How would you like to be able to light your water on fire? Sounds like some sort of spectacular magic act, doesn’t it? The great Josh Fox, director of the documentary Gasland, will now, for the audience’s enjoyment, perform a daring, mind-boggling trick in which he transforms ordinary water straight out of a kitchen faucet into flames before your very eyes.
Cool, right? Well actually, it turns out that that water contains not only flammable natural gas, but a dangerously toxic concoction of chemicals as well. You wouldn’t want to drink that, would you?
There’s a natural gas gold mine called the Marcellus Shale buried over a mile beneath our feet – that is, beneath New York State. Oil and gas companies are just itching to begin digging for it via hydraulic fracturing.
Hydrofracking: a process that involves drilling about 8,000 feet into the ground and then drilling horizontally. A charge is then shot through the pipe, which, like an earthquake, will cause the rock to fracture. Highly pressurized water and chemicals then go into the pipe and natural gas comes out.
The oil and gas companies love to make believe that this process is safe and well regulated. It’ll be a great job-creating boost to the economy and decrease our dependence on terrorist-supported foreign fossil fuel. After all, natural gas is a clean-burning, environmentally sound form of energy, right?
While I can’t deny that hydrofracking will create jobs and make money, I beg to differ that natural gas is actually that “clean.” A Cornell study revealed that carbon dioxide and methane emissions from unconventional sources like shale are just as bad as coal, if you take natural gas’s entire life cycle into account.
There’s also some overwhelmingly scary evidence that hydrofracking simply isn’t safe. Take Fox’s water-catching-on-fire example for instance. Water so contaminated that it’s actually flammable? You can’t tell me that that’s safe.
There have also been testimonies of bubbling and fizzing tap water, water that’s smelled like turpentine, brown, muddy-looking water that can’t be used for anything and water that’s come out pure black from the tap. Water that contains hydrocarbons and glycol ethers, trichlorobenzene and toluene, xylene and radium. Water that’s carcinogenic and can cause brain damage.
There is no denying that hydrofracking will contaminate drinking water supplies. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Preservation has estimated that one serious environmental concern occurs per 150 wells drilled. It might not seem like such a big deal that less than 1 percent of hydrofracking wells have screwed up, but when you think about the cumulative impact of the hundreds of thousands of wells that are waiting to be drilled in the next decade, you might want to think twice about taking that risk.
With so many conflicting viewpoints on hydrofracking, it might be difficult to distinguish the truth from the half-truths, the exaggerations and the downright lies. On the one hand you’ll see a commercial for natural gas with smiling men in hardhats gushing about their love for the environment and clean economics; on the other hand you’ll see a documentary about water pollution in apocalyptic proportions. As for me, I remain convinced that an ordinary person who has become dangerously sick living next to a fracking well is a more credible source than a company set to make millions.
So don’t frack with New York. Better yet, don’t frack anywhere!