Hydraulic Fracturing

Hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking, is a 60 year old practice of pumping high pressure water into shale rock thousands of feet below the earth’s surface. The pressurized water is pumped through cement encased pipes at pressures reaching 9000 pounds per square inch. The treated water is forced into small cracks in the gas-rich shale rock, resulting in the breaking of the rock and the release of natural gas that would otherwise be unobtainable. Hydraulic fracturing is a safe, economically efficient way to drill for natural gas, create jobs, and lessen America’s dependency on foreign oil.

Safety is always an important factor when considering new methods for obtaining raw energy sources such as coal, oil, and natural and shale gas. The process of fracking can be considered relatively safe when compared to oil drilling and mining. For example, in 2010 an offshore drilling station suffered a malfunction in a blow back valve that caused a massive explosion killing 11 people and spilling an estimated 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (Center for Biological Diversity, 2011). While the cost of lost lives is immeasurable, the costs of lost profits from the spilling oil, and the clean-up, are astronomical. The consequences of oil spills are not only immediate, but can also be felt for years after. Similar to the BP oil spill, in 1989 the Exxon Valdez ship ran aground spilling an estimated 750 thousand barrels of crude oil, an amount that equals almost 10 million gallons, into the waters of Prince William Sound. Litigation from this incident alone was continued into 2008 and cost the Exxon corporation $507.5 billion in punitive damages (The Whole Truth, 2008). These costs are then shared among the end user of oil, which is the American population. In the same vein as oil drilling, coal mining can be a hazardous way to obtain raw materials to be converted into energy. There have been many well documented cases of mining disasters and accidents. In the same year as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, an accident at a gold and copper mine near Copiapo, Chile trapped 33 miners more than 2,000 feet underground (New York Times, 2011). Beyond the obvious dangers of a cave in, there are even dangers associated with surviving the cave in but becoming confined for an extended period of time, as were the 33 men. According to J. Davitt McAteer, a mine-safety consultant who led the Mine safety and Health Administration for former president Clinton, the first concern is sanitation. The obvious aspects of close confinement for long periods of time is how to keep the air and water needed to survive clean, and what to do about the volume of waste produced by 33 gown men (New York Times, 2010). Luckily for these miners the circumstances surrounding their imprisonment were favorable enough that they could survive longer than any trapped miners in history. While the story surrounding these 33 men and their underground