The companies that extract natural gas quickly realized that they needed to put a positive spin on their dirty deeds or the public wouldn’t be swayed to their side. So, they started organizations like the “American Clean Skies Foundation” and they came up with videos like the 30-minute “Shale Gas and America’s Future”. Propaganda, every bit of it.
Let’s back up and give some background on this hot topic.
The energy companies that extract natural gas from beneath the ground used to only drill vertical wells. Problem is, most of the natural gas lays in horizontal pockets. To maximize profits, the companies came up with a way to drill horizontally, called directional drilling. But that wasn’t enough. The gas was hard to get out from the countless fissures that deep underground, so they came up with an extraction process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for short.
Fracking involves shooting pressurized water, sand, and a host of nasty chemicals designed to hold the fissures open so the gas can flow freely. These chemicals and compounds include formaldehyde, benzene, ammonium chloride, acetic anhydride, methanol, hydrochloric acid, propargyl alcohol, and even diesel fuel. In all, 65 of their substances are labeled hazardous by the EPA. But here’s the kicker. Thanks to former VP Dick Cheney and his 2005 coup called the Halliburton Loophole, the energy bill passed by the Republican-majority Congress that year exempted fracking from laws regulated by the EPA, i.e. the extractors do not have to tell what chemicals they use, or comply with clean water rules. Hmmm.
What’s this all have to do with people. Simple: water.
No one knows how the chemical brew affects underground water supplies. Check out the movie “Gasland”, available on the internet, to see how some families have seen their water supply contaminated. Also, the average fracking well consumes on average 4 million gallons. Halliburton contends that 98.5% of their fracking mixture is water and sand, leaving 1.5% a mystery fluid. That comes to 40,000 gallons per well, at least half of which is lost into the ground and never recovered. Where does it go?
Natural gas extraction in the eastern US is targeting the Marcellus Shale, an underground deposit that runs from Ohio and Kentucky through West Virginia and Pennsylvania all the way to New York state. It’s the second largest gas field in the world. Some locals, driven by greed and ignorance, have been signing leases with the extractors for as much as $5,000 per acre, plus royalties on the amount of gas taken. The prediction is that unless derailed by long-needed regulations, as many as 100,000 wells will dot the 54,000 square mile landscape by 2030.
So the question lingers: Where will the 4 million gallons of water per well come from? Can local streams and acquifers handle the withdrawals? Obviously not. And what effect will injecting this toxic mess into the ground have on water supplies? We can’t risk finding out!
- Mountain Man
