>It's inaccurate to group together hydraulic fracturing and traditional oil drilling in terms of environmental damage.
No it isn't, fracking is a technique that is used to increase the output of a 'traditional oil well' and actually, oil/gas drilling has been ruining surface water for a long time, too. In the past it tended to happen to people who owned the surface as well as the minerals, and who were often happy to take an additional check for their trouble (or not), to go along with their mineral check, and have some bottled water delivered, or hook up to a community water district (yay, they can afford it now). It is easier to get over the loss of a water well when you're making five or six figures a month in O&G royalties. Fracking isn't new either. The only thing new is fracking for shale gas, which is usually deeper/higher pressure, and I guess probably needs better well casings and cement. The problem being that many of these wells are only barely economical or a gamble, to start with (thanks Aubrey McClendon).
>discovered beetles in the proposed pipeline corridor.
Yeah, every now and then an EPA guy scores a win for team EPA. I'd bet that it is the exception, not the rule.
The wins, unfortunately, tend to be random, as a result of the sorry state of our environmental law. The people at the EPA don't target oil pipelines for rerouting due to beetles instead of focusing on whether fracking is polluting groundwater because they care so much about beetles, or because they've already won on everything more important. Industry takes examples like this to show "look at how out of control the EPA has gotten!" because bystanders thing: "gee, I care about the environment, but all that work to protect a few beetles is a bit much!"
But that paints a misleading picture. The EPA goes for the beetles because the Endangered Species Act is one of the few laws with bright-line rules that hasn't been watered down over the last 30-40 years. That makes it a good tactical hammer. They've got a limited budget, and they need to hit things like this that are a slam-dunk in court instead of broader issues that could get mired for years in debates between expert witnesses and thousands of reports being thrown back and forth.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Australia CSG wells are often operated under a coal mining permit (vs oil/gas drilling permit) where the drilling operations, casing requirements, testing/audit trails etc. designed to protect aquifers (and well integrity) are nowhere near as strict as conventional oil & gas.
Hell, the crews drilling CSG don't even have basic understanding of well control theory (or enough instrumentation on the rig to detect problems) - hence the occasional uncontrolled blowouts, mitigated only by the fact that these CSG wells are slimhole vs conventional.
I'd much rather live next to a fracked conventional oil & gas well which has been cased & cemented according to the design of certified petroleum engineers, pressure-tested with all the results lodged properly with government authorities to depths far exceeding any of the local aquifers - than a dodgy CSG well cemented by amateurs who work to rough guidelines "appropriate for the area", who write more documentation on their invoicing than on any actual data collection...
Source: I worked with an oil & gas service company 2006-2008...
No it isn't, fracking is a technique that is used to increase the output of a 'traditional oil well' and actually, oil/gas drilling has been ruining surface water for a long time, too. In the past it tended to happen to people who owned the surface as well as the minerals, and who were often happy to take an additional check for their trouble (or not), to go along with their mineral check, and have some bottled water delivered, or hook up to a community water district (yay, they can afford it now). It is easier to get over the loss of a water well when you're making five or six figures a month in O&G royalties. Fracking isn't new either. The only thing new is fracking for shale gas, which is usually deeper/higher pressure, and I guess probably needs better well casings and cement. The problem being that many of these wells are only barely economical or a gamble, to start with (thanks Aubrey McClendon).
>discovered beetles in the proposed pipeline corridor.
Yeah, every now and then an EPA guy scores a win for team EPA. I'd bet that it is the exception, not the rule.