Water and Power - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 242

how we allocate water. Before we do so, it behooves us to understand what is involved
and what is at stake—information that energy companies are not happy to share.
FRACK WATER
A society increasingly confronted with water decision-making should at least un-
derstand the ingredients of the problem.
—Abel Wolman,
Johns Hopkins University, 1966
T. Boone Pickens has profited handsomely from his investments in natural gas. He has
promoted the Pickens Plan on TV and in print ads, urging people to replace “foreign
oil”—which he says “America is addicted to” and helps fund terrorists—with “cheap and
significantly cleaner” natural gas. Natural gas burns 30 percent cleaner than diesel fuel
and is abundant, with an estimated 4,000 trillion cubic feet of reserves in the continent-
al United States. Running the nation's 8 million freight trucks on natural gas would cut
down on air pollution and cost about a fourth of petroleum diesel, Pickens says. He and
many others, including the Obama White House, have aggressively promoted natural
gas as a fuel for this century, one that helps reduce global warming, creates jobs, and
provides healthy tax revenues to recession-hurt states.
Yet Pickens and his colleagues don't mention one critical fact: over 90 percent of nat-
ural gas wells today use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking,a controversial method of ac-
cessing pockets of natural gas trapped in underground shale formations.
To frack a well is to inject a slurry of water, sand, and a mixture of chemicals at high
pressure into subterranean shale, cracking open fissures, which release the natural gas;
the gas then flows into a borehole to the surface. But each fracked gas well uses 3 to 8
million gallons of water, and the process has been blamed for contaminating ground-
water and impacting people's health.
Although hydrofracking has been used for decades in the West, usually on a small
scale, demand for natural gas is rising, and by 2008 hydrofracking had emerged as a ma-
jor extraction method. Over the next two years, reports of health problems and envir-
onmental pollution associated with fracking led to scrutiny by the press, a provocative
documentary film called GasLand,a growing sense of alarm in the public, and demands
for regulatory oversight. But natural gas companies were handing out jobs and lucrat-
ive deals for the right to frack on private land. In a time of global recession, politicians
found these enticements difficult to resist.