Part II: Endangering U.S. Water Supplies
Basically, the initial steps for forming a fracking well start off the same as for any conventional well. A hole is drilled down past the first 50 feet or so of soil, down past fresh water aquifers and then into deeper formations which can be anywhere from 1000 feet to 4000 feet below the surface. Once past the water table, a steel case is placed down the borehole well. Cement is poured down the borehole shaft which backs up and fills the spacing between the borehole inner cavity wall and the steel shaft forming a cement annulus. Ideally, this is to prevent any contaminants from entering the water table.
Vertical drilling then continues till one is close to the shale rock formation which can be anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 feet below the surface. Vertical drilling continues until a kick-off point is reached where the borehole drilling is maneuvered to curve the shaft and then continue the drilling horizontally. The borehole shaft may continue horizontally for a few thousand more feet. The drill is removed and a new steel casing is put in place that extends through the full length of the borehole. Next a specialized explosive device is sent into the borehole which creates perforations through the steel case and makes holes right into the shale rock.
Next, under high pressure, a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand is pumped into the borehole, usually using big diesel powered pumps, which enters into the perforations made into the shale rock. As the water is pressured in, it creates fractures in the shale, hence the name hydraulic fracturing. Typically, after four to six weeks of drilling, anywhere from three to seven days are spent fracking into the shale rock enabling the release of oils and natural gas. The sand particles keep the factures in the rock open so as the water pressure is alleviated, the oil and gas can seep out through these highly permeable fracture pathways.
The process is highly intensive in its water usage and typically one fracking uses five million gallons of water, which is typically mixed with 40,000 gallons of chemicals like acids. Five million gallons of water is the enough to supply the needs of 150 people for one year. The oil and gas companies are not required to tell regulators what the chemicals are used in fracking. Actually, under the bipartisan Energy Policy Act of 2005, by what is referred to as the ‘Halliburton Loophole”, fracking is exempt from the Safe Water Drinking Act, the Clear Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. By the way, even while arguing about concerns for global warming, a then Senator Barrack Obama voted for the bill, and when it was brought up in a debate with Hillary Clinton during the democratic primaries for presidential contenders, Barrack Obama stated he voted reluctantly but wanted the United States to achieve energy independence and liked the provisions the bill had for ‘clean coal.’ For those that have been following the energy sector, ‘clean coal’ seems to be a propaganda tool for the coal industry and never materialized. A pilot plant with advanced carbon sequestration technology has been talked about but never constructed, yet the coal industry spent literally tens of millions of dollars marketing the concept.
Regarding the politics, both parties have been complicit in the current state of the fracking industry. Apparently, the only difference between the two parties is the Republican view that we are not doing enough fracking, especially on publicly owned land, and for this President Obama is occasionally accused of having a war on the oil industry. The current conservative view is that all federally owned land should be privatized and the government should be kept out of it. Although it probably appears normal in the current political landscape, this is quite a dramatic change in conservative ideology which once held a belief in conservation of America’s landscapes. It was the Republican Party that effectively began the first federal national parks in the 1870s. Aggressive environmental activism didn’t really pick up in the United States till the 1970s.
As the number of fracking wells has been rising at a high rate, the five million gallons of water per well, the equivalent of seven Olympic sized swimming pools, adds up quite rapidly. The industry likes to point out that a typical large size golf course uses up one million of water per week in the summer, and that such uses over time easily surpass the amount of water used in fracking. However, what is not brought up when such comparisons are made is that the water used in fracking is typically completely removed from the hydrologic cycle. In other words, when a golf course is watered, some of that water evaporates back into the air, and some runs off into nearby streams and the rest sinks into the soil and joins the water table. Other industries that use water will filter out particles and toxins and put the water back into the cycle, and so forth. The water from fracking is typically highly contaminated with chemicals and often radioactive with Radium-226 and Radium-228. The industry usually can’t recycle the water and instead the waste water is pressured into deep injection wells, sent more than a mile below the surface of the earth. Basically, the water is simply just removed from biosphere altogether. As there are concerns of long term future water shortages, one can see the danger of removing potentially potable water from the hydrologic cycle altogether.
Scientists have already noticed that global warming has increased drought cycles, and some of the areas hit by the most severe of droughts also have an active fracking industry competing for the local water supply. For instance, at the heart of the Texas fracking oil and gas rush, the Eagle Ford Shale formation, the local water aquifer levels have dropped by 300 feet. Some Texas communities had at one point ran out of water or came very close to the brink of running out of water. Many reservoirs in west Texas are still only at 25% capacity. The combination of drought and high water demand for fracking caused similar problems in Colorado and parts of California.
Since 2008, fresh water lakes have seen water levels decline, and many scientists attribute this to climate change. This has been especially noticeable among the Great Lakes which supplies water to 40 million American and Canadian residents. In the Great Plains region from North Dakota to Texas, the Natural Academy of Sciences has noted that over-pumping of the water aquifers by the farming community could deplete the groundwater supply by 70% over the next 50 years. Certainly, 97% of the water on the Earth is in our oceans, but only a mere 2.5% of that water is fresh water for which depend on to live. Of that 2.5%, less than 1% of that fresh water is readily accessible for human use as the bulk of the fresh water on this planet is actually located in the Antarctica. So we must ask ourselves, should we add the additional burden of fracking on our fresh water supplies that simply throws the water out of the system permanently?
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