Just in case you were worried that the staged PR blitz by Cuadrilla Resources, announcing a huge find of shale gas under Lancashire, to try to keep one of its main investors off life support, meant that there isn’t any horribly depressing articles cataloging problems with fracking to read, we bring you a choice selection of new problems with fracking that you might not have heard of before.
One issue no one seems to have thought much about up until now is the sand used in fracking. Sand is used as a proppant to hold open cracks in the rock. Sand sounds simple but in fact there are multiple stages to the fracking process where different size sand grains are needed to prop open different size cracks in the rock. This high quality sand is needed in large quantities and there are now shortages in the US. This is resulting in an explosion in sand mining, which you might not be surprised to hear has a whole lot of problems of its own. These include air pollution from dust produced, where if “inhaled, crystalline silica, a building block in so-called frac sand, is a potential carcinogen and can cause lung and other diseases, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration”. Problems with water contamination are also cited.
Another concern is what happens to be above the rock formation that is being fracked. It is something that apparently concerns the US Army Corps of Engineers, to the extend that they wrote this letter in February suggesting that fracking within 3000 feet of the dams they maintain might risk as “catastrophic dam failure”, presumably due to the increased potential for earthquakes and perhaps subsidence. Of course you could think of plenty of other structures, such as nuclear power stations that you might not want to be fracking under. This does not seem to greatly concern the companies involved however, probably because their whole modus operandi is to frack an area and then move on to greener pastures with no concern with what they leave in their wake.
Finally something you might want to ponder while companies like Cuadrilla Resources are talking up how they will improve the “energy security” or reduce the carbon emissions of the UK, is the profit motive (and means) that they have to induce people burn through the gas that they are producing as fast as possible. Companies like Chesapeake Energy in the US are apparently busy trying to increase natural gas demand in order to push up prices and increase their profits (“Chesapeake has pledged to redirect about 1-2 per cent of its forecast annual drilling budget away from efforts to increase natural gas supply towards projects to stimulate natural gas demand”). And the more money they make the more they will be able to spend on getting people to burn more. If Cuadrilla is allowed to become a multi-billion pound company like Chesapeake then it will also be using its muscle to create new markets for its product and make sure that the UK stays hooked on what it is pushing until there is nothing left to burn, or probably any water to drink.
