We knew it was bull. Simple as that.
A great deal was made of supposedly frac contamination at Pavillion, Wyoming. Pavillion, WY, sits on top of a butte, has a perched water table beneath it, and what goes in it from the surface stays there, unless someone pumps it out. What's in there did not come from fraccing, or there would be no seal beneath the aquifer layer, and that water would simply drain away to a deeper layer.
I knew a guy in West Virginia who had rebuilt his spring house so many times that in frustration he built it out of railroad ties, earth bermed in, with a two part roof on hinges. When the relay on the pressure switch sparked from his pump kicking in (to pump the water to the house), occasionally it would ignite an explosive methane mixture in the spring house and blow the roof open. Now he could just go out and close the roof, instead of rebuilding the whole thing, as he had in the past.
Had that same water been piped in from a well in the same aquifer, chances he could light his faucet were extremely good, but all this antedated horizontal drilling and fraccing horizontal wells. (I honestly believe he would have found a way to separate the gas, pressurize it in the headspace on a pressure tank, and run the 5 +/- psi feed to the house for cooking or to his shop for heat or something had the water come from a well.)
That, and after decades in the oil industry, I knew there was just no way an undamaged properly constructed well would leak natural gas into a near surface aquifer. Two casing strings, minimum, and the cement that held them in place would have to lose integrity and leak into the near surface aquifer. Those casing bonds are checked with a wireline tool that essentially does an ultrasound of that casing and the cement around it to find any flaws, flaws which can be fixed before the well ever goes into production should they exist.
For those who howl about "greedy oil companies", leaking casing downhole would mean a loss of their product, and a loss of revenue, not to mention additional costs to fix things and clean up. The balance sheet just does not work: it is far, far cheaper to just do things right.
Knowing the movie was a gross distortion of the industry that fuels America is little consolation for the raving of ill informed people who affect the actions of uninformed politicians. But that is what it is. It's good to see some pushback finally get past the censors.
