[Taz's Master]

Originally Posted by jyl

If the deal were that
- the oil & gas industry will pay for cleanup of all groundwater contamination due to fracking
- without decades of costly legal and political battles over liability and damages and collecting from a solvent party
- that cost taxpayers billions via EPA, DOJ, state AGs etc
- and always leave some plaintiffs exhausted and without remedy

Then that might be fine.

But it is not going down like that. The industry is doing its best to extract the gas and leave the cleanup behind. Refusing to disclose the chemical signatures of their fluids. Denying that any contamination is possible. Denying that any people are ill, any property devalued, any wells unusable. Using their political influence to edit reports and block action.

In 15 years, when the scope of the contamination is clear, we'll find that many of the drill rigs were operated by companies that no longer exist and the lawyers will make hundreds of millIions fighting over corporate responsibility. The taxpayer will be pouring tens of billions into superfund cleanups. Someone will be laughing all the way to the bank.

I spent most of a decade litigating Superfund groundwater and soil contamination cases in the L.A. basin, so I know something about what I'm talking about. In most cases, my clients were able to evade liability, or at worst pay, several decades after the polluting action, a fairly minuscule percent of the time-value-of-money adjusted profits they'd made. I was rather well paid for my efforts :-)

Why will it take 15 years to determine the scope? The marcellus shale formation is beneath the world's earliest drilling sites, and fracking has been used there for a long time. Wouldn't the contamination of groundwater be more significant for the shallower deposits (much closer to the groundwater supplies)? Since the shale is below the salt layer wouldn't the lack of salt contammination provide an indication that frackwater contamination would be unlikely?