Gasland

This weekend I watched a documentary by the name of Gasland. It follows one man, Josh Fox, who lives in Pennsylvania, after he is contacted by a natural gas company to lease his land for drilling and fracking. He knows very little about what he would be getting into, and decides to do some research. He drives cross-country, from his small town in Pennsylvania to Colorado and even Louisiana, and shares the stories of individuals and families affected by fracking.

A visualization of fracking

For those of you that don't know, fracking is the process of injecting fluid deep into the ground (typically around 8,000 feet down) in order to create fissures to release natural gas. One of the problems this creates is that these gas wells often leak into a nearby aquifer or water table, contaminating the local water with natural gas as well as with the chemicals used in fracking fluid. Many of these chemicals are known carcinogens, and many of the others have never been disclosed due to laws that protect a fracking company's proprietary material, which, in this case, includes the mixture of chemicals used in fracking. These chemicals can cause health problems for the residents. Fox also interviewed many residents of towns near fracking sites whose water was so contaminated with gas, they could light it on fire. Not only this, but the natural gas, mainly methane, is incredibly prone to explode via a spark from a well pump, or really any spark.

Proponents of fracking say that using gas is better, environmentally, than using coal or other fossil fuels, but this simply is not true. In addition to leaking methane into the water table, fracking can also leak methane into the air, contributing to the greenhouse effect and completely outweighing any benefit fracking may have for the environment. Additionally, the fracking process in highly dependent on water. Each time a well is fracked, it can use up eight million gallons of water, sometimes more. This water has to be transported in tanker trucks, increasing the carbon footprint of this process even more. The water that is not used up in the fracking process comes back up through the well as what is called "produced water", which is contaminated with chemicals and natural gas. This produced water is temporarily kept in large pits, where it is either allowed to evaporate back into the air (chemicals and all), transported to a treatment plant, or injected back into the ground. All of these options have tremendous environmental impact.

I learned all of this from Gasland, and I highly recommend watching it. I will say Fox's voice is a little monotone at times, but the interviews he has are highly informative and really interesting. If you want to learn more, Fox has set up a website for his film, which has in incredible amount of information on fracking.

Thats's all for now.

Write to you soon.

Danielle K.