I’ve blogged about this fossil fuel extraction process (hydraulic fracturing or fracking) – using chemically enhanced pressurized water mixed with sand to force out underground and embedded oil, gas, etc. to the surface – and the Halliburton loophole, which effectively exempts this procedure and the undisclosed chemicals from our environmental laws. You’ve seen the picture of the flaming residential water tap, seen reports of little earthquakes caused by the pressurized water and read about the pollution in countless groundwater pools that are used for drinking and bathwater across the nation. It part of the price, supporting legislators say, to reduce this country’s reliance on “foreign oil.”
But there is another price that needs to be paid to render fracking viable: water… and lots of it. Water at a time when farmers and ranchers in the 60% of the United States that is experiencing extreme drought conditions claim they need every drop to survive. That much of this nation’s fracking takes place in those drought-ridden places makes this a much more poignant struggle, one that harkens back to the range wars depicted in oh-so-many old Western movies.
As fossil fuel resources shift heavily to oil-embedded shale that has been found in abundance in Canada and many parts of the United States, the extraction process uses water in the extreme. “Each shale well takes between two and 12 million gallons of water to frack. That's 18 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water per well… ‘We're having difficulty acquiring water,’ said Chris Faulkner, CEO of Breitling Oil and Gas, an oil company with operations in many of the new shale regions including Bakken in North Dakota and Marcellus in Pennsylvania.
“Faulkner said officials in two Pennsylvania counties have stopped issuing permits for oil companies to draw water from rivers, forcing them to go further afield to obtain the crucial resource…In Kansas, he said much of the industry's water comes from wells owned by farmers. Farmers used to sell him water for 35 cents a barrel. Now, he said, they are turning down offers of 75 cents or more…As a result, between 10% and 12% of the wells Breitling planned on fracking have been put on hold.” Money.CNN.com, July 31st.
With the global market effectively reducing the oil supply from one of the major suppliers – Iran – by reason of the growing pool of sanctions against this rogue nation, oil prices have remained relatively high. As summer heat has increased the demand for the electricity that powers the higher required air conditioning capacity, other forms of fuel have likewise grown more costly. Natural gas, which is seen as the clean alternative to coal and powers an increasing number of electrical generation plants but is often secured through fracking, has seen price increases as high as 70% above trading levels just a few months ago. The drought mixed with demand for fuel has pressured corn-generated ethanol prices up by 30% since June.
We don’t seem to be likely to run out of fossil fuels anytime soon, but the collateral damage accelerating the greenhouse effect rapidly towards the tipping point, adding toxins to underground water supplies and literally draining our water supplies beyond capacity are powerful issues in search of solutions. Indeed, it appears that given the severity of potential climatic temperature increases in vulnerable parts of the farming/fossil fuel producing world, including the United States, future “water wars” seem more inevitable than oil wars. All this while other parts of the world face flooding from greater water levels producing by a lot more melting ice.
I’m Peter Dekom, and modern life is rife with expensive and irreversible consequences.
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