65% of Americans favor more regulation of fracking
72% of Ohio residents favor a state moratorium on fracking
by Tom Kenworthy
At the Wall Street Journal’s recent ECO:nomics conference, the chief executive of Atlas Energy LP was asked how fracking had become a four-letter word. Edward E. Cohen’s response: “I think when we talk about the natural-gas industry losing the PR war, that is not correct.”
If that is typical of how the natural gas industry is interpreting public opinion on hydraulic fracturing and the development of shale gas, then it’s got its head in a borehole.
Recent polling gives a more realistic picture of the public’s broad and deep concerns about the technique that is widely used, in conjunction with horizontal drilling, to stimulate production from oil and gas wells. The practice involves pumping a combination of water, sand and chemicals underground at high pressure to crack rock formations and release oil and gas.
A Bloomberg News poll conducted earlier this month, for example, found that 65% of Americans favor more regulation of fracking and only 18% favor less regulation. The survey of 1,002 adults had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1%.
In Ohio, a January poll conducted by Quinnipiac University found that 72% of Ohio residents favor a moratorium on fracking in their state until the process is better understood. Ohio has been the site of a series of earthquakes which the Ohio Department of Natural Resources said in early March were most likely caused by the underground injection of wastewater produced during fracking of natural gas wells.
At the Wall Street Journal conference, Chesapeake Energy Corp. CEO Aubrey K. McClendon appeared to adopt the same no problemo attitude. “I fracked 15,000 wells,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of American gas is fracked, and it has been for 50 years. [Today there are] 1.2 million wells. Where are the 1.2 million disasters?”
Someone should tell McClendon it doesn’t take a disaster rate of 100%. It only takes a few. Like the one in Pennsylvania where his own company was fined $900,000 by regulators for causing the methane contamination of the water supplies of 16 families.
Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress working on the Public Lands team.
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“Someone should tell McClendon it doesn’t take a disaster rate of 100%. It only takes a few. Like the one in Pennsylvania where his own company was fined $900,000 by regulators for causing the methane contamination of the water supplies of 16 families.”
It captures the truth. There have been a few incidents out of the 1.2 million wells drilled and fracked.
So a few problems out of 1.2 million wells makes the whole thing unacceptable? A few incidents out of 1.2 million seems like a pretty good deal when you compare it to what we would do for energy otherwise. No one was hurt or killed in that incident by the way.
Think of the pollution associated with coal mining and burning and tell me that is preferable to a few incidents for every 1.2 million gas wells fracked.
People die installing wind turbines and solar panels (mainly from falls). Wind causes mental health problems with some people who live near the turbines. Dams are hugely destructive to ecosystems. There is no such thing as zero risk and zero impact.
We really have no idea how many people have had their water poisoned by shale gas extraction. Almost everyone who negotiates a financial settlement with the driller to pay for the damage to their water and their property’s value signs a non-disclosure agreement and cannot tell ANYONE how their water was contaminated or risk losing that money. And that money is probably their only opportunity to start a new life (when they can’t sell their property). So there could be hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of families who have had their water poisoned. With the non-disclosure agreements, we will never know for sure.
More like its snout in the trough. Whatever happened to the public interest in energy and utility matters?
Someone should also tell McClendon that “it ain’t over til it’s over.” Cracked casings and bulked subsidence develop over time. We are still living with miserable outcomes from 19th and 20th century wells that seemed to perform admirably – at first.