A blog post contributing to Blog Action Day 2010
Led by some America’s most daring and outspoken individuals and civil society organizations, the assault on America's drinking water and pristine rivers perpetrated by poor regulations and single-minded energy companies is gaining some attention in the media and traction in public discourse. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is one of the industry’s leading and most destructive methods for extracting natural gas from the Country’s enormous patches of shale. Indeed, for anyone motivated into action by water pollution and safe drinking water shortages, fracking needs to be on your radar. By fracturing underground rock formations with high pressured fracking cocktails of water and other substances, fracking’s human and environmental casualties include toxic and highly flammable drinking water, bubbling rivers best reserved for science fiction stories, and massive water consumption tabs. Even at an untrained glance, these casualties seem as obvious consequences of a process that injects into the earth millions of gallons of water, mixed with diesel fuel, benzene, hydrochloric acid, ethylene glycol and many more nefarious substances, with enough pressure to fracturing shale formations, only to releases natural gas in underground regions close to water our tables.
For those of you less familiar with fracking, I direct you to this easy to understand infographic and this truly amazing, but brief video illustrating one of the many hazards posed by hydraulic fracturing. For those more fracking literate, all of this probably seems to be a repeat of what’s been said and read by us thousands of times over. However, what’s often missing from the fracking attention is an appreciation for the global implications of hydraulic fracturing. Indeed, fracking is not only offending America's water wells, rivers and wildlife. It’s poised to make a potentially catastrophic assault on life-sustaining waters on every continent across the globe. While the estimates on the global volume of shale reserves are "highly tentative" (Guler 2010), national security and energy inspired exploration initiatives are popping up places like China, India and Germany to name a few. The Brisborne Herald reports that the Canadian-based TAG Oil Ltd. will frack should it decide to exercise its permits for oil and gas exploration on New Zealand's East Coast (2010). In Australia, Beach Energy is already operating vertical gas wells and is now looking to run fracture simulations and possibly begin drilling as early as 2011 (World Oil News 2010).
The greatest dangers posed by fracking are perhaps found in those countries where a combination of factors, like weak and corrupted regulatory institutions, poorly endowed civil societies and mysterious and untimely accidents occasionally finding outspoken critics, coalesce to undermine the public’s capacity to hold energy interests and governments accountable. In countries like Poland and Bulgaria, where the government’s capacity to adequately regulate powerful interests is far weaker than those found in Western Europe and the North America, one might safely predict that fracking will likely result in human and environmental casualties far greater than those found in Pennsylvania’s mountains and Wyoming’s range lands. And, these very same countries are now shaping up to be some of the new frontiers for shale gas mining operations. A Carnegie Council article entitled "Shale Gas Goes Global" reports that "Poland's shale formations are currently under exploration by ExxonMobil, Chevron, and several other U.S. companies". In fact, earlier this year, Halliburton performed Poland's first-ever shale-based fracking operation (PennEnergy 2010).
The environmental and human tragedies found in the oil-rich Niger Delta are the horror stories in an all too real marriage between a weak and easily corrupted state and global interests driven by profit maximization and national energy security concerns. And companies like Halliburton, Shell and BP are currently scouting out the African Continent for opportunities for another round of resource plundering, but this time it’s shale gas. In an ominous line fit for the lips of Dick Cheney himself, Halliburton reports that, in the Middle East and Africa, "extensive studies are underway to develop execution strategies for the maximum shale operation profitability" (2010). In Tunisia this year, the Canadian-based energy exploration company Cygam Energy Inc. executed two of North Africa's first-ever shale fracking jobs (OGJ 2010). Energy companies are also looking to the massive shale formations that lay beneath the arid Karoo region in South Africa, an area already stressed by acute water shortages (Capazorio 2010). Home to South Africa's lucrative coal mines, five companies, including Shell, Falcon and Sasol, have been issued licences to scout Karoo's shale for economically viable sources of gas (Du Plessis 2010). And, despite assurances from energy companies about their commitment to preserving sources of potable water, many residents rightly fear that gas drilling means 'fracking up' their drinking water.
While the ANC government in South Africa is a far cry from the corrupted basket case that presides over the Niger Delta, fracking chemicals and gas seepages from gas mining in countries like Congo-Kinshasa, Sudan and Somalia will undoubtedly kill what might be an uncounted number of people. What’s more are its implications for the supply of clean drinking and washing water in areas of the world where safe water is already a rarity of life. This same scenario applies to other parts of the world, including the Middle-East, Asia and Latin America, where water scarcity is acute and governments easily subdued by the deep pockets that accompany foreign energy and national security interests. It is incumbent upon us, in our advocacy and our consumption habits, to gaze beyond our borders and do what we can to protect our waters here, there and everywhere.
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