Hmm…well this is the tricky part. It depends who you listen to.
The gas companies would say absolutely nothing to worry about and anyone who questions that is a hysterical greenie. But other people aren’t so sure, including those who live in areas where fracking is taking place, scientists from Cornell and other universities, plus environmental organizations.
Anyway, here’s a quick list of the concerns:
1. Pollution of water supplies: Vertical wells drill right through the water table, if well casings fail (as they have been known to do in the US) then fracking fluids and gases can flow into the water table or aquifers.
Even when the drilling is done there’s the issue of disposing of the waste water. In instances overseas it’s collected in lined ponds or pits or injected back into disused wells. There’s also the option of spreading it across areas of land in a practice known as ‘landfarming’. Sounds nice and natural doesn’t it? But actually that waste water still has all the chemicals that were used to frack the well and in addition a whole lot of other substances picked up underground which can include heavy metals, some of which are naturally radioactive.
There’s also the issue of methane migration and according to a paper released recently by Duke University in the US, this does seem to be a problem. They found that methane levels were 17 times higher in wells near fracking sites. Methane is a major component in natural gas and it’s this that created the controversial scenes in the movie, Gasland, where people were able to set alight the water coming out of their taps.
2. Air pollution: this can occur from evaporation from the waste-water ponds and again, overseas, this has been recorded to contain the potent carcinogen, benzene.
3. Possible earthquakes: this one is a bit ‘out there’. The industry for the most part categorically deny it. But it’s been suggested that the process of fracturing the rock and injecting fracking fluid can cause some seismic activity. It’s a notion that the gas industry absolutely refute. However, over in Arkansas, USA and Blackpool, UK fracking operations have been suspended after earthquakes. So, again, it seems to be a bit of an unknown.
Here’s what Bernie Napp of Straterra in NZ had to say about this possibility in an article he wrote earlier this year: “It is conceivable that a change in the state of stress of rock could lead to low-level shock waves that would be picked up by a seismic detector. I suppose you could call that an “earthquake”. Well, yes, if it’s picked up by seismic detectors then I think you can call that an earthquake.
4. Noise pollution: It’s inevitable that there will be noise from drill sites and increased traffic as machinery and trucks move on and off site.
5. Loss of land value: If you’re living in an area where fracking is going to take place nearby, or if you’re a large land owner and parts of your land are going to be fracked, in all likelihood you’re not going to find many keen buyers once that’s done. Figures float around saying that in the US land owners who have been fracked have experienced losses in land value of between 30 to 75%. Now that’s a big difference and hard figures are tricky to pin down. But use your common sense. If you could buy 10 acres of land in an area that had been fracked - would you pay the same amount for it as you would in a non-fracked area?
