June 30th, 2011
Is Your Water at Risk from Fracking?
Our drinking water is at risk from toxic chemicals that can leak in as a result of fracking. Join Food & Water Watch in doing something to protect our water.
Category: Nonprofits & Activism
Uploaded by: GoodFoodnH2O
Hosted: youtube
We can learn to live without oil but not water and the air we breathe!
why dont we hear more about what fracking does to causing earthquakes…. remember before fracking there were no earthquakes back east.
I am a former roughneck and drilling engineer for Chevron who has been an md for 20 years. these chemicals will end up in our drinking water guaranteed.
We live to eat healthy …WE ARE WHAT WE EAT…..BUT WHAT ARE WE WHEN WE DRINK OUR PLANETS Water Resources when it will be polluted BY Fracking IT?
So,in reality we are not what we eat or drink in this date and time .
How can we protect ourselves and our childrens, children?
I ask the Universe to in prayer what has become of our natural way of living on the Mother Earth..we are chemically polluted everyday..whether we like it or not. There has to be a method to this madeness…Peace Kat Roman aka Green Wave International
The information in your video is as silly as the cartoon depicting fracking. You offer no facts to support your contention that fracking adversly affects ground water. Tens of thousands of these wells have been drilled and neither state nor federal regulators can point to one instance where fracking has contaminated ground water. The hand full of instances where there has been contamination occurred because of faulty cement jobs in the casing…totally unrelated to the frack. This is only one of the total misrepresentations in the video but facts mean nothing to the chicken little crowd.
Of course state and federal officials deny the environmental damage done to our water. They receive MILLIONS of dollars in campaign funds from the oil and gas industry. Their lobbyists continually walk the halls of Congress currying favor from the politicians and cabinet heads such as the Department of Energy, The Environmental Protection Agency, etc. Why don’t you do a web search for “fracking water” or ANY such term. WATCH some of the videos you will find. EDUCATE YOURSELF!
look what fracking has done back east…..now they have earthquakes regularly
JR, are you insane or do you work for people who try to spread the lies about “safe fracking”.
I’m not saying we can’t go after the oil and gas but the sooner we stop the lies the sooner we will figure out how to do it safely.
Really JR, do a little research for yourself and turn off Fox News for a while and learn what’s really going on in this world!
I am trying to understand more about fracking, so following your line of defence for fracking, isn’t the cement (faulty cement, good or bad workmanship not withstanding) part and parcel of fracking?
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to this common argument from the oil and gas industry.
There is no doubt that methane and other gases have regularly contaminated groundwater near drilling and fracking sites. Faulty cement jobs are not totally unrelated to the frack, since most wells these days would not be drilled at all if not for modern fracking. I suspect that you primarily object to our characterization of the longer-term risk to groundwater either from injected fracking fluids or from brines long trapped deep underground.
A recent peer-reviewed scientific study demonstrates this risk, as well as refutes (on page 2.) your assertion that there is not one instance where “fracking has contaminated groundwater” : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22509908
Another hard working citizen who is really sick and tired of oil interest greed
So are yous saying that people in the oil & gas industry aren’t hard working. I take offense to that. Not to mention yo would not have 99% of the things you own if it wasn’t for oil & gas
Thank you for this info. I am still curious as to why are the chemicals being used. Don’t they get enough pressure from the water? I think it’s horrible to misuse that much water, but nobody seems to be able to tell me what purpose the chemicals provide to create pressure. I can only think that it’s a sneaky way to dump chemical waste.
[...] For more information on the negative impact that fracking can have on a community, watch Food & Water Watch‘s video Is Your Water at Risk from Fracking? [...]
Have you viewed this event in NY State about anti-fracking: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nysendems
[...] of money (kindly donated by taxpayers) Moving from industry to industry and crisis to crisis. Is Your Water at Risk from Fracking? | Food & Water Watch Reply With [...]
As a petroleum engineer in the industry the fact that you failed to do enough research to figure out the amount a fluids that go into each well when frac’ed means you failed to research any other viable information. Millions of barrels of fluids per vertical well and millions more for the horizontal section is a gross exaggeration. It’s sad you have to make up numbers to add to your flawed argument.
TH, you appear to have gallons and barrels confused. It is true that fracking vertical wells typically “only” requires several hundred thousand gallons of fluid.
We regret that mistake, but when corrected it makes it all the more clear that modern fracking is an entirely new beast. Fracking horizontal shale wells typically requires 2-5 million gallons of fluid. This is a statistic from the DOE’s 2009 primer on modern fracking. Many of the newer frack jobs are using up to 10 million gallons of fracking fluid.
Do you even know what “chemicals” go into fracking? Please show me where your research is from because it is extremely biased and misinformed. Show where you have studies to back up your statement that these chemicals get into the nearest aquifer. Do you know how big a injection well site is? Not big at all. About a fifth the size of the local municipal waste water facitily. Not to mention it is very profitable. Do you even know what a injection well does? And how exactly does fracking create local air pollution? That is a kicker right there. This website is extremely one sided and misinfomred
In reponse to “Karen, June 16, 2012 at 7:40 PM ”
The chemicals are primarily used to convert the water to a gell (like Jello desert) so that the sand (or other solid, up to and including feathers) will not fall out of suspension as it would in water.
For example, if you had the vertical well bore full of a water/sand slurry the sand could easily fall to the bottom and plug the well. Being a gell, the sand does not fall out.
Often the gell breaks down pretty fast and becomes viscous again (like water) and is pushed back out of the well by the oil or gas, leaving the sand to support the cracks.
This “water” that comes back out of the well is either then disposed of on the surface or through a waste injection well, and that is the most likely source of surface or ground water contamination.
DES, thank you for your interest in our issues. Fracking and drilling for natural gas use a cocktail of chemicals that by law are not always required to be disclosed, due to the oil and gas industry’s influence over major environmental regulations. Here are some links to some our research on the issue in case you’d like to learn more: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/reports/the-case-for-a-ban-on-gas-fracking/; http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/reports/fracking-the-new-global-water-crisis/. Moreover, while we know that the good men and women in the oil and gas industry are very hard working, we have some concerns about the overall safety of the processes they’re using and endorsing.
Well FYI DES, we won’t need 99 percent of the things we have if we are all dead now will we?
We simply have to dramatically reduce our use of oil and coal for electrical production and fuel for internal combustion engines. If we don’t, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will increase to levels that assure irreversible global warming. Check the scientific literature: We have a problem unless we start now to reduce the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In the short run energy conservation and alternative fuels are either not sufficiently realistic or technically not ready for prime time. Fracking results in vastly increased natural gas production which can replace coal and oil in our electric utility generating facilities and oil in our internal combustion engines. The use of natural gas instead of oil and coal results in hugely less production of carbon dioxide. This fact is a natural consequence of the chemistry behind the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas. It’s a process, guys, and you are letting perfect be the enemy of good.