During the last one hundred sixty five years, the United States has depended in fossil fuels in order to support the growing economy from a developing nation into a World Superpower and most recently the nation has been able to transition from an importer nation to an exporter nation of fossil fuels. These changes are based in the discovered of massive reserves natural shale gas deposits in conjunction with the development of new technology capable of extracting these fossil fuels with the shale deposits. This technology is called horizontal drilling when combined with Hydraulic Fracturing commonly known as fracking which has been around since 1947, has resulted in the highest increase of fossil fuels since the birth of the nation. This process …show more content…
Furthermore, the lack of oversight of the chemicals used during the fracking operations at the federal and state level has enhanced the problem by allowing these companies to utilized a vast amount of chemicals that are regulated under the Safe Water Drinking Act, the Clean Air Act and others acts, to be used in complete disregard for the safety and welfare of the citizens and the environment under the assumption that oil dependency is a treat to national security. While placing emphasis in profits and not in the safety of the citizens. My hypothesis is that is the current trends continue, the fresh water resources of the United States will be polluted beyond repair within three …show more content…
The importance behind the increase of hydraulic fracturing is the opportunity to protect the economy from the volatile market of crude oil in which was mostly dominated by the OPEC and Russia, which it’s also responsible for the stabilization of petroleum products prices (Pirog & Ratner, 2012). Studies of future oil market place the United States as the world major exporter by 2030 and currently has drastically reduce the importation of crude oil to only 20 percent in contrast with previous decades (McBride & Mohammed, 2015). In other words the Global energy geopolitics is changing fast and this is the primary purpose behind hydraulic fracturing increase in the US. Furthermore, the future used of fracking will continue to increase as new deposits are discover and technology efficient increase, as the United States move toward an energy independence (McBride & Mohammed, 2015) . This technology is responsible for the highest production of natural gas and crude oil since 2006. These process has been use in over one million wells in the U.S and has being able to produce over seven billions barrels of oil and over 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (Pirog & Ratner, 2012). The petroleum industry has estimated that in the next 20 year over 80 percent of new natural gas wells