“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 46

extends deep underground to seal of wells from their surroundings. 67
h e only question is whether companies will do it or whether govern-
ments will force them to.
h e bigger water problem, though, appears to be not what goes into
shale gas wells but what comes out of them. Massive amounts of water
are sent down into wells when they're fracked, and millions of gallons
come back out, bringing with them toxic salts. 68 h ese can be disposed
of safely, either underground or at appropriately equipped processing
facilities; but if they aren't, it can be a big problem. Irresponsible opera-
tors have ditched their wastewater in local streams or stored it in poorly
constructed ponds that then let the water seep into the soil. 69 h e result
can be dangerous contamination of surrounding freshwater supplies.
Once again, in principle this is an easy problem to i x, if producers are
willing to step up; but again, there's no reason to assume they all will.
Supporters of shale gas development have ot en accused those who
favor stricter standards of trying to shut down the industry. In 2011,
the International Energy Agency launched a study that would implic-
itly address this claim. 70 It asked a simple question: How much more
would it cost to drill wells that met the highest standards for safety?
h ey tallied up steps drillers would need to take, such as buying more
cement and allot ing more time for drilling so that they could pause
if anything was amiss. h eir calculation was striking for its modest
result: for a mere seven cents on every dollar that producers were
already spending building their wells, all the operations could easily
be brought up to snuf . 71
Instead the toughest challenge surrounding shale gas may not be pro-
tecting water or avoiding earthquakes, or anything else that admits to
a technical i x. h e most vexing problem may be managing how drill-
ing af ects the way communities, like Bill Dix's and Warren Taylor's,
work. Natural gas development can be an enormously disruptive activ-
ity. In places like Pennsylvania and Ohio that lack a large number of
properly trained workers, the hordes of young men who move in from
out of state to work in the industry can anger local communities; one
Keystone State lawmaker went so far as to accuse them of “spreading
sexually transmit ed disease among the womenfolk.” 72 For a couple