The Issue Of Hydraulic Fracturing - 1444 Words

Hydraulic Fracturing One of the hottest new issues that has arisen to the forefront of the battle between environmentalists and the energy industry, where the health of future generations is set against our energy needs and economic growth, is the issue of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is colloquially called. America’s new-found energy independence has been made possible using technology that was only a pipe dream a mere decade ago, slashing the disparity between net imports versus exports of crude oil and petroleum products, with exports skyrocketing more than 400% since 2006 and the advent of hydraulic fracturing (1). The great difficulty, like any politically-charged point, is dealing with the confrontations between those†¦show more content†¦However, just because a new natural gas power plant opens, it does not mean that an older coal-fired power plant will close its doors and shut down. Also, the increasing reliance on yet another non-renewable resou rce will likely delay the transition to more sustainable and environmentally-friendly sources of power such as wind and solar that produce little to no airborne particulates. Hydraulic fracturing may also pose a risk to human health through contamination of drinking water supplies, with several instances of contamination having been reported in the news over the past few years and verified by the EPA in its five-year study published in 2015. Despite this, the overall finding of the report is that â€Å"hydraulic fracturing activities have not led to widespread, systemic impacts to drinking water sources.†(2) While there have been instances of water contamination, when compared to the overall number of hydraulic fracturing wells, fracking poses an exceedingly low risk to drinking water supplies as demonstrated in a study of drinking water contamination in the Marcellus Shale drilling region where there were only a handful of incidents among the 3,500 wells.(3) As technology improves and the surface operations and piping made sounder,