Fracking Fracking is drilling down into earth before high-pressure water mixture goes down directed at rocks to release the gases inside. Water, sand and other chemicals are injected to the rock at high pressure, which allows the gas to come back up and come out of the well where it is collected (BBC News).
Fracking is so controversial because it requires enormous amounts of water to extract and is a disaster for the environment. It takes on average 400 hundred tanker trucks to carry water and other supplies to and from the fracking site. It takes 1-8 million gallons of water to complete ONE fracking job. Ninety eight to ninety nine percent of the fracking fluid is water and sand used to keep the cracks open. The rest is made up of chemicals
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Methane gas and toxic chemicals leak out from the system and contaminate nearby groundwater. Methane concentrations are 17x higher in drinking water wells near fracking sites than in normal wells(Dong). A man in Colorado went and got a lighter and held the flame by his faucet and it whistled and made a popping sound and it erupted into flames. Contaminated well water is used for drinking water for nearby cities and towns around the fracking sites causing public health concerns(Cart). There have been more than 1,000 cases of humans getting contaminated. Only 30-50% of fracking fluid is recovered, the rest is left in the ground and is non-biodegradable. The excess fluid is left to evaporate releasing deadly organic compounds into the atmosphere creating ground level ozone. In spite of the commercials telling the public how necessary it is to extract gas from U.S. soil and denying the harmful effects of the extraction process, and that fracking gives people jobs and security, fracking is terrible for our ecosystems and environment as a whole. The water that the tankers bring in have to mix the water that they bring in with sand