Hillary Clinton ought to embrace the green side of fracking
Hillary Clinton needs to drop her anti-fracking rhetoric if she’s serious about fighting climate change.
To her credit, she never talked about an out right ban like her opponent Bernie Sanders, she just promised to smother it in regulations.
“By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many place sin America where fr ac king will continue to take place ,” she promised during a presidential debate last month.
But now that she’ s won the primaries in Pennsylvania and New York, where anti-f racking movements are strong, she should acknowledge that fracturing has done more to lower America’ s carbon emissions than any environmental regulation. Banning it would has ten global warming, which ironically, she says is the biggest threat to the world today.
This will come as a shock to green-minded progressives because activists who want to ban fossil fuels have played fast and loose with the facts to manufacture unrighteous outrage.
Take, for example, the Carroll County Concerned Citizens of Carrollton, Ohio. This not-in-mybackyard group hired-researchers at the University of Cincinnati Department of Geology to drill upthe dirt on fracking. When researchers came back with no evidence that it hurts the environment, the Concerned Citizens quashed the report.
“I amreally sad to say this, but some of our funders, the groups that had given us funding int he past, we rea little disappointed in our results ,” said Amy Townsend- Small, the lead researcher, explaining in a video posted to You Tube why she can not release the report.
Like any energy source, fracking does raise some environmental concerns, but some simple regulations can address the biggest problems.
Americans need to first understand the engineering and tune out the hyperbole.
All well scan potentially contaminate groundwater because
they begin with a drill bit cutting thousands of feet into the earth and passing through the water table. To protect groundwater, which is within the first 1,000 feet, drillers are required to pour cement around the pipe so that oil and gas don’ t flow up the hole and mix with the water.
In conventional wells, the oil and gas flows up the pipe by itself. But to release the oil and gas from shale, operators must pressurize an immense amount of water mixed with sand and chemicals to break the rock at the bottom, 5,000 to 8,000 feet down.
Anti-fracking activists complain about gas getting into well water, insidiously suggesting that the broken rock 8,000 feet down somehow contaminated the water at 1,000 feet. But peer-reviewed research shows drillers don’t pour the cement properly in 1 percent to 3 percent of all wells andthat causes the contamination.
The Environmental Protection Agency last year found no evidence that fracking causes “widespread, systemic impacts ond rinking water.” States can solve the decades-old contamination problem by requiring well operators to use a special tool that inspects the cement before the driller accesses the oil or gas.
Activists also like to blame earthquake son the fractured rock, but scientists again point to another culprit: wastewater disposal wells.
Oily water has always been a byproduct of drilling, and operators have disposed of it in old wells for decades. But because fracturing produces millions of gallons of wastewater, disposal companies have injected it underpressure into some old wells that are near fault lines, triggering earthquakes.
When the disposals stop, so dothe earthquakes. Requiring operators to clean and recycle the water would end the temblors and address complaints about water consumption.
Lastly, numerous studies have shown that drilling natural gas wells releases large quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Again, responsible operators are already sealing upt hose leaks, and the EPA is generating rules to make it a requirement in the future.
Solve those problems, and the benefit of cheap natural gas is indisputable. Widespread fr ac king began in 2008, when natural gas prices were $9 for a million British thermal units, and U.S. wells produced about 2 trillion cubic feet. The U.S. produced 15 trillion cubic feet in 2015, andthe price this year is below $2,amajor achievement championed by the O ba ma administration.
That low price triggered huge investment in gasfueled power stations that will generate more electricity than coal in the U.S. for the first time in decades. As a result, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions dropped to a 27-year low last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
A fr ac king ban would cut U.S. gas production by 30 percent, drive the price up to at least $6 and make coal cost-efficient again, Rice University researchers Ken Med lock and Peter Hartley found. Are turn to coal would boost greenhouse gas emissions.
When Clinton was secretary of state in 2012, she encouraged other countries with shale gas to adopt fracturing to replace coal. Candidate Clinton needs to put party politics behind her and promote fr ac king athome.