Unfortunately, there’s nothing new to this, as my brother lived in Rangely, Colorado many years ago when it was the fifth biggest oil & gas field in the country. I've been meaning to post this description from him for a while.
The elements they injected were rudimentary by today’s standards. Up there they injected saline solution with many bacteria in it, and when those bacteria died underground, part of the byproduct was hydrogen sulfide gas, a very highly toxic and flammable compound. There was hardly anyone in that community that didn’t suffer from asthma and/or COPD. This gas was usually piped with the oil and natural gas to splitting stations close to the well heads, and sometimes to smaller local refineries and compression stations, where the natural gas was liquefied and the hydrogen sulfide was flared off, burned as a torch. The exhaust from that was also highly poisonous, and there were frequent times when the monitoring stations at these flares had to go unstaffed because the gasses were so thick. As firefighters there, they were taught never to take their apparatus into gullies or trenches where pump-jacks were often located, because the hydrogen sulfide was likely to be more concentrated. It is odorless, colorless and kills within three breaths, not to mention explosive. Talk about the wild west! There's more below the curly-queue
Other gases that were combined with the natural gas were slightly less volatile and more stable like methane, hexane and decane. Old timers there sometimes filled their gas tanks with these and referred to them as “drip-gas.” They were looked down on as cheap because they didn’t purchase gasoline and they were easily identifiable because the exhaust from their cars was almost pure white.
Despite what the oil and gas companies say, the technology of well drilling and casing has barely improved in the century it has gone on. They cannot prove that the now more sophisticated and more highly toxic compounds they pump into gas and oil bearing shale beds will not leak into ground water or into the air. They are not even responsible to tell anyone what they’re using to protect their patents. They are also unrestricted as to where they drill because the energy companies own the mineral rights under huge tracts of land, many of which are built farmed and citied upon. It is no different than the mountain-rape occurring in the Virginias and Kentucky.
This is all very dangerous stuff to be so easily written off as the keys to our unemployment and energy independence.