Fracking involves injecting pressurized water combined with sand
and small amounts of chemicals to crack open shale rocks so that
they will release trapped natural gas. Generally, the shale rocks
are thousands of feet below the aquifers from which people draw
drinking water. No doubt to the dismay of activists, President
Barack Obama appears to endorse the process.
"Sometimes there are
disputes about natural gas," he said at his
climate change speech last week at Georgetown, "but let me say
this: We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas
producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can
provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon
emissions."
The president gets it, but a lot of activists don't. To help
bring them around, I thought I'd take a look at some of the
misleading claims made by opponents of fracking. Fortunately I just
got a fundraising letter from fine folks at foodandwaterwatch (FWW)
urging me to sign and send in a petition to the president to ban
fracking. The letter is a nice compendium of anti-fracking
scaremongering.
Falsehood 1: You can light your tap water on
fire. Fox made this claim famous in the first
Gasland movie when he showed a resident of Colorado
striking a match as water came out of his tap; the natural gas
dissolved in the water burst into flame. Yet the water was tested
by the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, which reported
to the resident: "There are no indications of any oil & gas
related impacts to your well water." The agency concluded that the
natural gas in his water supply was derived from natural
sources—the water well penetrated several coal beds that had
released the methane into the well.
Falsehood 2: Fracking fluid "could seep into groundwater
and poison drinking
water." (The underlining is the FWW's.) The letter
also asserts that fracking fluid is "full of poisonous
chemicals."
Of course, the cabinet
underneath your kitchen sink is also likely to be "full of
poisonous chemicals." What matters to your health is the amount of
exposure you have to them, not the mere fact of their
existence.
A new
study by researchers at Duke University, published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June,
did find higher concentrations of methane in water wells that were
within a kilometer of gas wells. But like earlier reports, the new
paper concluded that the two simplest explanations for the higher
levels of dissolved gas were faulty steel casings and improper
cement sealing of the wells, not fracking. In addition, this study
and two earlier ones done by the same team found no indication that
well water has been contaminated by fracking fluids. (About 99.5
percent of fracking fluids, I should add, consist of water and
sand.)
Falsehood 3: Fracking increases air pollution.
The FWW letter warns that fracking "contains high levels of
neurotoxins and carcinogens and contains compounds that can create
smog."
Almost any industrial activity will involve the production of
noxious fumes at least some of the time. So how does the air
pollution associated with producing natural gas compare to other
industrial processes? A 2013 report from RAND Corporation
researchers, published in Environmental Research Letters,
calculates the
regional air quality damages from gas production in
Pennsylvania. Their reckoning of total damages takes into account
harms both to physical health and the environment, including
mortality, morbidity, crop and timber loss, visibility, and effects
on anthropogenic structures and natural ecosystems.
Falsehood 4: Fracking causes cancer. The FWW
letter hints at this, but the most incendiary claim along these
lines was made by Josh Fox in his short "emergency film," The Sky Is Pink (2012).
Fox intones, "In Texas, as throughout the United States, cancer
rates fell. Except in one place: in the Barnett Shale. The five
counties where there was the most drilling saw a rise in breast
cancer throughout the counties."
The claim is entirely specious. Fox apparently based his lightly
sourced assertion on a
single newspaper article. Even that article garbled the data,
reporting that six counties in the western Dallas-Fort Worth area
have the highest rates of invasive breast cancer in Texas, rising
all the way from 58.7 cases per 100,000 people in 2005 to about
60.7 per 100,000 in 2008. Typically breast cancer rates are
reported as per 100,000 women, which would roughly double
the rates cited in the article to 117.4 and 121.4. Meanwhile, the
incidence of breast cancer among all Texas women hovered around
116 per
100,000 between 2005 and 2009. The U.S. rate was 125.7 per
100,000 women.
Falsehood 5: Natural gas is worse than
coal. This particular claim was launched in 2011 with a
hastily
cobbled-together study by three anti-fracking researchers at
Cornell. Their argument is that leaking methane, whose global warming
potential is much greater than that of carbon dioxide, more
than entirely offsets whatever reductions in carbon dioxide
emissions would be achieved by, for example, switching from coal to
gas to generate electricity. The FWW letter claims that calling
natural gas "clean" energy is "misleading," but unlike the Cornell
researchers the group concedes that burning natural gas "emits half
as much carbon dioxide as coal."
The FWW came much closer to the truth than the Cornell crew did.
A comprehensive
analysis published in November 2012 by researchers associated
with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that "the life
cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with electricity
generated from Barnett Shale gas extracted in 2009 were found to be
very similar to conventional natural gas and less than half those
of coal-fired electricity generation." With respect to global
warming, producing and burning natural gas from fracked wells is
much better than burning coal.
Read More: Reason
