Marcellus Shale Fracking: it is totally unnecessary, as well as sheer waste of pristine waters, beautiful forests and resources!
Bad as the GULF OIL SPILL is, I strongly feel that allowing the POISONING of precious, pristine River Water for fracking is potentially far, FAR WORSE! It is simply INSANE to expect ANY HUMAN or ANIMAL on this planet to long SURVIVE for long if we condone POISONING PURE DRINKING WATER in exchange for a half-hearted promise from the gas industry of “cleaning” it after use and further contamination…indeed, it is SUICIDE by fairy tale!
1. In the first place, if the choice came between drinking water that has not been subjected to the “fracking” process and supposed clean-up or a “warmer” building (above 65F degrees) and we are far better off with safer drinking water and cooler buildings and sweaters. (We would be anyway, since body functions better at slightly lower temps.)
2. If we are really so desperate to heat or cool our buildings, we would be better advised to develop single-building and community-wide ground-source* heating and cooling systems to maintain our buildings at approximately 50-55 degrees, winter and summer (solar/wind electricity can run the heat pumps), without resorting to any fossil fuel use such as the promised gas. [*Or true geo-thermal where available.] Also,this would provide FAR MORE GREEN JOBS and FAR LESS GLOBAL WARMING/DESTRUCTION!
3. If the Congressional Budget Office or any other unbiased facility were to determine TOTAL COST–from exploration to extraction/delivery and use of gas (including building/maintaining roads, destruction/replacement of forest costs, loss of Carbon-sequestering by lost forest, destruction of landscape/natural land use [with possibly still undiscovered value undisturbed], extraction, water hauling, water loss, water re-cleaning for drinking, loss of 40-60 % of available ground water for 15 million people with growing-population water needs, gas pipeline installation and maintenance plus concurrent destruction of forest and scenery, added highway-use maintenance, costs for exploring-construction-extraction-delivery phases, etc., COST OF DEPLETED RESOURCES, and enormous production of gHg throughout this process, and compare such cost to the cost of developing, installing and using either ground-source or geo-thermal systems for the same number of units, I suspect that the per capita or per unit gas extraction/delivery costs would exceed the cost of all ground-source/geo-thermal systems installed as an alternative to gas. AND WOULD YIELD AN ENORMOUS REDUCTION IN gHg PRODUCTION, with inherent extra costs for Global Warming mitigation efforts.
The costs would surely be close enough to encourage decision-makers to support “GREEN JOBS” rather than destructive gas-industry works…and to consider prior experience in which fossil-fuel industries have been excessively irresponsible, greedy, sloppy and disrespectful of either Mother Nature or the rights of all other citizens, both current and future, as the records clearly demonstrate.
4. While the gas extractors may say that the reclaimed water can be made potable once more, the extractors have been discarding their “waste” water, rather than cleaning it up to use again in their extraction processes. Why?
5. It seems to me that the current method of gas extraction is akin to sawing-off the-leg-to-save-the-body surgery (as prevalent in Civil War, for instance—see Dances With Wolves), or so many other surgical procedures prevalent as few as twenty-thirty years ago, where the procedure required extended hospital stays and grossly intrusive cutting into the body….yet today can be performed with minimal intrusion and pain in an out-office procedure from which the patient recovers in a day or two*(e.g. A gall-bladder operation used to require at least a week post-operative hospitalization, with further in-bed time recuperation time at home before patient could return to work; today it is a simple out-office procedure with virtually no work-time loss.)
If in a few more decades the extraction process were found to be similarly more refined,and both much less disturbing to our lands and forests and requiring less than a tenth of the water presently required, perhaps the whole process could then be reconsidered in light of the needs and conditions then prevailing.
6. I feel it important that there be a complete moratorium on all gas extraction activity—from exploration and “testing” to actual production and/or site construction—until at least six (6) months after all of these studies are completed and widely published to general public for discussion. Without this information, and informed public response, how can the various agencies—including the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC)—possibly come to a fully-informed decision?
NOTES: (a) While if may be very useful to have several college/universities analyze the cost/benefits of this situation, it would be unwise to depend solely upon the findings of any aligned organization such as Penn State University.
(b) In a joke recently I pointed out that it would be most helpful and cost-effective if we could get the fracking industry to pay all municipalities to put in large under-ground retaining basins to capture and store our excess storm-runoff water (so it wouldn’t mess up our water-reclamation processes), then bring their water-tank trucks down to us to carry that excess storm-runoff water up to the fracking sites, where they could then load the storm-runoff water with all those lovely chemicals and use that water for the fracking process. Of course, if our runoff water was too dirty (with all that street oil and lawn fertilizer and pesticide stuff), why, the frackers could clean that runoff water before adding the fracking chemicals ….and everyone would be better off! Unfortunately, water is heavy, and carting it to the fracking sites would result in excessive production of gHg and wear and tear on the roads.
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