Fracking Facts From Emily Green

Hydraulic fracturing in the search for shale gas got you down? Are there visions of flaming taps dancing in your dreams? Not even  Kekulé had such a dream! Puzzled as to how this technology became so widespread so quickly?

Count me in for all of the above, but Emily Green, through some journalistic sleuthing, will satisfy our curiosity if not assuage our trepidation with her The Week That Was post in which she traces the hydrofracking - shale gas nexus.

She begins (that's Gasland's Josh Fox in the gas mask):

Josh Fox’s documentary GasLand, broadcast last Monday on HBO, planted the suggestion that as former Vice President Dick Cheney was waging his “war on terror” in the wake of 9/11, his energy task force set America on a path capable of poisoning the drinking water supply of New York City, along with that of Pennsylvania, Delaware, parts of Ohio and West Virginia.

Were the charge directed at almost anyone else, one would have to dismiss it out of hand, but Mr Cheney’s track record begs the question: How bad is it? I decided to check for myself and spent a week on ProQuest, a database available to just about anyone with a library card and access to a computer. The result is this cross-section of articles, announcements and reports on the gas extraction technology known as hydraulic fracturing, “fracing” or “fracking.”

The links after the jump offer but a snapshot of the gas drilling boom that Mr Cheney surely helped to migrate from Texas throughout the Intermountain West, West, Southwest and South into the Northeast.

Give her post a read. And take a look at my review of Gasland.

For another perspective on shale gas as a geopolitical game-changer, read this WSJ Op-Ed by Amy Myers Jaffe.

I'll close with this lovely quote.

"Many of the cited articles come from the Tulsa-based publication Oil &  Gas Journal, which captured an angle missed by every other organ — that being how hotly the gas industry was concerned with keeping natural pollutants out of its fracking water just as the public began panicking about fracking chemicals in its drinking water." -- Emily Green, from her post 

Comments

[Rudy]

What the frac?