Summary: The Benefits Of Fracking

Earthquakes, water contamination, air pollution: these are some of the dangerous and environmentally devastating side effects of fracking (hydraulic fracturing). Fracking has been implemented at the Fayetteville Shale, which stretches across Arkansas, to access natural gas buried deep below the surface of the earth. Fracking enthusiasts tout the economic benefits of this method of tapping our natural resources and are quick to dispute any argument from environmentalists. However, a close examination of the facts proves that Arkansans stands to lose more than they will gain from fracking. Hydraulic fracturing does not only waste water, but contaminates the water supply. Fracking pollutes the air by means of methane emissions, use of fossil
Regardless of where the water ends up, it is effectively wasted. It is too complicated and expensive to completely purify water used in hydrofracking because of all the chemicals. Therefore, the water can never be safe to replace in streams. Up to 8,000,000 gallons of water, therefore, is taken out of the water cycle. Environmentalist Roger Drouin argues that this may be one of the causes for droughts in Arkansas and Texas during the past few years (11). 4 Another way that hydraulic fracturing ruins Arkansas’s water supply is by pollution.
Even though evidence points against water becoming flammable due to fracking, and water radiation has proven to not be as harmful as some critics propose, hydrofracking, nevertheless, does contaminate water. A water quality study in Pennsylvania shows that wells in close proximity to fracking cites can have impressively increased amounts of methane dissolved in the water. As Sid Perkins, writer for Science News, Stars and
Stripes, and the Columbia Missourian, reveals, “wells located more than 1 kilometre from fracking operations averaged about 1.1 milligrams of dissolved methane per litre.
But in water taken from 26 wells within 1 km of one or more fracking
3). Obviously, each truck uses lots of diesel to carry such a heavy load.
“About 22.38 pounds of CO2 are produced by burning a gallon of diesel fuel,” says the
U.S. Energy Information Analysis. If each truck used ten gallons of diesel, then about
45,000 pounds of CO2 would be produced per well. That is a large carbon footprint! The methods used in fracking are very harmful to air quality as well. To clean and maintain the wells, the gas has to be released. Venting is one of the greatest problems with fracking. The process of venting the gases releases methane and possibly “other hydrocarbons such as ethane, propane, butane, and pentanes as well as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes and hexanes, hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and carbon dioxide” (Air 6
Pollution and Fracking 21). Another technique used when drilling for gas is flaring, burning of dangerous or useless gases. This also contaminates the air by releasing a variety of harmful gases. However, flaring is not nearly as bad as venting. Though methane is a greenhouse gas, The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency claims that it is
“a clean-burning fuel” (Understanding the Basics of Gas Flaring 9). Therefore, it