Frigging fracking

By now you have probably heard of the process of induced hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. fracking or methane mining), which many say will make the United States energy independent.

I recently retired from a state environmental agency, where I worked for ten years in the section that issued air pollution permits for oil and gas production facilities and for various regulated facilities associated with fracking.  What follows is my personal assessment of fracking.

Several people are making and will continue to make lots of money in that industry.  However, that money will not benefit the 99%, except by giving them a temporary drop in the price of the natural gas they use.

Fracking requires that thousands, and perhaps millions, of holes be drilled in the earth to reach the shale beds that will be fracked.  These drill holes are lined to prevent cross contamination into strata containing our subsurface water supplies.  Most of the liners don’t leak now.  Some leak now, and more will eventually leak; no engineered system is perfect.  Eventually, most or all subsurface water supplies will be affected in some way, and many will become contaminated.

While the fracking is being conducted, tanks and open ponds of nasty shit are installed on the surface to facilitate the process.  They spew contaminants into the air.  When the equipment is eventually removed the ponds and tanks are cleaned up, but the cleaning process is not perfect.  Contamination remains.

Millions and billions of gallons of water is used in the fracking process, and it becomes contaminated.  Companies are now purifying it for reuse, but the purification process leaves behind a concentrated brine of contaminants.  This mess also has to be disposed of somehow.

The drilling process leaves behind a residue called drill cuttings, and the cuttings also are contaminated.  Some companies extract the hydrocarbons remaining in the cuttings to cut down on their volume, but the remaining solids are heavily contaminated and also must be disposed of somehow.

The collected solid contaminants mentioned above are either put into landfills or deposited as mountains of debris on the surface.  Some of these mountains are then further processed to produce road base, which is used to pave new or existing highways.  This further spreads the contamination.

Collected liquid contaminants are often injected into deep wells below the water supply, and these wells also have liners susceptible to leakage.  And the shit the wells contain will never degrade, so that if the wells ever leak a flood of crap is available to release back into the environment.

I predict that the situation will become very similar to what happened to the nuclear industry.  It was predicted that nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter”; in fact it has become an environmental catastrophe, and the cost to fully clean up the nuclear mess will far exceed any benefit obtained from the use of nuclear power.  And the collected nuclear waste will remain practically forever, requiring continued attention as the containers breakdown and leak, generation after generation.

The same thing will happen to the frigging fracking waste.  The short term profits from fracking will go to the one percent, while the long-term costs of this industry will be borne by the rest of us in the form of contaminated water supplies, sick and dead wildlife, increased human mortality, and a permanently degraded ecosphere.

It’s not worth it.  It really isn’t.