The Pros And Cons Of Fracking

Retrieving gas that is hidden thousands of feet in the ground, in rock formations called shale, has led to a very controversial retrieval method called fracking. This gas is called natural gas, and it consists of 70-90% methane, and 0-20% of ethane, butane, and propane. Natural gas can be used to replace petroleum and coal in many aspects of our daily lives, such as heating our homes, powering manufacturing, creating electricity, and even powering cars and buses. The process of retrieving this natural gas, hydraulic fracturing, is done by: drilling thousands of feet below the surface, past the ground water, then a steel casing is inserted so the chemicals don’t leak into the ground, then a specialized drill starts drilling horizontally into

alone, a well can be fracked up to 18 times total, 300,000 barrels of natural gas are produced each day, and the U.S. is the number one producer of natural gas in the world. Natural gas has many perks, some examples are an increase in jobs, a lower amount of pollution, and less dependency on foreign oil. However, there are an abundance of cons that go with all of these pros. Some cons are: an abundance of water usage, water contamination, a large amount of chemical usage, and seismic activity. The U.S. government has produced legislation to ensure the safety of fracking; however, most of it has to do with the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act to ensure that the chemicals used in fracking doesn’t get into the

The use of water for fracking and how fracking affects drinking water are some of the major concerns with fracking. One fracking well uses three to eight millions gallons of water, most of which is not recovered, and the water that is recovered is usually laced with chemicals. In fact, about ninety-two percent of hydraulic fluid is left in the shale rock, which is very bad for the environment due to all the chemicals in the fluid. In addition to this, methane released from the process of fracking can get into the local drinking water, which can be very deadly. An example of this is in 2009, when methane leaked from a fracking site and got into the local drinking water of Dimock, Pennsylvania. In fact, the contamination was so bad that a woman’s water well blew up because of the methane in it. This is only one of a thousand cases of contaminated drinking water from fracking. Another gas that fracking releases is hydrogen sulfide, which in high enough quantities can be deadly. Hydrogen sulfide is usually only found at the fracking site, there is a very slim chance it can get into the drinking water. Also, the process of drilling so deep into the Earth can cause a shift in the earth, or seismic activity. Not only is fracking itself bad for the environment, but the chemicals made for fracking and transporting the materials for fracking are