Fracking

It is a very good short term solution which we need now while we develop renewables or nuclear energy for the future. We can't just jump straight to green energy, a transition period is needed, and it would be foolish not to exploit our own natural resources and to buy other people's instead.

'Exploit' is the key word.

I don't think it's 'foolish' to spend more investing in alternatives or paying to import in the interim, if the alternative is poisonous run-off and huge environmental damage.

I'm not against fracking, but I think it's unlikely we'll see it in the UK any time soon. It's a very expensive way of extracting hydrocarbons, and with prices the way they are at the moment, I can't see any sudden desire in oil companies to start fracking here at the moment.

Except of course the suggestion of 'huge environmental damage' is nonsense.

We've seen stuff about polluting drinking water. Easily avoided with proper containment. Or microearthquakes - which have zero impact on anything, and are considerably less of an issue than those which occurred through coal mining.

The environmental damage comes from not taking up this opportunity. Substitution of less polluting fossil fuels for more polluting fossil fuels has been fundamental to progress in meeting our carbon emissions targets. Even a small amount of fracked gas would have a very useful effect in substituting for other energy sources like coal in this country.

I don't mind so long as they don't frack near where I live. Or near the nice parks I like to visit.

I'm pro-fracking but people dislike it because of the environmental issues. Fracking in the US is causing more earthquakes as well as poisoning local aquifers with chemicals, including the Ogalla Aquifer where the majority of the US populace gets its drinking water. The blemish of fracking equipment and the ecological results of increased human activity in remote areas is also of concern.

Absolutely not. As far as I can work out, fracking won't bring down energy prices at all, since the rights have been given to foreign companies.



Please tell me you're being flippant and that my sarcasm detector could do with a fix-up.

The first modern frack that happened was in Blackpool in 2011 and caused a small earthquake, which I thought must have been quite awkward for the fracking companies.

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Please tell me you're being flippant and that my sarcasm detector could do with a fix-up.

Plenty of possibility for environmental damage.



Aside from the use of 8,000,000 gallons of water per fracturing.

Large use of water isn't necessarily irrelevant, depending on the water used, remember that only something like 2% of all water on Earth is freshwater, if the 98% is used rather than 2% you're taking water you can't drink and turning it into water you can't drink, what a terrible thing to do(!)

And back to the bullet-points:
Strictly, it's 8m gallons of chemicals per fracture, and 40,000 gallons doesn't really mean anything, that could be 40,000 gallons of, say, water. Oh no, water, it's going to kill us. I can additionally say "well, nationwide every day we pollute the environment with over 25 million gallons of chemicals when we pee, so we should stop peeing; additionally, drinking pee is bad for us, so it's irrelevant that is it dissolved to insanely low concentrations when expelled back into nature."

Only 600 chemicals? I'm surprised it's so few, and again, you're being unnecessarily vague, you say it includes carcinogens and toxins, well, so does everything we eat and drink, are you going to stop eating and drinking? Don't eat shellfish, they contain arsenic, that's poisonous. Don't breathe, it contains Carbon monoxide, that's poisonous too. Don't drink anything, whatever you drink will almost certainly include lead, uranium, mercury, formaldehyde and hydrochloric acid, they're dangerous too.

Only 30-50% of the fluid is recovered, the rest is 99.5% water with plenty of harmless other chemicals in it and a few that are dangerous but also exist in trace quantities naturally and when these fluids combine with the natural ones the trace increases marginally to a slightly higher trace which is probably still lower than traces you have already experienced in your lifetime. Did I mention they weren't bio-degradable, that must be a bad thing, the only way anything can degrade is biologically, and even then it is very rapid(!)

More vagueness, and again: "oh noes, something that exists naturally in trace quantities has even smaller trace quantities added to it". The atmosphere, if the pressure was consistent throughout it equivalent to the pressure at sea level, would have a volume in excess of 4bn cubic Km, or ~10^41 molecules. The atmosphere is a big thing, look at all the nuclear testing that took place in the last century, surely we should all be mutated beyond belief by all that atmospheric radioactive material? Oh, no, wait a second it's spread incredibly thinly around the world.