But Evan Hansen, president of the environmental consulting firm Downstream Strategies, in Morgantown,West Virginia, said the chemical industry executives involved don't seem to have learned their lessons.
In February, the Shrivers decided to test their pipes, and Andrea Varrato, an environmental scientist for a consultancy called Downstream Strategies, arrived at the front door with a set of amber-glass bottles to collect samples.
In a study conducted last year, researchers from the environmental consulting firm, Downstream Strategies, attempted to trace fracking water — from water withdrawal to wastewater disposal — at several wells in the Marcellus Shale formation in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
The Downstream Strategies report, funded by the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation, said that more than 80percentt of the water used in hydraulic fracturing in West Virginia is pulled directly from rivers and streams.
"We just couldn't do it," said Downstream Strategies staff scientist Meghan Betcher, citing a lack of good data and the wide range of disposal methods used by the industry.
The Downstream Strategies report noted that from 2005 to 2012, Pennsylvania and West Virginia issued permits for nearly 9,000 natural gas wells that use hydraulic fracturing technology, which pumps a high-pressure mixture of water, chemicals, and sand deep into shale formations to extract natural gas.
These advances in upstream technology have resulted in efforts to develop efficient downstream strategies for these products, many of which exploit affinity-based strategies [22].
Utility-scale solar could be placed on that property and be put to economic use, says Evan Hansen, president of Downstream Strategies in Morgantown, W.V., who spoke at the conference.
But Evan Hansen, president of the West Virginia environmental consulting firm Downstream Strategies, said coal's slide has been tough on many towns in the southern half of the state.
