it to a river and flames leap up from the water. It's all very dramatic. Whoa! The fracking just a kilometre away, methane coming up

and now the river is alight. This video is real and the water is burning because methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, is flammable and it can end up in water supplies because when you're fracking and trying to capture all that natural gas underground, some of it leaks through the pipes and can escape. But just because something is flammable, it doesn't mean it's bad for you. Pistachio nuts are flammable. Fun fact, right? Oh, the pistachio nuts are on fire. Anyway, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quote, drinking water or eating food prepared with water

containing methane gas is not a health hazard, end quote. The CDC also says that methane leaves the water and enters the air very quickly. So even if there was a lot of methane, quote, it is unlikely that this level would remain in the water and enters the air very quickly. So even if there was a lot of methane, quote, it is unlikely that this level would remain in the water long enough to be ingested, end quote. So that's methane. What about the chemicals used in fracking operations?

We talked about a few of them already. The bactericide, the friction reducers. Are they OK to drink? Well, no. An Australian team of researchers recently bathed some cells from the human intestine in the water and chemical mix used in fracking. And it killed the cells. The mix was toxic.

But you would never drink this mix straight. If fracking water was coming out of your tap, it would be cut with lots and lots of fresh water. And as a general rule, the more diluted things get, the safer they get. So when this same team of Australian researchers diluted the fracking mix by five times, the test couldn't pick up any damage to the cells. And the researchers pointed out that the water coming out of your tap

would actually be way more diluted than that. But they wrote in their paper that if you were exposed chronically, over time, to the diluted chemicals in fracking, it might change the game. Plus, cells in a petri dish versus the body, that's very different. So to get to the bottom of these health questions, we need to look at another kind of study. Say, a survey of people living near fracking wells.

Peter Rabinowitz, a physician and an associate professor at the University of Washington, has done just that. He started studying fracking after a visit to southwestern Pennsylvania when he spoke to one family that claimed to have been affected by fracking operations nearby. The family told Peter that the drilling company had said that the water was fine. And it certainly didn't look that way to me,

and they definitely said that it had changed in some way. And then they gave interesting anecdotes that I was not sure what to make of about how when they tried to give water to their dog, the dog refused to drink from the bowl or another dog drank some of the water and got sick and its hair fell out. It's a scary story. Dodgy fracking company, dog's hair falling out. Peter was intrigued.

But he's a scientist. And this was an anecdote. So he got a team together and they surveyed the health of 180 households in the area. Ultimately, he found no link between living near a fracking site and the people reporting that they had heart, brain or stomach problems. But he did find something. Two issues were more likely to be reported in those living within one kilometre of a fracking drill compared to those living further away. One, skin problems. Which included

generalised rashes or itching of the skin. And two, upper respiratory complaints. But Peter says just because he found those issues, that doesn't mean the chemicals in fracking or fracking operations caused them. It's a correlation at this point, which means that there is a very real risk that these issues could be caused by something else, the Nis placebo effect. This is like the placebo effect's evil twin sister, where just believing that something will make you sick actually does.

And so powerful is the placebo and the placebo effect that every medical study has to consider them. And according to Peter, the circumstances surrounding fracking are a perfect storm for this kind of thing. Things have happened so rapidly that there's a lack of information flowing. I think it's more likely that people start fearing the worst and thinking that there could be unknown hazards that they again are being exposed to. So it could be that people's fears about fracking are making them anxious and stressed and bringing on those rashes. But it could also be the fracking chemicals. So with this in mind, Peter also asked residents about the health of their farm animals and their pets. Because while your dog might be very smart. We don't expect that they're going

to read the newspaper or listen to the radio and have preconceptions about whether they're sick or not. He looked at a range of domestic animals, dogs, cats, fish. Someone even had a pet raccoon. Who has a pet raccoon? Pocahontas had a pet raccoon. Come on, Miko. Overall, good news for Miko. He found that pets living near fracking wells

weren't any sicker than animals living further away. But when he analysed the results focusing on the dogs, he found that they were more likely to have skin problems if they lived closer to the fracking wells. Peter wanted to know more, so a year after his survey, he returned to the households to get more data. We asked someone in the household to provide a urine specimen and also to get a urine specimen from a dog in the house.

Just in general, you knock on someone's door and say, remember me from a year ago, can I get some urine? It's an interesting conversation to have. And some people say yes and some people say no. And then when you ask to get a sample from the dog, it gets even more interesting. They're not used to doing that. Peter is currently looking into this data. So where does that leave us?

What is the scientific answer? Are chemicals from fracking making us sick? There may be something here, and we need to have further, better studies to investigate it further. Conclusion. If there was a major chemical spill onto your property's water and the water looked different, it's probably not a good idea to drink it because high doses of fracking fluid are likely to be toxic.

But in terms of whether you'll get sick from smaller, say, harder-to-detect leaks, currently there's not good evidence that you will. Next up on our journey into fears about fracking, we're moving away from the personal and asking, what is fracking doing to the world around us? Like, is it causing earthquakes? Some parts of the US, including Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma,

and Arkansas, have experienced... Oh, sorry, I'm going to get letters about that. Should have been Colorado. OK, so some parts of the US, including Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, have experienced an unprecedented increase in earthquakes since 2009. And unprecedented, that's not my word. It comes from a paper published in Science magazine.

And Professor Robert Jackson, he says these earthquakes are worth getting shook up about. Obviously, he didn't use those words. He doesn't talk in puns. It gets people's attention when someone has to start paying for earthquake insurance when they didn't even know what an earthquake was probably a decade ago. I mean, that is really remarkable, and that is not natural. Yes. Robert says frackers are responsible for the increase in earthquakes,

but not for the reason that you might think. I'll let Robert explain. Oinky boink. Wrong audio. It's not this step of cracking open the rock that's causing those earthquakes. That does cause little tiny tremors, but no one feels those. What's causing some of these earthquakes instead is the disposal of the wastewater. Okay, so the wastewater.

Okay, so, wastewater. Remember, that's the dirty water that comes back up the pipe after you frack the rocks. Now, you can deal with that water in a couple of different ways. You can store it above ground in those giant water coolers. You can recycle it, use it for more fracking. But it's just a lot of water to deal with. So sometimes the fracking companies just shove it right back underground into what's called a deep injection well. And those wells are the problem. What's causing some of these earthquakes is the disposal of the wastewater. When we pump millions of gallons of wastewater back underground at high pressure,

it can cause rock layers to slip. It essentially lubricates those rock layers, and that slipping is an earthquake. So, pouring wastewater from fracking down an underground disposal well can and is causing earthquakes in some places. Huh, that was an easy one. But here's a tricky one. How is fracking impacting climate change? The sweet fuel we get from fracking, natural gas,

is in one way great for the climate. It doesn't emit much carbon dioxide when it's burnt. But the main ingredient of natural gas, methane, is not that great for the climate. It's a greenhouse gas, and it traps heat very effectively, more effectively than carbon dioxide. Natural gas is mostly methane, and methane's an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. This is Bob Howarth, and methane's an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. This is Bob Howarth, and he's an ecology professor at Cornell University.

Bob says that when fracking companies are trying to capture the natural gas, some of it escapes, becoming what's known as fugitive methane. No, seriously, that's the scientific term for it. Fugitive methane. Like the fugitive. The one-armed man. But for methane. It's a really bad whammy for the climate. Even very small emissions of methane to the atmosphere are globally important in terms of global warming. Fugitive methane is obviously problematic. But the question is, how much methane is actually leaking into the atmosphere from fracking?

And this question, just like the question of how much fracking chemicals are getting into people's water, is really tricky to answer. For one, the science is pretty new. Bob published the first paper to look at this, and it wasn't that long ago, in 2011. And back then, his calculations made the picture look bad for fracking. But that was just one paper. So Bob went searching for more data. He got in a plane, hunting for plumes of fugitive methane. Do-do-do-do, do-do-do.

We used an airplane and we flew over southwestern Pennsylvania in the Marcellus Shale area. The pilot flew back and forth measuring methane in real time. And he was able to determine plumes, they're clearly visible when you plot the data out, that are coming from distinct points on the ground. Using the data that Bob collected, along with other work, he estimates that in parts of America, around 9% of the methane that companies are trying to capture escapes during the entire fracking process.

But lots of folks cite lower numbers than Bob's. And much of this is because fugitive methane emissions fluctuate wildly, depending on a lot of factors, like the type of rocks in an area. Either way, whatever the number is, it isn't very helpful in isolation. The important question for us right now is this. Is natural gas production, which obviously includes fracking, better for the climate than our other big fuel source, coal. If Bob's fugitive methane estimates are correct, then no,

natural gas is worse than coal. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents the views of over 800 scientists from 80 countries, disagrees. Every few years, these scientists analyse the most up-to-date research on, among other things, how energy production is affecting climate change. And at their last report, they labelled natural gas, the fuel from fracking, as a transition fuel.

That is something that's better than coal. But over the years, as more and more data has been coming out on fugitive methane emissions, the IPCC has been giving less and less love to natural gas. So after reading the IPCC reports and chatting to Bob, I didn't know what to think. I talked to Robert Jackson at Stanford. This has like been exploding my brain a little bit because you have even the IPCC, over time I feel like they've been moving on this as well and saying, oh, we didn't realize the methane leaks were bad, natural gas is worse than we thought. But where do you think we're currently sitting on this methane leakage question when it comes to fracking? Our work, the work of many people, has shown quite clearly that we've been underestimating the leaks on average, not everywhere, but on average. That doesn't mean that that number, that that leakage is so large that it's, you know, that it negates any potential

benefits compared to coal or that it's far worse than coal. I just don't think the body of evidence suggests that to be the case. So, bottom line, to the question of natural gas versus coal? Point blank, I think natural gas is a better fuel than coal. Anytime we can take an old coal plant offline, I'm all for it. But of course, that's just compared to coal. Don't go buying your I Heart Fracking t-shirts just yet. Practically everyone we spoke to agreed that renewables are the best option for reducing pollution and staving off climate change. Conclusion.

Methane from natural gas does escape into the atmosphere through fracking. And that's bad for the climate. It traps heat. It's a powerful greenhouse gas. But currently, the evidence suggests that even with that, natural gas is better than coal. But worse than renewables. So, our fears about fracking, do they stack up?

Maybe? Not really. Let's break it down. Fear number one. Can the chemicals from fracking contaminate people's water? Science says yes, but these instances are rare. Fear number two. Can these chemicals make us sick?

Science says... Yes, in high doses. But the amount that's likely to get into your water supply is small. And so far, and for now, the evidence suggests that in these doses, people should be OK. Fear number three, does fracking cause earthquakes? Science says... Here, there's almost no debate.

Fracking sites that dispose of their wastewater by injecting it back into the ground, they can cause earthquakes. And fear number four, will fracking destroy the climate? Science says... Well, it's not good for the climate. It's better than coal. It's worse than renewables.

So, when you add all these points up, how bad is fracking? It's not an unmitigated evil. The science on many of these fears is uncertain. And that means that when anyone, anyone, comes out with some grand statement about the horrors of fracking or the greatness of fracking, those comments aren't based on science. But they do make for a good story.

Remember Chief Thundercloud? James Hughes? Whatever happened to Chief Thundercloud? Where are his people? Where is the land of a free? We called him to find out exactly what happened. And yeah, he told us a good story. Well, it happened so fast, Wendy.

I didn't expect it. And boom, boom, boom. I mean, they just basically, they started drilling next door, right, first. To my neighbor's ground. Next thing you know, boom, I had red water coming out of my faucet. And I went, what in the world's going on? And yes, we checked it out. We contacted Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection,

who confirmed that James's water did change color. The DEP said in their report that by releasing iron from the rocks, the drilling process had turned the pond a reddish-brown colour. And according to James, that was just the beginning. So, wow. Seneca, they drilled me a new water well. And when they were putting the new plumbing in, somebody lit up a match for a cigarette. Poof! We had almost like an explosion. The DEP report doesn't mention the fire, but it does mention that the new water well

initially had high levels of methane, which returned to normal after some months. Seneca's Rob Bulware told us, quote, In this instance, a new water well was drilled for Mr Hughes and the minor methane issue was addressed via installation of venting on the water well, end quote. He also said that Seneca accepted the DEP's resolution, but, quote, Mr Hughes was not fully satisfied with that result, end quote.

That's why I don't like these guys, Wendy. These guys drill holes in the ground, puke up the land, ruin water, have a bad attitude. Then us poor landowners got to go, what just happened to us? Well, I'm one of these guys. I'm what you call a fighter. I don't like people stomping on me. I'm a Donald Trump kind of guy. The whole thing ended up in a legal battle and they settled out of court.

So, compelling story, right? But remember the science? These events are rare. And the thing is, the scary stories, they get the headlines and they capture our imagination. But the science, it isn't that easy. It's complicated and slow and full of inconvenient details. And I know that's hard if you're at the pub

and you're trying to have very strong opinions, but that's the way it is. And the thing is, if you do want an easy answer, I've got one YouTube video for you. Unbelievable. A river on fire. Don't let it burn the boat. Whoa! That's science versus fracking.

This episode has been produced by Caitlin Kenny, Heather Rogers, Caitlin Sori, edited by Annie Rose Strasser and Alex Bloomberg. Production assistance by Austin Mitchell and fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Recordings from the town hall meeting in 2014 are from NPR's WHYY reporter, Katie Colaneri, and the team at NPR's State Impact Pennsylvania. Thank you. A big thanks to the Gimlet Hive Mind for comments and joke

advisements. That's you, Eric Mennell, PJ Vogt, and Stevie Lane, plus the Zuckerman family. Thank you. Sound design and music production by Matthew Bolt. Music written by Bobby Lord. Next time, attachment parenting. Next on Science Versus, we're tackling attachment parenting. In the first few months, it's like the fourth trimester, and they should just be part of me. I just feel as though a stroller, when they're so small, it doesn't feel right.

It just makes me cry to think, like, they're separated from me. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.