https://www.newschoolers.com/videos/watch/826555/Gasland-Part-II
Watch this with an open mind.
What is fracking?
Fracking is short for hydraulic-fracturing, a relatively new method of natural gas extraction. In almost all cases when you hear about fracking today, you're hearing about a new method of it called high-volume slick-water horizontal fracking. It's a process used to extract natural gas from shale deposits –shale being a type of rock - deep underground. Using New York State as the example, natural gas companies want to extract gas from the Marcellus and Uticashale deposits. The shale they want to access in NY is mostly 1-2 miles underground. With the shale deep underground, indeed attached to the shale soto speak, are little bubbles of methane. Methane is natural gas. Let me explain how the horizontal fracking process works. First, a gas company clears a well pad, generally a couple of acres, where they set up the drill rig. Over the course of a month, they drill down over a mile, and then are able to turn the drill head 90 degrees and drill out horizontally up to a mile. As they're drilling the well, they put in a number of cement casings, which are supposed to prevent contamination of the groundwater. Once the drilling is complete, the fracking begins. At extremely high pressure, they blast – as in explode - 2-9 million gallons of water mixed with sand and over 500 chemicals down the well. This fractures the shale deep underground, which frees up the methane. Each frack pad contains between one and twelve frack wells.
Water contamination
One of the biggest issues with fracking is water contamination. Those 500+ chemicals are very dangerous. Of the 2-9 million gallons injected, 99.5% is water. The .5percent may not sound bad, but when we do the math we see that this equates to between 10 and 45 thousand gallons of chemicals per well. They include known carcinogens like benzene and toluene, many endocrine disrupters, as well as more recognizable chemicals like mercury and diesel. Benzene IS still used in fracking. Other harmful agents used in fracking include Methanol, Silica, Diesel, Lead, Formaldehyde, Sulfuric Acid, Mercury and Toluene.
Coming back up along with much of the water mixed with a whole host of volatile chemicals is Radon, Radium, Uranium, and Arsenic. This is not all at once, not all in one place, and is most certainly not all collected.
Even very small amounts of these chemicals can contaminate enormous bodies of water. There are over a thousand known cases of water contamination from fracking, including hundreds where people can light their water on fire. Groundwater contamination occurs because the cement well casings fail – cracks develop under the high pressure of fracking – and from chemicals and methane migrating up on the outside of the outer-most casing layer. Surface water contamination is common from spills, blowouts, leaks,dumping of wastewater, etc. In 2008 for example, the city of Pittsburgh told residents to drink bottled water for 3 weeks due to water contamination from fracking operations.
How do they get away with this?
In the last 10 years, the gas industry has spent $747 million in lobbying and campaign donations at the federal level. In doing so they have gotten exemptions from our most basic environmental protections, including the clean drinking water act, the clean air act, the clean water act, and the super fund act. For example, as I've pointed out the chemicals used in the fracking operation are clearly hazardous chemicals. Normally, such chemicals have careful regulation,tracking, permitting, etc. For the gas industry, as soon as those chemicals enter into their development, they lose their hazardous classification. When it's in the lab, benzene is hazardous. When it's 100 feet out your backyard in a fracking operation, it's classified the same as construction debris, the same as a 2 by 4.
Further, the gas industry has an enormous legal team, and they fight long legal battles with land owners who claim water contamination. Inevitably, they force landowners to settle, and with the settlements they make landowners sign "non-disclosure agreements," which is akin to being legally silenced such that the landowner can never talk about water contamination and the EPA can never investigate it. For their part, the EPA has documented water contamination from fracking in Pavillion, WY, and is investigating it in a high-profile case in Dimock, PA.
Radioactivity:
Much of the water that comes back up from the fracking operation, as well as the gas itself, is laced with high levels of radiation. The shale itself is naturally radioactive, with high levels of radium, uranium, radon, and other radioactive components. Dangerous levels of radiation have been documented from this in PA and NY streams, as no treatment plants that the industry puts their waste water through can treat for radiation and a host of other dangerous chemicals used in the fracking process.
Community Impacts:
Having fracking in your community drastically changes where you live. The fracking operation itself is dangerous industrial activity, which ends up literally in your backyard rather than zoned away from residential areas like most industrial practices. It's extremely loud, it smells, and it's bright at night. Each frack requires over 1,000 round-trip industrial truck trips over the course of one month, destroying local roads and creating traffic hazards. Many folks in PA report their regular 30 minute commutes now taking over 2 hours because of the truck traffic. There is also always a steep crime increase directly associated with fracking, such as rape, battery, and DUIs. The gas industry tends to bring in transient workers who are on performance enhancers.
Air pollution, health:
Obviously water contamination leads to terrifying health problems, as it has in many communities. There are also significant health problems relating to air pollution. For example, in rural Wyoming, in 5-10 years of fracking development, the air quality went from pristine mountain air to air worse than downtown LA on a bad day. Air pollutants include volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, methane gas,well-head benzene, etc. These provide a risk of cancer and increase the number and severity of asthma cases, respiratory illnesses, and a host of other health issues. One example is a New Centers for Disease Control study released in August 2011. This found that breast cancer rates dropped in every county in Texas except the six counties with the heaviest natural gas production air emissions, where rates exploded.
Environmental destruction:
The fracking operation itself devastates the environment, from the clearing of well-pads,creation of access roads and pipelines, the fragmentation of land, etc. It is also disastrous for the climate. One rationale for fracking and natural gas tends to be that it burns cleaner than coal or oil, releasing less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and thus it is a transition fuel. This is a very faulty argument. Although natural gas does burn cleaner than coal and oil, the entire life-cycle in fact makes it worse for the climate than coal. The extraction and transportation process leaks a tremendous amount of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a particularly heavy, dense greenhouse gas, that is25 times more potent in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Studies by NOAA, NCAR, the International Energy Administration, and many leading researchers show that natural gas is worse for the climate than coal. It is neither clean nor a transition fuel.
Domestic (Patriotic) Fuel Source:
Natural Gas is hailed as an abundant source of domestic energy, that it will get us off of foreign oil. Many have said that there is a 100 years supply of natural gas underneath our own soil. This estimate is based off industry speculation that is motivated by painting a rosy picture for investors. The reality is that we don't have nearly that much gas. The federal agency in charge of this, the Energy Information Administration released an updated estimate this January indicating that America has not more than a 20 years supply of natural gas, and that's at current consumption rates, not at the increased rates that many are pushing for. The US Geological Survey in 2011 put the estimate at even less.
Economics:
The #1argument for fracking is that it provides jobs and revenue. These are vastly overstated for the sake of influencing politicians and running a PR campaign.The gas industry wants public and political support, and the best way to get that is to claim that they're going to create huge numbers of jobs and economic gain. Here's the scenario in PA. They've been fracking in PA for 4 years now,close to 5,000 wells. The industry claims that in doing so they've created over48,000 jobs, which in fact is far fewer than they initially promised. But that number is far from true. An independent research center, the Keystone Research Center, studied this to come up with a real number. They found that the gas industry actually created fewer than 6,000 jobs. What happens, is the industry uses "new hires" in their count.That means that on Tuesday, if they hire two people, they say they created two new jobs. However, if they also fire two people on Tuesday, as is common in the gas industry, they still claim 2 jobs since there were 2 new hires, even though the net number of jobs is 0. Additionally, over 70% of those jobs have gone to out-of-state workers, as it's the people in KY, TX, TN, OK who know how to frack,so they bring them up and the money they make gets sent back to their families in their native states. Not a good deal for PA. At the same time, the Keystone Research Center points out that with the 6,000 jobs, many jobs were likely lost in other industries negatively affected such as agriculture and tourism.
That brings up the reality of the economics, which is that fracking is bad for the economy.It's a boom and bust cycle that spells disaster for most economies that are built on generations of local businesses, agriculture, tourism, etc. For example, take the winery industry. In NY, the wine industry is a $6 billion industry that brings in over 5 million tourists each year. Who wants to go on a wine trail in the finger lakes surrounded by industrial fracking operations,and who wants to buy wine made with potentially contaminated water and grapes grown in polluted air? Over half of NY wineries have called on Governor Cuomo to ban fracking.The same applies to agriculture, small businesses, tourist-oriented businesses,etc. Additionally, fracking leads to precipitous drops in real estate values and threatens to undermine mortgages and property insurance.
Excellent YouTube Video: Fracking Hell: The Untold Story
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEB_Wwe-uBM&noredirect=1
