"There is a new player for water, which is oil and gas," said Kent Peppler, president of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. The redirection of water supplies to the fracking industry not only causes water price spikes, but also reduces water availability for crop irrigation. "We don't want to look up 20 years from now and say, Oops, we used up all our water," said Jason Banes of the Boulder, Colorado-based Western Resource Advocates. Since that water is permanently removed from the natural water cycle, this is bad news for drought-afflicted or water-stressed states, such as Arkansas, California, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, Texas and Wyoming. More than 90 percent of the water used in fracking well never returns to the surface. “In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste." Quigley, former secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. In addition, methane concentrations are 17 times higher in drinking-water wells near fracking sites than in normal wells. Only 30-50 percent of the fracturing fluid is recovered the rest is left in the ground and is not biodegradable. In 2011, the New York Times reported that it obtained thousands of internal documents from the EPA, state regulators and fracking companies, which reveal that "the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle."Ī single well can produce more than a million gallons of wastewater, which contains radioactive elements like radium and carcinogenic hydrocarbons like benzene. There have been over 1,000 documented cases of water contamination near fracking areas as well as cases of sensory, respiratory and neurological damage due to ingested contaminated water. The contaminated water is used for drinking water in local communities. Burning the furniture to heat the house.ĭuring the fracking process, methane gas and toxic chemicals leach out from the well and contaminate nearby groundwater.
FRACKED GAS METHANE DANGERS TV
72 trillion: gallons of water needed to run current gas wells.1.1 million: number of active gas wells in the United States.10,000: number of feet into the ground that the fracking fluid is injected through a drilled pipeline.600: number of chemicals used in the fracking fluid, including known carcinogens and toxins such as lead, benzene, uranium, radium, methanol, mercury, hydrochloric acid, ethylene glycol and formaldehyde.
8 million: number of gallons of water used per fracking.40,000: gallons of chemicals used for each fracturing site.To help keep track of all the bad stuff, here's a roundup of the various nasty things that could happen when you drill a hole in the surface of the earth, inject toxic chemicals into the hole at a high pressure and then inject the wastewater deep underground.īut first, let's take a look at some of the numbers: And while the process produces jobs and natural gas, the host of environmental, health and safety hazards continues to make fracking a hot-button issue that evenly divides Americans. government that the fracking process causes earthquakes, the list of fracking's deadly byproducts is growing longer and more worrisome.
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