Fracking fluid: coming to an aquifer near you soon
In Cuadrilla’s February submission to parliament, the company points out it’s fracking fluids are found in nappies, glass cleaner, salt, and bleach. Even salad cream gets a mention.
Reading the submission you’d imagine the company simply nips down to the local superstore to get its chemicals.
In reality this attempt at normalising fracking fluids is utterly misleading. The scale at which the company pumps chemicals underground is of a different magnitude altogether.
A quick look at the experience of the management team reveals why.
Conservative estimates from the Tyndall Centre’s Report on Shale Gas shows a single frack requires 1.1m litres of water (or 1,100m2). Considering a borehole can be more than 2000m long, that would certainly seem to fill it. Caudrilla says 0.15% of that is fracking fluid. That’s 1650 litres of chemicals (or 1.65m2) per fracture.
Not much: so far so Tesco.
In the course of their collective careers, Cuadrilla’s management have fracked more than 3000 wells. And each well gets fracked, at Tyndall’s lower estimate, six times. So we get 1650 per fracture, times 3000 wells times six fractures. Suddenly we have a staggering total: in the course of their fracking history, Caudrilla’s management have injected 29,700,000 litres of chemicals underground.
Do the math. That’s nearly 30 million liters of friction reducers (polyacrylamides), surfactants, potassium chloride, dilute acid and viscosity agents (as well as the chemical ingredients the company is not disclosing).
On top of that the management team have been involved in the injection of more than 19 billion litres of water into the ground (1.1m litres times 3000 wells times six fracks). This inhuman amount is the equivalent of the daily water use of 33 million Americans – or 1.2 days’ water for the whole of the German population (using water consumption stats from the UN).
These environmental criminals are now proposing 400 wells in the UK. To put it in perspective, that’s 3.96 million litres of chemicals dissolved in 2.64 billion litres of water, all pouring under Lancashire.
This ludicrous poisoning and expenditure of a natural resource is crazy. Fracking must be stopped. Now.
