The dirty secret that oil and gas industry hugely pays to keep about fracking, is that it is more harmful to the environment than other fossil fuel recovery methods. It is not by any stretch of objective science, a cleaner bridge fuel to a green tomorrow. Besides
emission of methane in huge amounts into the air,
[pie chart below] the high-pressure enhanced recovery technique contaminates ground water with a host of toxic chemicals. Ever since the EPA proved that fracking wells do pollute ground water with a two year study at Pavilion, Wyoming, the industry has employed a legion of lobbyists and other assorted influence peddlers like former Pennsylvania governor, Tom Ridge, and
even the same PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, that developed the tobacco industry's propaganda campaign, to ward off more regulation and closure of the infamous Halliburton loophole that exempts fracking fluids from the Safe Drinking Water Act. The charts below show the possible migration routes into surrounding geological formations, such as water aquifers, of fracking fluids from an injection well, and conversely, methane from a production well.
 |
| shows migration routes for injected fluids through cracked well casing |
 |
| migration route though failed seals |
This is a frightening statistic: about 5% of new wells have casing failures. Casing--the concrete shell that separates the bore hole from the surrounding rock--fails at even higher levels for older wells which have a life span of 30-40 years. When hundreds of thousands of fracking wells are drilled as part of a national policy promoted by the Obama administration to develop domestic gas production, that figure means thousands of new wells leak from their start.
Every year, about 13,000 new wells are drilled. According to a 2014 study, at least 15.3 million Americans have lived within a mile of a fracking well that has been drilled since 2000. There are now about 1.6 million active fracking wells in the US alone.
