While energy efficiency and renewable power offer the largest, cleanest, and cheapest ways to meet our energy needs, natural gas has a role to play, especially in replacing dirty coal power.
But the Natural Resources Defense Council can not support hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” to tap natural gas from shale until we are convinced that local communities, watersheds and habitat are protected to the maximum possible extent from the risks it presents and authorities have the tools they need to enforce essential safeguards.
At the state and federal levels, we’re not there yet.
The rapid growth of fracking – roughly 75,000 wells have been drilled in just the past five years – means regulators across the country have been overwhelmed. Fracking is dangerous and destructive. Millions of gallons of water are injected through a well –sometimes a mile deep- to crack the shale and open up pockets of gas. The water is mixed with sand and chemicals, some of which are toxic or carcinogenic, to make what is called fracking fluid.
After a well is fracked, between 10 percent and 40 percent of this fluid returns to the surface, carrying toxic heavy metals and volatile organic compounds, high levels of salts and, in some cases, radioactive elements from deep underground.
Even when fracking operations go well, it puts water at risk – underground, on the surface and at our tap – as well as plant and animal life that depends on clean water.
In drilling though, accidents happen.
Last April, near Canton, Pa., a blowout gushed thousands of gallons of toxic fracking fluid into a stream that fed Towanda Creek, a tributary of the Susquehanna River, the mother channel of the Chesapeake Bay. The Environmental Protection Agency found contamination at three private wells and we still don’t know the damage done to affected rivers and streams.
More than 92,000 gallons of fracking fluid spilled out of a Killdeer, N.D., blowout last September. Two months earlier, seven rig workers were burned when a fracking well near Moundsville, W.Va., hit a methane pocket that sent flames raging 50 feet into the air.
Blowouts aren’t the only problem. Tanks can rupture, equipment can fail, impoundment ponds can overflow or simply leak, fracking fluids can spill. Fracking fluid is suspected of contaminating drinking water in Arkansas, Colorado, North Dakota, Texas, Wyoming and other states.
We need comprehensive plans for dealing with the vast quantities of hazardous waste that fracking creates and the danger it poses. Currently this industry isn’t even bound by the provisions of cornerstone federal safeguards like the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. That must be fixed. Since our founding four decades ago, NRDC has stood up for fresh air, clean water and healthy habitat coast to coast. Right now fracking puts our workers, our waters, our air and wildlife at risk. NRDC can not support fracking unless we have done everything possible to address those risks. And, over the long run, we must invest in greater efficiency and wider use of the clean, renewable energy sources that can sustain us into the future.