Protesters against Marcellus Shale drilling march across the Rachel Carson Bridge in Pittsburgh in November 2010.
Despite having complained for years that studies on the effect of hydrofracking on drinking water supplies are deficient because they don't include pre-drilling water quality data on wells and water systems, the natural gas industry has been keeping that data away from researchers.
ProPublica reports:
The absence of baseline data was one of the most serious criticisms leveled at a group of Duke researchers last week when they published the first peer-reviewed study linking drilling to methane contamination in water supplies.
That study - which found that methane concentrations in drinking water increased dramatically with proximity to gas wells - contained "no baseline information whatsoever," wrote Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the industry group Energy in Depth, in a statement debunking the study.
Now it turns out that some of that data does exist. It just wasn't available to the Duke researchers, or to the public.
