A Brief Note On The Impact Of Fracking

First let me explain what this process involves and how it works. Fracking involves using a 99.5% sand, water, and special chemical additive to help bore through rock to release the natural gas so it can be harvested (Loki (2015)). It is this

Imagine an economy in the United States if we were an oil exporting country, like those in the Middle East. The States falls victim to those countries because we do not export quite as much as they do. This problem could potentially be solved by upping the amount of oil and gas fracking. Then, that now unused oil can be sent out to other countries, turning a profit here. Although many people believe that it is harmful to the environment, and bad for the public around it. The largest being that it will contaminate the underground water supply. Despite this, many people can agree that it is overall beneficial. Hydraulic fracturing is essential to the United States, because it creates jobs, it generates income, it could potentially turn the economy around, and it is crucial to our energy production as a whole.

There is wide agreement among experts and the public that the current energy sources we use in the United States are in need of a replacement. The successful development of horizontal drilling by the energy industry coupled with the existing technology of hydraulic fracturing is now providing access to 100 years’ worth of energy in the form of natural gas located within our own borders, thousands of feet below the surface. Fracking is a fairly new method of extracting natural gas and has been very beneficial to our energy needs. The question is not how fracking has helped our goals for cleaner energy, but how fracking has affected our environment, our health and our water.

Fracking is becoming increasingly prevalent in today's society as a means to extract an increasingly rare resource from our environment. Despite the many arguments made in its favor by oil companies and supporters of such company’s hydraulic fracturing or fracking is harmful to people, the environment, and should be prohibited. In this paper the reasons given for fracking being beneficial are untrue. Explanations why the harm done by fracking outweighs the good will be given. There will be evidence shown for the damage hydraulic fracturing does to people and the environment.

“Hydrofracking refers to hydraulic fracking, a technique in which large amounts of water, combined with smaller amounts of chemicals and sand, are pumped under high pressure into a drilled gas well.” (Curtis 2011) Once the mixture of chemicals, sand, and water enter the well, they start to fracture the rock and create small cracks. The sand then fills in the rock cracks and allows the trapped gas to move freely and exit the well. Hyrdofracking is used because large amounts of natural gas are stuck under ground in dense layers of shale rock. The only way to break that gas free and retrieve it is through high pressure drilling. The most common area

Hydraulic fracturing, or more commonly known as ‘fracking’ is a technique designed by engineers to open fissures deep within shale to extract oil and natural gas. The practice involves using large amounts of high-pressured water along with proppants, usually sand, and a small amount of a chemical solution. The diagram below pictures the process of hydraulic fracturing. In the last few years, hydraulic fracturing has become a popular topic of debate centering on whether the increase in amount of fossil fuels is worth the cost of possible environmental damage. Fracking is not simply a way of providing more fossil fuels, but should also be seen as a viable solution to the nation’s foreign oil

The underlying causes for fracking are manifold such as heavy consumer demand for cheap, readily available natural gas, unpredictable economy, high unemployment rate, abundance of natural gas under the rocks, corporate ideology to maximize profits and natural gas by far being the cleanest burning fossil fuel compared to coal and oil. Then, environmental factors in conjunction with particular management practices, lax regulations and technical issues led to the catastrophic effects of fracking today. Plus, there are legal frameworks that slack and are not immediate effective, that eventually lead to particular drilling practices that later cause hazardous effects, directly and indirectly. So, there is a real complex, long and indirect chain of cause and effect in the fracking process.

Oil and natural gas companies have developed a way to drill for natural gas, a process called hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. Natural gas is a flammable gas mixture consisting of methane and several other hydrocarbons that occur naturally underground. Natural gas is used as fuel for heating, cooking, and even in some automobiles like the “RideOn” buses. This technique has only recently become economically feasible with the rising prices of fossil fuels, and there is much potential for recovering natural gas through fracking. However, fracking has many waste products and unusual side effects caused by the unnatural forces and materials used. Fracking has a detrimental effect on the surrounding environment through

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, has been around since the 1940’s. This is the act of injecting fluid into rocks or rock formations underground that will ultimately release natural gasses and oils. In the U.S. there are over 500,000 natural gas wells. On top of the already existing wells, many states across the country are rescinding their ban on fracking. This is one of the more debated topics when it comes to alternative energy. There is a big split on this issue and it is understandable. There are many pros but there are also many cons to come along with it.

Fracking can be described as the process used to remove natural gas located beneath the ground. In order to successfully acquire the valuable gas that can replace other sources of energy; water, sand, and unknown chemicals are sent under the ground through a pipe. The purpose is to create enough pressure with this toxic solution to make the gas come back into the surface. When it comes to fracking there are two major statements, one on favor and one against it. Researchers that are against fracking have long assume that the negative consequences are greater than the benefits. For instance, one eminent environmentalist named Michael Brune expresses his concern regarding the toxic waste that fracking involves. The corrosive solution required in fracking uses unknown chemicals that

Fracking extracts hydrocarbons from previously inaccessible sources of oil and gas using hydraulically pressurised liquid to fracture rock and release gas trapped in coal seams (Hester, R & Harrison, R). This gas was once unprofitable because

Fracking can extract a large amount of resources compared to other methods of exploitation that we used before. Since 2013, production of natural gases in the United States has been climbing rapidly, especially in shale gas. Shale gas has driven U.S production to a record level. In 2010, it is recorded that 1 million of barrels of oil per day are produced. But in 2013, the year with booming application of fracking, the generated barrels of oil per day were tripled, approximating 3 million daily. It could be deduced that more drilling rigs had been installed during the 3-year interval. However, the increase in the number of rigs was not enough in explaining the leap in production of resources. It was the new technique, fracking, that expanded the oil and gas industry in the US. In addition, fracking might be a temporary method to solve the problem of soaring demand for energy. Depletion of resources is posting a great concern for many countries, including the US. Massive U.S industry nowadays is having a huge demand of energy. By using the modern Fracking techniques, oil and gas producers are now able to exploit resources from hard-rock formations deeply under the ground, which they could not do previously. This solidify our hope that by using Fracking, the energy industry of the U.S is no longer suffer from the lack of

Hydraulic Fracking is an oil and gas extraction process used in the past 60 years. The process consists of drilling the underground until reach a shale layer, and them a high-pressure fracking fluid is injecting in this hole to fracture the rock underground, which will provide oil and gas to be extracted. As a huge extraction process it requires large quantities of water, sand and chemicals, which are to produce the fracking fluid, and in most of the cases all this water and chemicals are through away causing a huge environmental impacts. Although, all those environmental issues, the oil and gas industry will not stop its production due to it high productivity and cost benefit, so alternative processes have been developed to treat this water and chemicals used in the fracking process. The purpose of this report is to analyse the effectiveness and viability of those methods.

The oil industry in the United States is booming. However, not all oil or natural gasses are available by drilling. There are some oils and gasses trapped inside shale rock. To access these gases, a process called Hydraulic Fracturing, informally known as fracking, was invented. Hydraulic Fracking “is a controversial oil and gas extraction technique developed in the late 1940s to gain access to fossil energy deposits previously inaccessible to drilling operations. The process…literally involves the smashing of rock with millions of gallons of water- along with sand and an undisclosed assortment of chemicals in order to bring gas to the surface. (serc-carelton.edu).” This process combines water, sand, and chemicals

While it is true “fracking”, a procedure to obtain natural gas removal from shale formations, it is also true there have been infrastructure security issues associated with this practice. Furthermore, there have been ecological considerations from fracking brought to the forefront by countless environmentalists. Indeed, hydraulic fracturing, as it is referred to, is a process by which shale gas and oil is uprooted from a depth far below the earth’s exterior. The process of extracting shale gas and oil is employed aggressively while water is forced deep beneath the earth surface through a geological arrangement. From this arrangement, oil and gas is exerted back to the earth’s surface. Moreover, once the hydraulic fracturing process is