Why America needs hydraulic fracturing
Hydraulic fracturing also called fracking has been around for many years despite the recent events of controversy to continue fracturing or not. With the earth’s resources depleting rapidly every year and no sufficient replacement for energy humanity needs fracking. The process of fracking has been around for more than six decades. Fracking has been around since the 1940s and was created to increase the removal flow of oil and natural gas. In the words of chemical engineer Robert Rapier “Fracking involves pumping water, chemicals, and a proppant down an oil or gas well under high pressure to break open channels in the rock holding the oil or gas (Rapier).” A proppant can be different materials,
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Therefore with resources becoming scarce humanity needs to extract the most from what the earth has. In fact from adding gasoline to your vehicle, to power plant facilities using natural gas instead of burning coal to power homes, to computes and cell phones, almost everything in our lives depend on an oil based product and fracking is the solution for the depletion of fossil fuels. Three controversial issues with hydraulic fracking are nearly everything people use daily has a petroleum based product, contamination of drinking water also the surrounding soil, and the financial impact on the economy. Many people in America do not realize the positives that comes with fracking. It is a great way to help the economy in the United States. Fracking decreases the price of all petroleum products including the price in gas. When gas prices decrease it allows other products such as food, plastics, and other petroleum goods to also go down in price. With these savings being passed down to the consumers it makes the cost of living in America much easier for many people who are living with a minimum wage budget. Minimum wage going up in Oregon and gas prices declining creates a stir in people making them spend more and builds consumer confidence on what is spent. In turn this rapid spending creates a boom in the American economy. With fracking producing nine million barrels a day and decreasing prices by forty five
Fracking is a controversial topic of discussion for a majority of people. Fracking is also known as hydraulic fracturing which is a method of extracting natural gas stored in shale rock. It involves forcing rock to fracture by pumping millions of liters of water and chemicals at extremely high pressure into the ground. The technique of fracking has been known since the 1940’s. Prices of natural gas and other fuels are rising steadily. Fracking has been used more than a million times in the USA alone.
Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is an oil and gas drilling process that is used to extract oil and natural gas from deep underground. Fracking is the cheapest route for oil and gas companies to make billions of dollars. The majority of the time the cheapest way is not always the best way of doing things. Hydraulic fracturing is not a good thing just because it makes money for--at times--everyone involved, as it causes our air and water to be polluted. There should be more regulations and laws to prevent contamination and protect our air and water from fracking pollution.
Five million gallons of water has gotten wasted to fill just one fracking well. All of that water when the frack is done becomes contaminated. (Is Fracking a Good Idea?) Once the frack is done a toxic pit is just left there. If the wells that were fracked are not cased properly that hazardous waste can leak into people’s drinking water, or the wells could burst. There are also other options for energy that are renewable unlike crude oil, coal, gas, oil shales, and tar shales. (History of Energy Use) Fracking is not good because it uses large quantities of water, the wells can only be fracked a few times, and it can contaminate water although it is an inexpensive alternative source of energy.
Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, is a process the the oil and gas industry uses to extract natural gas and oil from shale rock formations buried deep within the Earth. Fracking is done in order to recover oil and natural gas from formations and areas that scientists didn’t think were possible to produce. It is also used for the extraction of oil and natural gas from older wells in more mature oil and natural gas fields. Many people don’t know about the many harmful effects to people and the environment because of fracking. Hydraulic fracturing is harmful to the environment and people because it contaminates drinking water, pollutes the air, and threatens the climate.
With these negative side effects of fracking, which affect the people and the environment in a terrible way, there are people who benefit from this. One set of people who benefit directly from the extraction process is the oil and gas industry workers. These industries perform the extraction of the gas; this provides them a source of income. Other than the industry workers, we the people, the consumers of energy, are also benefitting from the extraction of shale. We use the natural gas extracted to power our houses, heat our houses, and to power our stoves so our houses are heated. Fracking will continue
In recent years, the subject of hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking has been a constant subject of interest in the news media. The pros and cons of fracking are passionately debated. However, the public should become educated on the subject of fracking prior to choosing a side of the argument. In the scholarly article, “Super Fracking,” published in 2014, by Donald L. Trucotte, Eldridge M. Moores, and John B. Rundle, a detailed description of fracking is provided, followed by their analysis of current issues surrounding the controversy. According to Trucotte, Moores, and Rundle, fracking saves the consumer money. The wellhead cost to produce natural gas in January of 2000 was two dollars and sixty cents per one thousand cubic feet. At an alarming rate, the cost at the wellhead to produce natural gas had risen to eight dollars per one thousand cubic feet by January of 2006. Comfortingly, the wellhead cost dropped to two dollars and eighty-nine cents by the end of 2012. Impressively, gas production increase and price decrease over the time period are a result of fracking. In their article, Trucotte, Moores, and Rundle describe in great detail that hydraulic fracturing, most commonly referred to as fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth to fracture the layers of rock so that a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the oil or natural gas inside. This method of fracking has been used commercially for the last fifty years.
Fracking has been an issue ever since it started back in the 1860’s. It was not until the 1940’s, when modern day hydraulic fracking started to be an issue to most individuals, which has affects, many individuals. This method of getting oil consists of a drilling technique, which allows individuals to extract oil and gas from shale rock. Drilling holes and getting gas has a variety of pros and cons within the years. Fracking has both sides to an argument like any other thing in this world.
Here in the state of Oklahoma, the economy completely revolves around one main thing and that thing is oil and natural gas. With that comes the necessity for finding the oil and gas trapped in the earth so that it can be converted to revenue for the companies and the state as a whole. The most popular way of finding the trapped resources though is becoming public enemy number, one in some people’s minds. This form of extracting oil and gas is called hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as “fracking”. What is fracking though and why is it so bad? Fracking is defined as the injection of fluid into shale beds at high pressure in order to free up petroleum resources (such as oil or natural gas) (Merriam-Webster). The reason the most effective
The global crisis surrounding energy needs grows in severity as time goes by and in order to solve it, scientists have created the innovative solution known as hydraulic fracturing (Source 5). Hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as “fracking,” is a process that injects water, chemicals, sand, and other materials into layers of shale. The injected mixture cracks the layers of shale, releasing trapped natural gasses that can be collected (Source 1). Fracking occurs deep under the surface of the earth, miles below the groundwater that is accessed from drinking-water wells. In the mid-2000s, “fuel prices were rising rapidly” (Source 5). Hydraulic fracturing was a cheap solution that not only brought the world out of a state of emergency but made oil prices drop. The new method of gas collection grew the oil and gas industry, benefiting people all around the world. Fracking is a cheap, effective solution to global needs, but is under attack from skeptics who worry about environmental hazards. The claims against fracking not only have no real evidence but also risk destroying the jobs in the oil and gas industry as well as support for energy needs. Hydraulic fracturing is not only a cheap but a safe method that supports global needs surrounding both energy and jobs.
There is widespread agreement among most experts that the current energy sources we use in the United States today are in need of a change. How we rely on the fossil fuels of coal and oil is a concern for two main issues: which is the negative impact on the environment and how the U.S. relies on other countries for supplies. This too has created issues on the political standpoint of the situation. This is where hydraulic fracturing comes in to play. Hydraulic Fracturing is a horizontal drilling process by the energy industry that has presented the means to solve both problems. This technology has provided the U.S. access to 100 years’ worth of energy. Natural gas has been located within the country’s borders and thousands of feet below
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.
The definition of fracking is, creating fractures in rock formations by putting a specially made liquid into cracks to make them open up more to allow more oil and gas to pass through. The use of fracking to help the extraction of oil and natural gases dates back to the 1860’s. At the time nitroglycerin or dynamite was used to increase output. It wasn’t until the 1940’s when hydraulic fracking started being experimented with. However, the first successful use of the process was done in 1950. Ever since then fracking has been used worldwide.
Hydraulic Fracturing is a process that involves drilling a well and injecting water at high speeds to break up rocks and minerals underground and allows natural gas to flow out to be collected, according to Hydraulic Fracturing Should be Banned written by the Food and Water Watch non-profit organization. The Article goes on to claim that new fracking methods, technologies, and chemicals to reach more and more remote gas reserves carry a greater risk than that of gas drilling. The desperation of gas companies to find more natural gas pockets has led them to employ riskier methods to ensure they find what
Fracking has actually changed out future as we know it, and has made it possible for many things. Fracking will make the world run on natural fossil fuels for much longer, which is also better for the environment and us. In 2015, the U.S. reached its all time high in oil production in 14 years and is only expected to continually rise. Oil production in the U.S. is one of the main sources of jobs for people living in the U.S. (Nunez, 2013). Fracking is a good way to employ U.S. citizens and is also a good way to get natural ways of oil production. As we all
Hydraulic Fracturing, or Fracking as it is known in the common vernacular, was developed in the early 1940s. Fracking describes the recovery of natural gas from deep layers inside the Earth, through the use of water, sand and chemicals. The technique has been known for nearly 65 years; however, due to a combination of new technologies, higher oil prices, and the exhaustion of previously available natural gas deposits in the U.S. fracking has become quite popular, but quite controversial as well. As of 2015, fracking has been done over 1 million times in the U.S. alone.