By Kaitlyn Mattiace
I like to drink water. I like to drink water that is clean and safe, and I have never had to question the purity of the water I’m drinking, but I’m afraid I might have to sometime soon.
Imagine a giant drill going as deep as 8,000 feet into the ground, then drilling horizontally to blast the land with millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals. The resulting pressure fractures the shale, opening fissures that allow natural gas to flow out of the well. This process, known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is illegal in North Carolina—for now. Despite the suspected dangers and risks, some North Carolina lawmakers are determined to legalize fracking.
Gee, what a great idea! Why wouldn’t we want our land super-blasted with water that contains over 80,000 pounds of chemicals? Never mind the 2-5 million gallons of usable water that is wasted in each frack.
Gas comes up in the water and must be separated from it on the surface. Only 30-50% of the water is typically recovered from a well. Most of this non-biodegradable juice is left behind as highly toxic wastewater waiting to leech into our soil, contaminate our drinking water and decrease soil fertility, destroying our farms. Believe it or not, the salad you had for lunch was in the ground at some point before it got in the pretty plastic bag at the grocery store.
Let me pause and acknowledge the Safe Drinking Water Act, a piece of legislation passed in 1974 to ensure clean drinking water free from contaminates. But wait, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempted natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Therefore, companies don’t have to meet safety regulations listed in this legislation, or have to tell us what chemicals they are using in fracking, making it easy for them to use whatever it takes to maximize profit.
This is a very bad idea. Pollution caused by the wastewater is enough to devastate our whole ecosystem. It all starts with the little bitty microorganisms in our water that other creatures feed off. They cannot tolerate a change in pH, salinity, or chemical presence in the water, so they die off. Without the tiny organisms that are the base of the food web, whatever species feeds on them has less food. It’s all a chain reaction. Everything has an effect on everything else. You lose one piece, such as a safe environment to live in, and everything/everyone else is at risk.
Supposedly, the wastewater is remediated by the fracking companies using evaporators to evaporate volatile organic compounds and condensate tanks to steam off VOCs. They then truck off the wastewater to a water treatment facility. I don’t understand how you can possibly effectively collect all of the contaminated water and separate out the gas and chemicals without dispersing any chemicals, wastewater or gas straight into the atmosphere.
I doubt that these companies consider the gas being used and emissions given off by the 100 or more trucks needed to ship the two million gallons of water per frack. Maybe they think it’s ok to use tons of energy to transport the water, because more energy is being accumulated through the fracking in which these trucks are needed. It doesn’t make sense to me.
While this may seem like an effective way to treat the wastewater, it actually creates more pollution. When the evaporated VOCs come into contact with diesel exhaust from trucks and machinery at the well site, a few chemical reactions occur, and ground-level ozone (the bad type of ozone!) is produced.
Duke University conducted a study regarding fracking sites at Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and Utica Shale in upstate New York. They found evidence of “methane contamination of shallow drinking-water systems in at least three areas of the region and suggest important environmental risks accompanying shale-gas exploration.” While methane dissolved in water is not a classified health hazard for ingestion, it sure is flammable and is an explosion and fire hazard.
In some cases, contamination is so bad people are finding if they take a flame to their running water faucet, it will burst into a stream of fire. Mmmmm, drink up!