Washington (Platts)--7Aug2012/154 pm EDT/1754 GMT

Stony Brook University researchers asserted massive hydraulic fracturing in the US' Marcellus Shale formation poses "substantial potential risk" to waterways, but a drilling industry spokesman on Tuesday asserted the claims are based on faulty data.

"Even in a best case scenario, an individual well would potentially release at least 200 cubic meters of contaminated fluids," researchers Daniel Rozell and Sheldon Reaven said in a statement Monday.

Regulators should consider additional mandatory steps to reduce the potential of drinking water contamination from salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, such as uranium, radium and radon from the rapidly expanding fracking industry, the researchers said.

Many treatment facilities "are not designed to handle hydraulic fracturing wastewater," the researchers said.

Rozell and Reaven estimated that 40,000 wells would be drilled if only 10% of the Marcellus Shale region is developed. Under their best-case median risk calculation, they said the volume of contaminated wastewater from these wells "would equate to several hours flow of the Hudson River or a few thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools."

The researchers' assertions were made in a paper entitled "Water Pollution Risk Associated with Natural Gas Extraction from the Marcellus Shale" and published by the Society for Risk Analysis' in its August 2012 journal.

Chris Tucker, a spokesman for Energy In Depth, an industry advocacy group, said in an email, "This is just another case here of 'garbage in, garbage out'. To be clear: these guys found no cases of actual contamination, or actual pollution, or actual migration. So in absence of that, they just modeled a bunch of hypotheticals based on scenarios that don't, haven't and will never exist."

--Rodney White, rodney_white@platts.com --Edited by Katharine Fraser, katharine_fraser@platts.com