When Governor Andrew Cuomo announced last year that hydraulic fracturing would be banned in the State of New York, he cited the lack of scientific data on public health effects. He also said more study needed to be done to determine where emissions were coming from in the fracking and extraction cycle. That study has now been done. Chemists at the University of Texas at Arlington published a study that indicates contamination from fracking wells are highly variable but result more from operational inefficiencies than from the extraction process itself. In other words, it’s sloppy drilling methods that are the worst part of fracking. The study, “ Point source attribution of ambient contamination events near unconventional oil and gas development ”, was published on Friday in the Science of the Total Environment . The researchers found highly variable levels of benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene compounds (BTEX) in […]