Fracking or: How I learned to stop worrying and love fossil fuels

When I envisioned advocating for controversial topics as a method to further my writing skills, I imagined this as the topic I was going to be writing about. I might have taken most of my classes in the social sciences, but I have always been a tech/science nerd at heart. Nothing is cooler to me than watching giant machines move and figuring out how they work. This most likely explains my lack of a social circle throughout high school. It also might explain how a guy who believes strongly in man-made Global Warming can also support a system of energy which involves colossal pumps oscillating above a barren landscape.

In my experience talking with college students about hydraulic fracking and it's closely intertwined sister technology horizontal drilling, there have been two primary concerns that I have heard repeated several times.

The first is a local pollution problem. Many have seen the 2010 documentary Gaslands and few can forget the scene where an unassuming resident manages to light a running faucet on fire. It is heavily suggested in the film that this was due to fracking fluids seeping into the resident's groundwater well.

The second problem is one of a larger and more foreboding scope. Students are understandably skeptical of relying on yet another fossil fuel in the age of Global Warming. The process we call fracking has seen its most wild success in the areas of natural gas and oil. It has increased US production capacity of oil several times and has brought both natural gas and oil prices to record lows. For an environmentalist, this does not seem like a cause for rejoicing.

I can't address these concerns in a complete manner with such a short article format like this but I hopefully can get the ball rolling a bit.

Let's start with the first concern. I need to add a bit of a quantifier to this one. I don't think that fracking is necessarily all that great for the communities where it occurs. I went to Williston, North Dakota two years ago at the height of the oil boom and I can assure you the town was not a pretty site.

This was probably the craziest thing I saw in Williston. I stayed with a real estate developer via AirBnB and to make some additional profit, he had leased out this closet to an oil rig worker. Rent was 600 dollars a month for the closet. I slept in a full room since I was paying 50 dollars a night. Unfettered capitalism at its finest.

The formerly quiet enclave roughly 2 hours west of Minot Air Force base had multiplied in size several times since the boom had begun. Large and dirty SUV trucks dominated the landscape, tough looking male oil workers seemed omnipresent, and the entire road network was collapsing under the weight. I can't begin to imagine what it would be like for a family to move out to Williston for peace and quiet, only to be rudely awakened by the machines of creative destruction. Not to mention, with the rapid fall in oil prices since my visit, the town has ceased its massive influx of population and its boom state but the fracking industry's rapid transformation of the area remains.

But perhaps because I have never had to undergo such a transformation in my own town, I see this as an unfortunate but necessary part of an innovative economy. As Charles Wheelan writes in Naked Economics, the computer revolution might have been great for the United States as a whole, it was a terrible time for the typewriting business. Not to mention, that same solitude craving family most likely would have become millionaires after realizing they were sitting on black gold.

But since WiIlliston has started to stabilize and its rapid transition near complete, the real question is, does the process of fracking damage the environment it inhabits and its immediate vicinity? The surprising answer is not really.

Let's go back to the resident in Gaslands who lit his faucet on fire. It should be said that while this segment does highlight a very real issue with well leakage, the faucet fire was not at all the result of this. Quite honestly, I consider it outright fabrication by the director.

In fact, this particular man's water well had been investigated multiple times by Colorado environmental regulators, once before the film was released and once after. Both times clearly indicated that the leakage was not coming from any oil or gas drilling activities and stemmed from breakdown of living organisms. Don't take my word for it though, both reports are publicly available online. I do have to wonder why this man had not fixed this problem considering he has been informed about it several times.

THERE ARE ZERO RECORDED INCIDENTS OF FRACKING FLUID LEAKING INTO WATER SUPPLIES AND A MINIMAL NUMBER OF INCIDENTS THAT INVOLVE ANY SORT OF COMPLICATIONS FROM DRILLING.

But regardless of that particular case, if a well is constructed improperly, well contaminants can leak into the groundwater. This is not really a super huge concern with the fracking procedure itself since that usually occurs far below where we derive fresh water sources, but rather with standard oil and gas mining. If the top of a well is not properly sealed up, not so great things can leave the vicinity of the well.

The good news is that it is relatively easy to prevent this. A few layers of cement are sufficient to stop any fluids from leaking outside the vicinity of the well and of course these layers need to be maintained. I will freely admit that this needs to be stringently enforced, but in the grand context of the problems of delivering energy, this is nowhere close to the largest issue. Despite the EPA previously being far more lax about this than they should be, there are zero recorded incidents of fracking fluid leaking into water supplies and a minimal number of incidents that involve any sort of complications from drilling.

Did anyone see Gaslands II? This is an even worse fraud than the flaming faucet scene. It's pretty easy to cause a hose fire when you intentionally hook up the hose to a gas vent instead of a water source.

This is looking like this is going to be a two parter so I will spend the rest of this talking about one other local pollution issue I hear a lot about: earthquakes.

Like the issue of well leakage, this has some basis in truth. Gaslands mentions at some point that fracking is by definition causing earthquakes. I suppose this is true, fracking is the process of cracking rock under the earth's surface. But if I dug a hole right now and started jumping up and down, I could also make a plausible case that this is in fact an earthquake.

The real question is how harmful is this activity? Are these earthquakes affecting anyone in negative ways? I will give this a somewhat qualified no.

For the fracking procedure itself, the amount of force is far far too small to create a destructive earthquake. Generally, it is accepted that the power of the fracking fluid injected into a well site can generate a range of 1.0 to 2.0 on the Richter scale. This might sound like a lot until it is pointed out that a change of 1 on the scale is a difference of magnitude by about 30. There has never been a single earthquake caused by fracking which has caused any damage.

That being said, when the fracking fluid comes back to the surface, it needs to be disposed somewhere since it is not at all suited for drinking. To that end it has frequently been put into deep water disposal sites and these very much have the capacity to cause destructive earthquakes. A 5.6 earthquake was registered in Oklahoma due to this process and it caused a significant amount of destruction. A magnitude 5 level earthquake is hundreds of thousands greater in force than a level 1 (30X30X30X30X30). This is not acceptable for the communities around deep disposal sites and quite honestly, these have been happening way more than they should be.

A picture that was simply too great for me not to include. This is Gary, the man who lives in the closet pictured earlier in the article. He is standing on top of a storage tank for one of the wells that he is paid to inspect.

But once again, there is good news. Placement of these sites matters a great deal and there is no reason they need to be put in areas which can trigger such large scale destruction. Simple procedures like moving deep water disposal sites away from fault lines can virtually eliminate any risk of high magnitude earthquakes. There are also a variety of ways that fracking fluid can be reused in the fracking procedure itself that would prevent the need for disposal at all.These are both very doable things, they are in everyone's best interest, and are already being done. States with deep water disposal issues have been cracking down extremely hard on problem sites that are likely to produce earthquakes plus the oil and gas industry has stopped disposing most of its fracking fluid.

I strongly believe that important people are aware of this problem and that this is not going to be a significant issue going forward.

So hopefully I have gotten some to think a little more about the ways in which it is conceivable that fracking will not cause significant local environmental problems. I suspect though that the more controversial piece will be my next one where I talk about fracking's role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.