The USFG should ban hydraulic fracturing

Before I get started, I'd just like to defend my choice for annual review. Realize that a ban would be reviewed in any case, multiple times over the course of any given year, especially considering the money involved. I'm merely providing an avenue for this discussion to occur annually as well. Moreover, I think it's unreasonable to state that a ban of this sort should be viewed as absolute. I can't account for all the technological advances of the future, as these may dramatically alter what fracking is. Should the definition of fracking be altered substantially, I should not be required to defend a continued ban on all things under it. Alright, let's get started. 1. Environmental Harms a) Groundwater contamination In 2008, a hydrologist found benzene in a water well in Wyoming above where fracking was occurring. [1] There is a tremendous amount of film available showing that flammable gas is leaking through dinking water pipes, which poses a dramatic risk to homes and their inhabitants. [2] Lives are placed at risk, as well as livelihoods. What does all this stem from? Well, the first problem is that the fluids used in fracking are considered to be proprietary formulas. [3] Most companies don't disclose nearly enough information on the chemicals used in fracking. [4] The second is that we don't know where all of our groundwater is, since extensive techniques must commonly be used to be certain. [5] The third problem is how it's done. The process of injection is mostly safe when the wellbores are constructed strongly, but the injection itself is meant to send large amounts of chemicals outward into porous soil, from which it cannot possibly all be recovered. [6] Hell, porous rock is normally required at the point of injection. [7] In other words, it's a part of the process, something only a ban such as this could address. b) Earthquakes. This might sound absurd, but it's a real concern. Earthquakes have rocked many states in which fracking has been done extensively, most notably in Oklahoma, where a freak earthquake that baffled seismologists leveled a number of homes. Why did this happen? "Scientists now believe that the pressure and lubrication of that wastewater can cause faults to slip and unleash an earthquake. .. too much wastewater in a disposal well forces liquid downward and outward. .. it can meander for months, creeping into unknown faults and prying the rock apart just enough to release pent-up energy. "[8] As an extraction method, fracking amounts to 878 billion gallons of wastewater annually. Even if we forget about the massive loss of water and the various dumping practices associated with it (and we certainly shouldn't), more than a third of this is injected back into disposal wells, all of which can contribute to similar earthquakes. c) Pollution Let's start with the air. I'm not saying that oil or coal are good, but natural gas is, at best, no better, and at worst, dramatically worse. Recent studies have shown that methane, a more potent greenhouse gas, is leaking out of the soil and into the air from many of these wells. [9] This leakage is thought, again, to result from the porosity of soil, which allows gas to travel through it in the event that the rock around that gas is disrupted. That's exactly what fracking is supposed to do. It's only a short term solution, as the amount of natural gas available to be fracked is still limited. It also releases CO2 when burned, producing a smaller but still substantial amount of the greenhouse gas. The biggest effect, however, is one that is not direct. The price of natural gas is so low that many companies are simply abandoning renewable energy alternatives. [10] It's gone so far that natural gas - a resource-limited, carbon dioxide-emitting fuel source - is being rebranded as green energy by the European Union! [11] The use of natural gas is actively pushing back our progress in biofuels and green energy, which means we're just going to keep burning for longer, leading to more CO2 and methane emissions. Most companies engaging in fracking is currently exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. They deny many scientists access to the wells to actively prevent us from understanding the impacts of fracking. They even go so far as to use lawsuits to prevent what information does come out from being disclosed. [12, 13] The number of unknowns is simply staggering. 2. Economic Harms a) Long term Fracking has been shown to be a low sum game. Whether you're fracking for oil or gas, fracking only allows access to very small amounts of oil or gas trapped in the rock. Withdrawal of either fossil fuel will normally peak after just a few years, and then begin a rapid decline. Each new source, therefore, requires more fracking over a larger area, and often the movement of operations. This is true even of the Bakken shale in North Dakota that my opponent touts as a fantastic source. [14] That means the costs of fracking increase, since they can't just make a well and sit there. It creates periods of huge economic booms followed by similarly huge economic busts. All we need to do here is look at Pennsylvania's Bradford County, a place where fracking companies saw quite a bit of theoretical benefit. They paid residents to frack under and near their homes, had new motels built and staffed in order to accommodate the massive influx of workers, and many of the businesses in town either expanded or, at the very least, acquired far more resources in order to field more customers. Then they left. Whether this was due to the difficulties involved in acquiring natural gas, the plunging cost of natural gas worldwide, or the need to plumb new sites hardly matters - the town was hit hard. Residents who depended upon the money from fracking companies won't receive it, motel owners will have to close down, and other businesses will suffer the effects of lost resources. The best you can say is that they have increased tourism, but even that should flag with time. [15] b) Short term Not only does fracking do long term damage that can't be fixed, disfiguring the landscape, as it has done in North Dakota,[16] but the damage is happening now in Texas towns. As stated earlier, the water required for this is tremendous, and it's taken from the area. That leaves the ground dry, and many of the operations that require water parched. Agriculture suffers, as do cattle ranchers and the people at large, who now have to pay more to get their water. [17] Just like the boomtowns that resulted from oil extraction, these are leaving towns behind that are shells of their former selves. States that are enabled by their natural gas resources are still low in their Human Development Index ratings, which means the people there aren't seeing the benefits, even in the short term. [18] They remain among the poorest in the country. And that's during the boom. The bust, however, is inevitable, as I stated above. And that's not to mention that there's even more dramatic environmental harms as a result of this abandonment of wells. Methane leaks are a huge issue from abandoned wells in Pennsylvania, creating dangers of explosion. [19] That methane is contaminating drinking water across the country, along with millions of gallons of wastewater. [20, 21] Recycling that wastewater would be good regulation, but far from perfect, as many of these methods leave behind salt, sludge, radioactive material, and carcinogens, not to mention that disposal is still a question following reuse. [22] The health risks have been elucidated both for humans and animals near drilling sites, and they're pervasive, affecting nearly every tissue. [23] The lack of disclosure and access that I mentioned earlier, however, prevent full testing, so these may simply be the tip of the iceberg. I leave it to Con to start his case. 1. . http://www.npr.org... 2. www. scientificamerican. com/article. cfm? id=natural-gas-make-water-burn 3. . http://www.psr.org... 4. . http://twon.tamu.edu... 5. . http://water.usgs.gov... 6. . http://www.scribd.com... 7. . http://twon.tamu.edu... 8. . http://www.motherjones.com... 9. . http://www.nature.com... 10. www. greenoptimistic. com/2012/10/31/biofuel-companies-miss-the-point-turn-to-natural-gas/#. UymwC4W-jC4 11. . http://www.livescience.com... 12. . http://www.theguardian.com... 13. . http://www.ucsusa.org... 14. . http://www.climatecentral.org... 15. . http://articles.philly.com... 16. . http://www2.ljworld.com... 17. . http://www.theguardian.com... 18. . http://motherboard.vice.com... 19. . http://stateimpact.npr.org... 20. . http://www.pnas.org... 21. . http://www.nytimes.com...; 22. . http://www.nytimes.com... 23. . http://www.psehealthyenergy.org...