What the Frack?

President Obama's State of the Union address framed and endorsed hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of shale deposits as a clean energy strategy (it also endorsed opening up "more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources"):

[...] Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we've opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I'm directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now, American oil production is the highest that it's been in eight years. That's right - eight years. Not only that - last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.

But with only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, oil isn't enough. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy- a strategy that's cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I'm requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don't have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock - reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground. [...]

Obama's comment that "my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy" SOUNDS good, but every day articles emerge about the documented emissions produced by this technology, and the threats it poses to aquifers, communities, health, ecosystems. ProPublica has been doing an excellent series on the threats posed by fracking for some time.

The following of Obama's comments also SOUND good: "And I'm requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk."  I'm pretty sure, however, that most if not all fracking for shale gas is currently done on privately owned land, and so these sentences may be a precursor to opening up public lands to such fracking.  And disclosure of chemicals isn't the same thing as protection from chemicals. It's also true that the effects of many of the chemicals have been very minimally studied, and some may be proprietary.

In addition to all the other threats to health, water, and ecosystems that fracking for shale gas poses, a recent report documents that fracking also allows large quantities of methane to escape into the atmosphere. Such "methane has 105 times the warming potential of CO2 over a 20-year time frame, after which it rapidly loses its warming potential. If large amounts of methane are released through fracking - as seems likely with hundreds of thousands of new wells forecast in the next two decades - Howarth [Robert Howarth of Cornell University] says global temperatures could rocket upward from 0.8C currently to 1.8C in 15 to 35 years, running the risk of triggering a tipping point that could lead to catastrophic climate change."

(From an email sent by Joe Miller, instructor at St. Mary's in South Bend Indiana, and a member of the Michiana Peace and Justice Coalition)