If you are like me, and you live in the Southeast, fracking isn’t a term you hear every day. Nonetheless, it is a huge problem that is affecting people’s health and the health of the environment in a lot of areas of the country. Over 15.3 million Americans have lived within a mile of a fracking operation since 2000.
Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, is the process where companies drill a mile or two straight down into the earth through shale rocks and blast water and toxic fluids in order to extract natural gas. In the US, the highest concentrations of fracking sites are in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, California, Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The Marcellus Shale is one of the most well known fracking areas, reaching from central New York through Ohio, and into Virginia. It is sometimes referred to as "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas" or "Frackistan" because the rural, economically depressed areas are less likely to fight the new income source: the fracking companies.
Fracking is also causing environmental damage by using an insane amount of resources. Each well needs around 400 tanker trucks to transport water and other supplies back and forth to the fracking site, as well as one to eight million gallons of water for only one fracking job.
Around 40,000 gallons of chemicals are blasted thousands of feet into the well for each frack. Those fluids are a combination of over 600 different chemicals that include known carcinogens. Some of the toxins found in this chemical cocktail include lead, uranium, mercury, radium, methanol, hydrochloric acid, and formaldehyde.
There are over 500,000 active fracking wells across the country that can each be drilled up to 18 times. That means an insane amount of water and toxic chemicals consumed, left to wreak havoc on the environment and the health of a community.
Fracking poses the greatest environmental threat to local water sources. During fracking, methane and other chemicals leach into groundwater and contaminate the ecosystem’s water sources. Consuming the contaminated water causes respiratory and neurological damage. It’s not hard to believe then that these contaminated water sources are causing serious health problems for the people that live in the area, as well as the local ecology. Less than 50 percent of the chemicals blasted into the earth during a fracture are recovered, which leaves a majority in the ground. Operations leave waste fluids in open pits to evaporate into the air so the fracking companies don’t have to deal with the toxic waste. The evaporation releases harmful VOCs (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere and contaminates the air. Fracking operations are also causing seismic activity to increase majorly in areas like Oklahoma and north Texas.
Fracking supporters claim it is a new, clean, and safe power source.
"Fracking has unlocked massive new supplies of oil and clean-burning natural gas from dense deposits of shale — supplies that increase our country’s energy security and improve our ability to generate electricity, heat homes and power vehicles for generations to come." - EnergyFromShale.org
Anti-fracking supporters are rightfully advocating that fracking is destroying ecosystems and water sources, and causing serious health problems for people living in the area.
Fracking operations are exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act at the federal level, including the requirement to disclose what chemicals they are using in their fracturing (except Wyoming, Michigan and Texas do require disclosure of the chemicals used).
Watch this video of a citizen of Granville Township, OH, lighting her tap water on fire. Then tell me that this water is safe to drink and the fracking companies have nothing to do with it.
The bad news is that the fracking boom is just getting started. The Annual Energy Outlook from 2012 anticipates that almost half the country's natural gas will be from fracking by 2035. The good news is that some cities, even states – New York, for example - are starting to ban fracking operations.
Check out the documentary, Gasland, by Josh Fox. It’s on Netflix and it is an incredibly eye-opening film about the effects that fracking really has on these communities. Check out the trailer below.
Even if you aren’t directly affected by fracking, speak up now to ban fracking before it’s too late. Who knows? You might be living on top of a shale deposit, just waiting for a fracking company to come along.
