Hydraulic Fracturing Research Paper

Mariza Fontecha

October 26th, 2015

Professor Poffenroth

Final Draft

Hydraulic Fracturing and the Effects on our Health and Environment In society today, there are countless environmental issues all around the world. It has only been getting worse as time goes by. Now is the time to act and change something about it. In order to do so, we must face each problem one by one. As an issue that is very popular with our society, lets begin with our oil issue. Earth naturally makes oil within the time amount of thousands to millions of years that has accumulated on Earth for the past 4+ billions of years. The problem is that we use so much of the earth’s oil so fast, that eventually we will run out of all the oil on earth in our human lifetime.

Hydraulic fracturing was first used in Kansas in 1947. Since then, we have continued to develop this process (“Fracturing 101”). This process uses more than a million gallons of water in order to pressurize down to the earth, but this is a problem because it wastes a lot of our water. The procedure is mostly made up of water because it helps create a passageway for the gas to be released and travel back up to the well site. This is a problem because fresh water has been becoming more scarce for ourselves and we should be trying to conserve this resource. Another problem with this process is not the procedure itself, but the leakages that happen during it due to carelessness. The technique of fracking doesn’t necessarily contaminate our environment, but does lower our fresh water supply, and also because of carelessness, the pollutants and drainage of the chemicals pollutes streams and rivers. This had resulted to the creation of the Clean Water Act due to many demands. However, this was not effective to the cause because hydraulic fracturing is one of the many processes that were exempted by the loopholes in the Act. Hydraulic fracturing does not have a lot of regulations and monitoring which allows these careless acts to occur like many other harmful acts companies do to our earth. Many families who had been tricked into contracts before knowing the risks or the harm it would do to their environment. For

Major concerns from people in the U.S. is to stop “groundwater (aquifer) contamination by fracking chemicals, accidental chemical spills, waste disposal, air quality, the land footprint of drilling activities, pipeline placement and safety, and the amount of water used” (Rahm 2974-82), but many companies like Texas Barnett Shale company choose to ignore health affects and the contamination it causes until they are confronted. Some companies, even when confronted, deny the problem entirely because they are able to fight it within contracts or have better lawyers to fight their cases against citizens in the area who are hurt from this contamination. As hydraulic fracturing gets bigger, companies have been taking this system into other underdeveloped countries that also have Marcellus Shale living under their land. For example, Citizens in Mexico who are close to fracking sites are also seeing changes in their environment. In nearby villages, locals point to cracks in their walls and say they have never felt anything like it. Sergio Gomez, mayor of the municipality of Los Ramones, says the tremors have shaken people's confidence in hydraulic fracturing or "fracking"--even if there is no scientific proof that the two are related(The Economist). There are many cases where environments change like this, but with not much background