Fracking has made billions of cubic feet of natural gas available. That’s fuel that can be used for cooking, heating, and some transportation. (Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory)
A new technique for extracting
natural gas is making it profitable
to drill in new gas fields all over
the country. The technique is
called hydrofracking, and it has
raised the nation’s natural gas
reserves by 35%.
But hydrofracking is not without
its critics. Samara Freemark tells us why some people
say the industry is moving faster
than regulators can keep up:
Transcript
A new technique for extracting
natural gas is making it profitable
to drill in new gas fields all over
the country. The technique is
called hydrofracking, and it has
raised the nation’s natural gas
reserves by 35%.
But hydrofracking is not without
its critics. Samara Freemark tells us why some people
say the industry is moving faster
than regulators can keep up:
Ten years ago the American natural gas market wasn’t looking too hot.
“In theory, America was running out of natural gas.”
That’s Susan Riha. She’s a professor of earth sciences at Cornell University. Riha says underground pools of traditional natural gas were starting to dry up.
But there’s another kind of gas – ‘unconventional’ natural gas. It’s suspended in tiny pockets in shale formations, like water in a sponge. And there’s unconventional natural gas all across the United States, especially in the Western states and Pennsylvania and New York.
But recovering large amounts of natural gas from shale formations was until recently, pretty much impossible.
“In the past, it’s been extremely difficult to get that gas out of that rock. They drill down, but the gas is only going to flow from right where they drill. But people began to put effort in to figuring out how to get this gas out. And maybe starting about a decade ago they began to get economically viable ways of recovering shale gas.”
The technique that drillers developed is called hydraulic fracturing – or fracking. Frackers dig mile-deep, L-shaped wells and blast them full of millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals. That solution holds open tiny fissures in the shale so the gas flows out.
The process raises some eyebrows in the environmental community, but we’ll get to their concerns in a second.
First let’s look at the upside.
Fracking has made billions of cubic feet of natural gas available. That’s fuel that can be used for cooking, heating, and some transportation.
And natural gas is a domestic energy source. It burns a whole lot cleaner than coal and oil. A lot of people say it could be a crucial part of the transition to greener energy.
Which is the point Thomas West made when I met up with him at a public hearing on gas drilling. West is a drilling advocate and attorney who represents gas companies in New York State.
“You have to realize that the shale plays, these unconventional resources, have changed the game in the United States. We now have a hundred years of capacity, which means we no longer have to rely on Mideastern oil. Gas is very usable, it doesn’t take much to make it usable, and it has a dramatic impact on air quality.”
But critics say fracking is a mixed bag.
“Things too good to be true, usually are.”
That’s Al Appleton. He’s an environmental consultant, and he says hydraulic fracking can cause all kinds of environmental problems – water contamination, ecosystem destruction, noise and air pollution.
And Appleton says the process is essentially unregulated. In 2005, Congress passed a law specifically exempting fracking from almost all federal environmental regulations.
“Basically what the law said is that things like the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Hazardous Waste Materials Act, the Clean Water Act, and other significant pieces of federal environmental legislation were not to be applied to the natural gas industry. So in essence, what your local dry cleaner has to comply to all sorts of regulations, the natural gas industry, they don’t have to follow these.”
Some members of Congress are trying to change that. They’ve introduced legislation to repeal fracking’s exemption, give the Environmental Protection Agency authority over the process, and require the industry to disclose what kinds of chemicals it injects into wells. As you might expect, the fracking industry is fighting the bill.
For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.