What It’s Like to Have Fracking Near You

Fracking – There’s more to it than than we realise

Most of us picture fracking as simply a concrete platform with a small rig on top. The platform is about the size of a cricket pitch or a high school football ground – if it’s just for one well.

With oil companies offering good rates to buy land with shale gas and oil underneath, it seems like a pretty good deal.

But there’s a lot more involved, and it’s not quite as “small” as it seems at first.

How Fracking is Set Up

Here’s what it takes to set up a fracking well – and I’d like you to imagine this happening near your home.

It can take up to 400 truck trips to complete a single well – all the noise and dust and diesel fumes rumbling past, damaging roads and land to access the site.

The land has to be carved up to support the rig(s), so there’s drilling and blasting and earth-moving equipment- all guzzling fuel and emitting noise and pollution.

Then the diesel drill rigs arrive. They are towering syringes that work round the clock to blast a toxic cocktail of water and chemicals deep into the earth at more than 9,400 pounds of pressure per square inch.

It’s a dirty, noisy, energy-intensive process.

It takes millions of gallons of water to break up the shale, and at least 30 percent remains underground forever.

The rest of it, along with the slightly radioactive, highly saline and heavy-metal-laden water that has existed alongside the shale for 400 million years, flows up to the surface over the lifetime of the well.

What Can Go Wrong?

It’s a dangerous industrial process and it’s impossible for it to be totally safe.

Even with the best will in the world, there will always be risks of accidents, mechanical failures, human error.

• There can be surface spills — of the fracking fluid or flowback water, or of diesel fuel.
• Sometimes diesel is dumped when a driver fails to navigate the hazards on back roads never meant to handle this kind of traffic.
• Natural occurrences such as earth tremors can damage the concrete casing of the wells, allowing toxins to leak.
• Groundwater can be fouled by drifting methane that migrated because the drillers – through carelessness, ignorance or just bad luck – failed to properly isolate those deposits.

There is risk of drought due to the massive use of water, as is happening in Texas.

If fracking were only taking place in isolated areas, it might still be OK. But the US opens up more fracking rigs every day.

The UK would need around 15,000 wells to replace North Sea Oil production – all on a small, densely-populated island.

An Extreme Example of Fracking

North Dakota USA experienced an oil boom in 2013. People were delighted, they had jobs.

But at what cost?

Watford City’s population rose from about 1,700 to more than 6,000 in 2 years because of the fracking oil boom. It meant:

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  A housing shortage so acute that men are forced to sleep in their trucks or in overpriced motels or live in one of the expensive prefab, dormlike “man camps” that have sprung up.

• Streets clotted with noisy, exhaust-belching tanker trucks, gravel trucks, flatbeds, dump trucks, service trucks, and pickups.
• More crime
• More highway accidents
• More medical emergencies
• More litter
• Overworked water and sewer systems.
• Prostitution.
• Registered sex offenders at large in the community.
• People on fixed incomes forced to move because they can’t afford steep rent hikes.

But many don’t mind – there’s investment in new roads and the school is being expanded. And service industries are springing up.

Just don’t mention climate change or fossil fuels or pollution there.

Are We Protected?

There will never be enough regulators to police all the trucks and tanks and rigs that will cover the countryside.

And when the wells are empty, will there be cleanup and restoration?

P.S. If your area isn’t suitable for fracking, don’t sit back and think you’re safe. You may be at risk from water contamination, radioactive waste and other nasties – find out more in this article Why Fracking Affects All of Us

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