That’s my understanding too. And if it were ONLY sand and water, we probably wouldn’t be talking about it.
I have found out the following.
Fracking was granted explicit exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act.
Frackers are allowed to pump millions of gallons of fluid containing toxic chemicals into the ground without having to identify them.
Substances used include benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, boric acid, monoethanolamine, xylene, diesel-range organics, methanol, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, ammonium bisulfite, 2-butoxyethanol, and 5-chloro-2-methyl-4-isothiazotin-3-one.
I don’t want these things in the water that my family drinks.
That's a short list of all the compounds found in drinking water. The important data is the PPM of each compound on your list found in the test sample and where and when were the test samples taken.
The enviro's, in order to scare folks, list everything ever found in water, even if that compound isn't found within 500 miles of where you might live.
I have no doubt that overall the pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers used by farmers and growers and sprayed right onto food we eat are much more of a hazard to humans than hydraulic fraccing. But pesticides and herbicides are much more familiar substances and therefore less threatening to environmentalists than the new, largely imaginary threat of fraccing. There’s also the political motive to attack fraccing because it’s used mainly in the conservative oil-producing states to produce products that wacko environmentalists believe will cause “global warming.”
The main environmental threat from fraccing is illegal dumping of waste water, so I would say regulators need to focus on proper disposal of waste water and make sure all the waste water is accounted for and isn’t disappearing somewhere late at night.
That statement isn't true. They may not publish them in the local paper, but every drill site using them has the MSDS sheets available on site to all the chemicals used.