Word Games are Misleading the American Public About Fracking
practices have unlocked previously inaccessible reserves of oil and gas across
the United States and the world. However, some of the debate over fracking is distorting
public understanding of these practices and interfering with good
decision-making about this recent boom in unconventional oil and gas
production.
politicians:
past 60 years, and in all that time there has never been a proven case of
groundwater contamination caused by fracking.
kitchen tables of ordinary citizens to the halls of Congress, as landmen use it
to try to secure mineral rights from private landowners and legislators advocate
for more drilling on millions of acres of public land. Even environmentalists,
scientists, and regulators, when pressed, reluctantly confirm this statement is technically correct. Upon closer examination, however, this claim
is a half-truth that muddles the debate on whether natural gas can be a bridge
fuel to a cleaner energy future, or a dead-end.
past 60 years…
on what you mean by fracking.
conventional hydraulic fracturing operation using 1,000 gallons of water, chemicals, and sand to frack a shallow Kansas well. Instead of dropping explosives down the well
like the early Pennsylvania oilmen, drillers used a spare WWII aircraft engine
as a pump to pressurize the fracking fluid and apply hydraulic force to the methane-bearing
limestone. According to a patentfilled in 1953, the first fracks used
pressures as low as 700 pounds per square inch (psi). This accounts for much of
fracking’s history, with small operations that were barely noticeable once
they were completed.
slickwater hydraulic fracture operations using an average of 800,000 gallons of fracking fluid and 200,000 tons of sand on horizontally drilled wells in the Barnett Shale of Texas. This
16-year-old practice much more accurately represents the procedure that has recently
unlocked natural gas from formations like the Marcellus Shale and oil from the Bakken
Shale. We refer to this type of fracking as “modern fracking.”
of gallons of fluids pumped into bedrock at pressures as high as 15,000 psi to
break open shale and tight sandstone formations. This is over 20x the pressure and
800x the volume of the first fracking operations. Modern fracking has as much in
common with early fracking as an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane has in common with
the Wright Flyer. Yet advocates of modern fracking cite those decades of old-fashioned
fracking as proof that modern fracking is also safe.
groundwater contamination…
was one of SkyTruth’s first projects,
because satellite images and aerial photography revealed a spider’s web of roads, wellpads, pipelines, and other
infrastructure
transforming massive tracts of western public lands. But as the practice spread
from relatively uninhabited wilderness to the more populated eastern US, media
coverage of modern fracking and fracking-related accidents began to increase. Journalists and
academics began to investigate claims that modern fracking had caused health
problems and water contamination. Then a documentary filmmaker from Pennsylvania ignited one of the biggest environmental movements in several
generations: by lighting water on fire – again.
number of reasons. For one, the Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly backed
away from completing research on claims of polluted groundwater in Pennsylvania and Texas, and stopped short of finalizing a report that blamed modern fracking for groundwater contamination in
Pavillion, Wyoming. Also limiting our knowledge about contamination cases is
the growing number of contamination claims settled out of court with
strict non-disclosure agreements. One settlement with a Pennsylvania family went
so far as to prevent a family, including their children aged 7 and 10, from ever publicly speaking about the issue of fracking.
are coming forward with reports of illness and contaminated drinking water in
the immediate vicinity of wells that that have been fracked. Is drilling and
modern fracking the cause? In many cases we just don’t know because pre-drilling
water quality and public health studies don’t exist, and the information is simply
not available to the public.
about the safety of modern fracking. Watch congressionalhearings on this subject and you will hear this
qualifying statement tacked on to nearly every remark about the safety of
drilling and modern fracking – but what does it mean?
(and technically accurate) way – referring exclusively to the well stimulation
process known as hydraulic fracturing. Period. Based on this definition, only
contamination caused by subterranean fractures that occurred during the process
of hydraulic fracturing counts as contamination “caused by fracking.”
- If the cement job on a well
fails when it is subjected to the high pressures of modern fracking, like in Dimock, Pa., Colorado, and Ohio, the cause is bad cementing, not fracking. - If a pond containing fracking
fluid fails and dumps contaminated water into a stream, or a truck carrying fracking chemicals loses
control on a narrow West Virginia road and overturns into a creek,
fracking itself is not the “cause” of the contamination.
shorthand to cover all of the activities related to drilling and completing a
well. Since > 90% of the drilling
being done today would not be happening if it weren’t for hydraulic fracturing,
this is understandable. Unfortunately there
are many documented incidents where contamination of the air, land, and water can and has occurred because of oil and gas drilling. And the homeowner who can light their tapwater on fire, or
discovers they’ve been drinking cancer-causing benzene, probably doesn’t give a
damn if the contamination was caused by a poor cement job that blew out, or by
the hydraulic fracturing operation itself.
That’s a word game only politicians and engineers care about.
information, a misleading history, and distorted by semantic arguments that
narrowly define what counts as contamination from fracking. While cases
of contamination caused by fracking remain
obscured by lack of information and tricky linguistics, we know that a growing number of citizens are reporting
harm and environmental contamination in unconventional oil and gas fields, and
especially from wells that have been
fracked.
Source: http://blog.skytruth.org/2013/11/fracking-word-games.html
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