I got busy trying to make a few dollars to survive on and it has taken me longer than I thought to get to this post. My apologies. When I started thinking about the subject of fracking my creative-divergent intellect immediately noticed the similarity between the verb to frack and the verb to frag. Those of us who come from the Vietnam war era remember fragging as the practice of killing fellow soldiers with the use of fragmenting grenades. The question is if the practice of fracking is all that different.
Fracking is the practice of injecting water, sand, and assorted chemicals designed to facilitate the flow of water into gas and oil bearing rock to fracture rock and allow oil and gas out. In the early 1970s I was actually involved in some of the early research associated with the process. The experiment involved measuring viscosity of chemicals that were highly sensitive to detergent. I was shocked to discover that the chemical engineers did not know that cleaning lab glassware in highly purified water would leave detergent on the glassware because the detergent would bond to the sodum in the glassware. This is taught in analytical chemistry, a second year chemistry course. I was hired because they could not get consistent measurements. These are the guys who do the fundamental research on the safety of fracking.
It should be mentioned that fracking unquestionably makes available large quantities of cheap oil and natural gas. This is not clearly a good idea even though it seems good to consumers. The bad side of this is that cheap hydrocarbon fuels prevents development of renewable, environmentally positive energy
alternatives. Politicians who are the lap-dogs of environmentally insensitive energy concerns look for any reason to keep killing children for profit. Many petroleum companies are concerned about the future and even honestly see natural gas as one step towards a cleaner and healthy future. It sure beats radioactive coal. All coal is radioactive. Coal also has a whole lot of other environmental poisons. The mere act of coal mining releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is 25 times as dangerous pound for pound as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The EPA estimates that coal mining is responsible for 11% of U.S. methane emissions. Methane is the second most significant greenhouse gas.
Fracking has been implicated in increases in earthquakes in some areas where it has been practiced. So far it has not blamed for serious earthquakes, but wastewater injection wells have caused earthquakes as strong as 5.6 on the Richter scale. This was caused by injecting wastewater into earthquake faults. I wonder what genius decided to try that. I guess the reasoning was that the earthquake producing fault would hold lots of dangerous wastewater.
In some places where fracking has been practiced ground water has become toxic due to the injected chemicals and ruined the wells of the residents. In many cases the water wells have become methane wells. It is inconvenient when the water coming out of your kitchen sink becomes explosive.
Another concern with fracking is the environmental damage done on the surface by the well site and operation. Fracking requires the injection of millions of gallons of water and chemicals into the ground to fracture the rock bearing the gas and oil. Much of that highly polluted water comes back up and has to be dealt with. Perhaps there may be an earthquake fault nearby to inject it into.
Obviously we will not be free from fracking in the near future. Well designed regulation based on competent research conducted by competent scientists not funded by industry concerns will reduce the dangers from this practice. Better yet, alternative energy development will reduce the perceived need for
this type of energy source.
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