Fracking is a delightfully cheeky-sounding nickname for hydraulic fracturing.  In simplest terms, hydraulic fracturing is a way of getting more of the valuable fluids, like oil or natural gas, out of geologic formations under the ground.  But these fossil fuels aren’t like big lakes where you can just stick a straw in and suck them out.  These reserves of oil and natural gas are found locked up in pores distributed throughout the vast layers of rock like shale. So how do you get them out at a reasonable pace?  

Let’s take a look how fracking actually works. It all starts with a shaft being drilled several hundred meters into the earth.  From there, a horizontal hole is then drilled into the gas-bearing layer of rock.  The fracking fluid is then pumped into the ground using a high-performance pump.  On average, the fluid consists of 8 million liters of water, which is the equivalent of about the daily consumption of 65,000 people, plus several thousand tons of sand and 200,000 liters of chemicals.  The mixture seeps into rock layers and produces innumerable tiny cracks.  The sand makes its way into the cracks to prevent the cracks from closing again, but still allowing the valuable fluid to flow out of the rock layer.  The chemicals used in the process perform various tasks including, condensing the water, killing off bacteria, and dissolving minerals.  The majority of the fracking fluid is pumped out again and the natural gas can now be recovered.  As soon as the gas source is exhausted, the drill hole is sealed and the fracking fluid is pumped back into deep underground layers and sealed inside of the drill holes.

Since the industrial revolution, the United States’ energy consumption has risen significantly.  The majority of the energy consumption of the U.S. is supplied by fossil fuels including coal or natural gas.  Recently there has been a lot of conversation about this controversial method of the recovery of natural gas from deep layers inside the earth.  In this method, porous rock is fractured, hence the name fracturing, by the use of water, sand, and chemicals in order to release the enclosed natural gas.  The technique of fracking has been about  since the Civil War in 1862, but innovation of the technique did not take place until the 1940s when Floyd Farris began a study on the relationship between oil and gas production output and the amount of pressurized treatment being used.  Nonetheless, only in the last ten years has there been quite a “fracking boom”, especially in the United States. This is because most conventional natural gas sources in America and on the European continent have been exhausted. But now a days, fracking is banned in most European countries including Norway, Sweden, and Germany, and a significant amount of countries have decided fracking wasn’t worth the effort and was not economically viable As a result, prices for natural gas and other fuels have been rising at a steady pace.  There has been a significant increase of more complicated and expensive methods, like fracking, that have now become attractive and profitable.  In the meantime, fracking has already been used more than a million times in the United States alone.  Over 60% of all new oil and gas wells are drilled by using fracking. 

The industry has changed what it does from the early ages now. Back in the 70s, the industry was after the oil or gas that was trapped. We know that most of the oil that is in the world is a result of organisms dying in the sea, getting trapped in sediments and getting heated up, then often that oil and gas will move upwards in the rock strata. If there is something up there to trap it, it became what the industry was trying to drill towards ever since Titusville Pennsylvania, which is where the American petroleum industry began in August 1859. What the industry is after now is what is called unconventional formations, and in this case it means the oil is where it is formed. “They are going after the motherlode” says Wes Wilson, retired EPA engineer. The reason this was not exploited before is they didn’t have the ingenious technique of drilling down and put exactly where they want it. The big play here is called the Niobrara, which is a type of shale formation, which companies are getting more oil out of than gas, which is why there is some much current drilling.  With the technology of horizontal drilling and high volume fracking companies can get oil almost anyplace that has been under the sea and is not mountains.  The industry has produced so much natural gas that the price dropped, so there is less drilling in the west and a huge amount of  drilling for oil. So much so that the industry is burning off a portion of the natural gas. 

However, fracking is also associated with several considerable risks.  The primary risk consists in the contamination of drinking water sources.  Fracking not only consumes large quantities of fresh water, but in addition the water is subsequently contaminated and is highly toxic.  The contamination is so severe that the water cannot even be cleaned in a treatment plant.  Even though the danger is known and theoretically could be managed, in the United States already sources have been contaminated due to the negligence. No one knows how the enclosed water will behave in the future, since there have not been any long-term studies on the subject.  The chemicals used in fracking vary from the hazardous to the extremely toxic and carcinogenic, such as benzoyl or formic acid.  The companies using fracking say nothing about the precise composition of the chemical mixture.  But is is known that there are about 700 different chemical agents which can be used in the process.  Another risk is the release of volatile organic compounds, hazardous air pollutants, and greenhouse gases.  The natural gas recovered by fracking consists largely of methane, a greenhouse gas which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.  Natural gas is less harmful than coal when burned.  But nonetheless, the negative effects of fracking on the climate balance are overall greater. 

The fracking process requires an extremely large consumption of energy. Secondly, the drill holes are quickly exhausted and it is necessary to drill fracking holes much more frequently than for classical natural gas wells.  In addition, about 3% of the recovered gas ends up being lost on the extraction and escapes into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.  So how is fracking and its expected benefits supposed to be assessed when companies are claiming the advantages are balanced against the disadvantages?  When properly studied, this technique offers one way in the short to medium term for meeting our demand for lower-cost energy.  But the long term consequences of fracking are unforeseeable and the risk to our drinking water this should not be underestimated.

One thing you will hear from the industry, which the state would agree, is they do have some bad operators, that things go wrong.  For example, someone left a tank open, a valve open, or somebody spilled something. Sometimes there is even bad wells where they forgot to put in the cement or some other important safety part of the well, which Wes Wilson calls “bad wells can go bad”.  This is a big issue in Colorado, where we see a large part of the spills do affect groundwater and a large part of the spills that affect ground water are not cleaned up. They might clean up the soil where the spill occurs but not the volatile portion that goes deeper. There is also leaking pits, which most are familiar with the incident that occurred in El Paso County, in which a fresh water pond blew out, which would have been a problem if they had chemicals in it.

With the great expansion of the use of hydraulic fracking, the development of unconventional natural gas development has had an increased occurrence in places where people work, live, and play.  The residents in homes near the fracking development sites started to show concern of public health. There have been multiple studies show that the inhalation of petroleum hydrocarbons can result in an increase risk of eye irritation and headaches, asthma symptoms, acute childhood leukemia, acute myelogenous leukemia, and multiple myeloma. Other assessments have concluded that ambient benzene levels can lead to the increased risk of developing cancer as well as chronic and acute non-cancer effects.  Over exposure to benzene levels can associate with other health affects such as acute and chronic nonlymphocytic leukemia, acute myeloid leukemia, chronic lymphocyte leukemia, anemia, and other blood disorders and immunological effects. Exposure to another petroleum hydrocarbon, xylene, can result in eye, nose, and throat irritation, difficulty breathing, impaired lung function, and nervous system impairment. There are many other gases that can affect not only the residents surrounding the fracking sites, but the sites themselves of course, which industry workers are exposed to higher health risks than anyone. In order to regulate, prospective medical monitoring and surveillance for potential air-pollution-related health effects is needed for populations  living and working in areas near the development of unconventional natural gas resource fracking sites.

For years environmentalists have been raging against hydraulic fracking. The Safe Drinking Water Act’s (SDWA) Underground Injection Control (UIC) program sets requirements for construction and operations of wells to minimize the risks of contamination of groundwater. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act excluded hydraulic fracking from the UIC regulations for oil, gas, or geothermal production. As the number of fracking wells increase, so does the volume of wastewater that requires disposal, which contains high levels of salt, various organic chemicals, inorganic chemicals, metals, and naturally occurring radioactive metals. In order to reduce the negative effects of hydraulic fracking, the government needs to be more clear about regulations and not excluding hydraulic fracking. The EPA is supposedly examining several different management methods to ensure safe snd legal options for disposal and flow-back are being used. In the past, Obama administration officials, as well as oil and gas companies, consistently contended that there was no evidence of water contamination as a result of fracking, contrary to the EPA’s findings. 

In conclusion, to answer the question “is hydraulic fracking harmful to the environment?” the answer is yes.  After hours of research there is no argument on whether or not this method is harmful.  My research displays the facts on what the negative consequences of hydraulic fracking are. Companies in the industry may try and argue that they are not doing any harm, but it is impossible to achieve the result of this method without doing at least some harm to the environment. But in the end not only does hydraulic fracking hurt the environment, it affects the health of the United States citizens. In final words, hydraulic fracking is resulting in many issues and something needs to be done.
