Even Obama’s EPA Now Admits Fracking Hasn’t Harmed Water Supplies

[edu]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419418/even-obamas-epa-now-admits-fracking-hasnt-harmed-water-supplies-jillian-kay-melchior

The EPA has grown especially politicized under the Obama administration, so it’s a good bet that if it had found a clear-cut instance where fracking had devastated a city’s water, it wouldn’t be shy about saying so. Instead, the report — which took four years and likely cost millions of dollars to complete — blandly concludes that “we did not find evidence that [hydraulic fracturing has] led to widespread, systematic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” In fact, the study never definitively identifies a single case where the fracking process itself — as opposed to mishaps or negligence — resulted in water contamination.

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Israel-May-Hold-the-Worlds-Third-Largest-Reserve-of-Shale-Oil.html

The most recent developments in this story start with Dr Harold Vinegar, the former chief scientist of Royal Dutch Shell,  who is at the center of an ambitious project to turn Israel into one of the world's leading oil producers. Israel Energy Initiatives, or IEI, where Vinegar is chief scientist, is working on projects to extract oil and natural gas from oil shale from a 238sq km area of the Shfela Basin, to the south and west of Jerusalem.

Oil shale mining is often frowned upon by environmentalists for many of the same reasons as fracking: it's a dirty process that is both energy and water-intensive.

IEI, which is owned by the American telecom group IDT Corp, believes its technique will be cleaner than that of other operators because the oil will be separated from the shale rock up to 300m beneath the ground.

Water will be a by-product of the process, rather than being consumed by it in large volumes. Vinegar says Israel has the third-biggest oil shale deposits in the world, outside the US and China:

"We estimate there is the equivalent of 250 billion barrels of oil here. To put that in context, there are proven reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil in Saudi Arabia."

And not to upset too many people, but we also ran an item earlier this year about Arab scientists working for ARAMCO who argue that the Saudis have, in fact, systematically OVER-estimated their proven reserves.

IEI estimates the marginal cost of production will be between $US35 - 40 per barrel.

The 2nd article I quoted claims one of the obstacles holding back using Shale oil in Israel is environmental worries that it will effect the water supply.
I am hoping this new EPA report might have an impact on speeding up permission for Israeli Oil Fracking (assuming the economics continue to justify it, since OPEC is trying to lower the price of their oil to some degree to knock out fracking competitors)