Donors Decline to Back More Fracking Research After Study Finds No Link to Water Contamination
The lead researcher in a study that concluded fracking in Ohio didn’t contaminate groundwater told The Daily Signal that, contrary to her previous remarks, donors to the study did not pull funding because of “specific disappointment” with those results.
Amy Townsend-Small, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati who conducted the three-year study, did acknowledge that some financial backers “have declined to continue funding past the initial study period.”
However, Townsend-Small said in an email Monday to The Daily Signal, those decisions not to donate more might be because the study didn’t establish a relationship between hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and water contamination in Carroll County and other areas that include the Utica Shale deposit.
Townsend-Small also said the results “show that fracking does not always lead to groundwater contamination, but that continuous monitoring is needed to ensure contamination has not occurred.”
“The left likes to continually talk about settled science, but often it’s settled on a predetermined outcome,” Nick Loris, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation who studies energy issues, told The Daily Signal. “Politicians use that predetermined outcome to justify policies that drive up the costs of affordable, reliable energy—even though those policies have little to …read more