Fracking is under fire, as we know, from those who insist that it does or can cause huge problems to the surrounding environment.
If this were true then it would be very important. For it's exactly fracking that is providing America with the gas to keep the lights on for another hundred years, so we'd rather like not to be poisoning ourselves by doing so.
This piece by an old friend, Peter Glover, gives us a list of the ten things we should all know about fracking:
# Hydraulic fracking has been around for 60 years. Developments made by U.S. engineers around 2008-9 have simply made the process much more commercially viable.
# Since fracking was introduced in 1949, over 2 million frack treatments have been pumped without a single documented case of treatments polluting a water aquifer.
# 90 percent of all gas wells drilled in the United States since 1949 have been fracked.
# The depth of most shale gas deposits drilled is between 6,000 and 10,000 feet – water aquifers exist at an average depth of 500 feet.
# Claims of ‘migration’ between the shale gas layers and water aquifers due to fracking or for any other reason, are patently absurd as the gas would have to pass through millions of tons of impermeable rock. If the rock was that porous, neither the water nor the gas would have been there in the first place. (As the hard data in fig. 1 from a study of 15,000 frac treatments in the Barnett Shale Field reveals plainly.)
I especially like that fifth point made there. The very existence of the layers of water and gas shows that cross contamination isn't really possible.
To add my own, entirely personal, supposition: that some to much of the opposition to fracking is due to opposition to fossil fuels altogether rather than to this specific process of extracting them.
Certainly I think that's what motivates much of the opposition in Europe for cheap gas supplies would very much undermine the roll out of renewables. Something which a very large number of people seem to be greatly over-invested in. As if it's a moral crusade rather than just a way to provide us with the energy we need and desire.