'Fracking' fight continues in wake of EPA water contamination finding

PAVILLION, Wyo. — Louis Meeks knows what to expect when he turns on any of the faucets inside the home he bought 36 years ago.

"Still stink?" he asks, after offering up a glass jar filled seconds earlier from the tap.

The cloudy water in the clear jar does stink. It has the distinct odor of gasoline.

But it wasn't always that way, says the disabled Vietnam vet who lives about five miles outside of Pavillion, a west-central Wyoming town where there are nearly 200 natural gas wells, but not a single gas station.

The water from Meeks' well was so good at one point that workers would stop by to fill their jugs with it on their way into work at the nearby natural gas plant.

Ask Meeks what happened to the water and the frustration becomes readily apparent.

"Well the first thing I know was in 2004, they drilled a well up here, 500 feet away from my house," he said.

The natural gas well Meeks refers to is owned by EnCana, a Canadian company with U.S. operations in Wyoming, Colorado, Louisiana and Texas. EnCana owns all of the nearly 200 gas wells around Pavillion, several of them on Meeks' property.

Meeks is no fan of the company, which he blames for contaminating his drinking water and the water of many of his neighbors through the use of a controversial technique called hydraulic fracturing.

"We got by without fracking before," said the former oilfield worker. "We gotta do something different, something safer."

Commonly known as "fracking," the practice of hydraulic fracturing involves the high-pressure injection of water, sand and chemicals into the well bore of a newly completed oil or natural gas well. The slurry forms cracks in the subsurface layers allowing energy companies to pump more oil and gas out of the ground.

Originally developed more than 60 years ago, fracking has become more prevalent in the past five years thanks to advances in technology and science. Its use has also become more controversial.

Fracking was the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Gasland" — Meeks' plight was featured in the film — and congressional hearings. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is also in the middle of a multiyear national study of the issue, slated to be published in 2014. And states like Colorado and Texas passed new rules this week that require energy companies to disclose which chemicals they use in the fracking process.