Fracking Claims, Fact-Checked

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

“Popular Mechanics” has fact-checked ten claims about hydraulic fracturing, and comes up with some interesting results.
Among its findings:
“There’s never been one case -documented case – of groundwater contamination in the history of the thousands and thousands of hydraulic fracturing [wells]” – That claim, from Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, is false, according to the magazine.
Popular Mechanics also debunks the argument fracking is sucking up all of Pennsylvania’s water, writing, “The amount of water required to drill all 2916 of the Marcellus wells permitted in Pennsylvania in the first 11 months of 2010 would equal the amount of drinking water used by just one city, Pittsburgh, during the same period.”
Read the rest at Popular Mechanics’ website.

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