For the story so far, click here
“They create a mixture of mostly fresh water with sand and nasty chemicals added. Then they inject this fluid at very high pressure, into a gas well, thousands of feet deep into the ground. Now forget the chemicals for a minute and just picture the fact that they use about 40,000 gallons of water every time they do this! And each well can be fracked 18 times. What a criminal waste of water! Anyway, the fluid is going down the pipe at such pressure that when it reaches the end of the well and hits the shale rock down there, it fractures it, making lots of tiny cracks, kept open with the grains of sand in the fluid, and the natural gas – that is methane – leaks out of these cracks into the well. So that’s how they get the gas.”
“What makes this business really horrifying is that during the process some of the toxic chemicals – and they use hundreds of different nasties in there, like lead, uranium, radium, mercury, hydrochloric acid, the list goes on and on – and the methane gas leach out from the system and contaminate the ground water. And the ground water is where our drinking water comes from. They are threatening the health and survival of everyone! In America they have found that drinking water wells near fracturing sites have 17 times higher concentration of methane in them than normal and some people have even been able to light their taps on fire because of the high level of gas in their water. Many others have become seriously ill from drinking it.”
To be continued …
*****
Information from Dangers of Fracking and Food and Water Watch
Fracking infographic adapted from one found at levellers.org
Violet's Vegan Comics 
I didn’t know Fracking at all !!! Thank you for amalgamating it with the story 🙂
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Nor did I ’til quite recently. Shocking stuff!
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Thank you, for that explanation. No wonder fracking is such a controversial issue. Of course the well-being of people is pushed aside when it comes to big money – totally immoral!
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Yes, and look at cafloyd’s comment
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Insanity. No other word for it…oh wait…there’s always Greed.
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Indeed, but look at cafloyd’s comment
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Hi. First, re: oil executives and fracking in their back yard – some news on this from last year (see, sometimes it pays to read the boring financial press) – this from USA Today re: Exxon-Mobil’s top exec: http://tinyurl.com/lyvz2v4 (actually based on WSJ stories at the time).
Then – and I hope this is not terribly boring – but in the past 2 years I read a novel set on labour organising and etc. in the early 1900s in West Virginia – Pennsylvania. In short: A scene early in the book described a guy pouring nitroglycerine down a well hole – where it would detonate (if not before) releasing oil and gas trapped in the rock. The biggest danger at the time was that the chemist/miner would blow himself up – it was done on such a small scale.
When the price of oil was >$100US a barrel large-scale fracking became economically viable. If you don’t count the environmental costs. Which many oil companies/politicians don’t.
Unless it happens in their own back gardens.
Anyway . . . it will be interesting to see what happens if oil prices remain low. U.S. frackers are suffering big time. Boo hoo.
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Wow. Thank you for this, it is a total eye-opener (and totally shocking though not surprising – is that possible?). I guess the surprising part is that he opposes his “own backyard” fracking site brazenly and openly without shame or embarrassment.
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I have to wonder if those people who do the fracking, own the companies and whatnot, live in the affected areas.. I would guess no. If they want to do it, they should have to live near it.
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I think you would definitely win that bet!
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after what you said I thought you’d be interested in this – look at cafloyd’s comment
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Reblogged this on Beechdey’s Weblog.
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Thanks for the reblog 🙂
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