Water and Power - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 247

County (NY) Board saying that existing New York State regulations “are grossly in-
adequate … they are a prescription for disaster.” He compared hydrofracking to a hy-
drobaric underground bomb, “a very powerful dirty bomb,” in which pressures ap-
proach fifteen thousand pounds per square inch—equivalent to thirty times that of an
air bomb, or to water pressure six miles deep. When shale is exploded by hydrofrack-
ing, powerful jets of fracking fluid break up rock indiscriminately for a considerable
distance underground. This can allow the release of natural gas—which is made up of
methane, butane, propane, and benzene—into drinking supplies, along with toxins in
the fracking fluid itself. “The fracking fluid contains chemicals that would be illegal to
use under the Geneva Convention banning chemical weapons,” Northrup wrote. Once
those toxic chemicals have entered a drinking supply, there is no way to claw them back.
If these suspicions about hydrofracking are borne out by further disclosures, then
the main premise on which natural gas is being sold by Pickens, BP, and even the White
House—that it is a cleaner, greener fuel—is badly flawed.
OILY WATER
Water is used to produce oil, and oil is used to produce water, but spilled oil can pollute
water and harm the ecosystem. In coming decades, the two resources will become even
more tightly bound, and at odds, as demand for energy increases.
To prepare for the extraction of shaleoil , a new type of fuel not yet on the market,
oil companies have developed long-term strategies in which water is a key component.
Firms such as ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have bought up tens of thousands of
acres of ranchland, farms, and open space—because of their water rights—in Colorado,
Wyoming, Utah, and North Dakota.
Shale rock tends to be rich in kerogens, a mixture of organic chemical compounds,
the soluble form of which is a heavy hydrocarbon known as bitumen. Bitumen can be
processed into a petroleum product known as synthetic crude. To mine oil from shale,
the rock is brought to the surface and subjected to high heat, which melts the oil out
of the rock. This process, called retorting, is energy- and water-intensive: one barrel of
synthetic crude retorted requires five barrels of water. According to Western Resource
Advocates (WRA), an environmental group, the retorting of oil shale in Colorado will
require an estimated two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand acre-feet of wa-
ter annually—equivalent to the yearly water consumption of 25 million people.
The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency responsible for man-
aging public lands, estimates that the shale formation under Colorado , Wyoming, and
Utah could yield as much as 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, an amount three times the size