Editor’s Note: This post is Steve Horn’s latest investigative piece on the Keystone XL. It . Check out from DeSmogBlog and give everyone at DeSmogBlog some love – for some of the best research debunking misinformation about climate science on the web.

Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) kicked the can down the road on a key study designated to examine the connection between and groundwater contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming.

A study originally scheduled for release in 2014 and featured in it in a move that appears to be purely politically calculated by the Obama Administration, akin to the .

Now, just days later, a damning in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences again links shale gas fracking to groundwater contamination. The Duke researchers did so by testing samples of 141 drinking water samples of Pennsylvania’s portion of the Marcellus Shale basin.

This is the Duke professor’s linking fracking to groundwater contamination, the source of drinking water for hundreds of thousands of citizens in the Keystone State. The industry is likely to come out with the familiar chorus that the contaminated water is “naturally occuring,” but the latest Duke study shows otherwise.

“They found that, on average, methane concentrations were six times higher and ethane concentrations were 23 times higher at homes within a kilometer of a shale gas well,” a . “Propane was detected in 10 samples, all of them from homes within a kilometer of drilling.”

Robert Jackson, a professor of environmental sciences at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and one of the study’s co-authors, pointed to the the fact that some of the contaminated water samples exhibited the chemical signature of Marcellus Shale gas. “The methane, ethane and propane data, and new evidence from hydrocarbon and helium content, all suggest that drilling has affected some homeowners’ water,” . “In a minority of cases the gas even looks Marcellus-like, probably caused by poor well construction.” The Duke study offers food-for-thought in the hours leading up to President Obama’s , just a month after his the model bill for fracking chemical fluid disclosure on public lands.

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