Technology has always had its dark side. The story of Frankenstein written in 1818 was a parable written about that dark side. The unleashing of a monster out of an abundance of the best intentions has always been storyteller’s gold from before Mary Shelley to the era of Jurassic Park. As an engineer, I understand the parable all too well. In every well -meaning engineering endeavor, there is that risk of the unintended consequence.
A conspiracy theory isn’t even necessary. Simple hubris and human frailty often combine to create an unexpected disaster more than malicious intent. Often it is simple greed and the willingness to cut corners without even considering the consequences. The malicious intent appears to come later – when the inevitable cover up ensues to protect ego and market share.
Fracking is the Frankenstein monster created by the United States government to help us reach “energy independence”, low gas prices, and the unreachable fossil fuels thought too difficult to access in the recent past. Enter American ingenuity, and hubris. They didn’t even stop to consider the toll it would take on our most precious natural resource. The one humans can’t live three days without – water.
As a water resources engineer I was quite proud of my profession because we have been steadily making progress in the area of water quality by strictly managing, treating and cleaning water before it ever has the ability to seep into the ground. We have been perfecting water quality for decades before fracking ever was invented to completely dash all our decades of hard work on the rock pile left behind by reckless energy exploration. NJ had the strictest laws in the nation regarding what you can put into the ground. Even my recent Municipal Engineering class this year taught us that surface water - taken from open reservoirs is not as pure and clean as groundwater from a well usually is. Surface water is supposed to need a lot more treatment than groundwater which has been filtered through the earth before it gets to the aquifer. I don’t think any fracking engineers even consulted a water resources engineer before creating the monster that is fracking. I am a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers – I get all the magazines, all the millions of emails about my water resources division. I had even been a licensed water resources engineer in NJ for over 10 years before I had ever heard of fracking.
The film Gasland was my introduction to what was going on just one state over in Pennsylvania. At first I was horrified. And then I got angry. They are making a mockery of my entire profession by disregarding all the science and progress we had worked so hard on for decades. Nobody in my field in the ASCE ever warned about what the mining division of ASCE was pushing. Frackers do the exact opposite of what water resources engineers consider responsible stewardship. They actually inject toxins directly into the earth and pretend to treat the water later. By then it is way too late. They have just completely destroyed any progress the water resources engineers had made to preserve pristine aquifers by treating parking lot runoff, and even runoff from individual homeowners’ property. The EPA’s new runoff calculation tool that they frequently tout on Twitter for homeowners to help them deal with nonpoint source pollution and runoff is a joke, while the EPA allows investigations of water contamination from fracking to languish or not be conducted at all, because the Obama Administration is pushing fracking as part of their “All of the Above” energy policy.
It is hard not to be cynical about the reasons why. We can throw our efforts into wind and solar and water energy, but in the United States – we still have money in politics. It is a war between the Republicans and the Democrats and like the mere mortals in a Greek tragedy, we are left to watch the gods fight amongst themselves. But it is we who are suffering. The Republican’s rely heavily on coal industry money as well as oil money, while the Democrats piggy bank is well funded by the natural gas industry. That is the rub here. Increase natural gas and you not only get those big donors but you can cripple funding for the Republicans backed by Big Coal and Big Oil. Back Natural Gas and you not only get the Natural Gas industry to fund your campaigns but you win over big natural gas states like former Gov Ed Rendell did who delivered PA for Obama. The new series on Netflix House of Cards takes on this gas industry coziness with DC politics. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the Congressman cozy with the Gas lobbyists are in PA pushing fracking in the Delaware valley. It is the energy equivalent of the Republican push to crush the unions - who typically support Democrats. Kill their source of funding, and you kill their campaigns. Maybe it was strategic and the Democrats will change course when they have effectively weakened the Coal industry but we mortals can’t wait. Climate Change is already upon us – we have passed the critical 400 ppm CO2 levels we were dreading.
Regardless of the intentions that started us fracking – thinking of this fossil fuel as a bridge away from fossil fuels (crazy isn’t it?) or as a way to break Big Coal and Big Oil’s grip on US campaign finance, or making us “energy independent”, or bringing down gas prices, or releasing less CO 2 when burned even though methane itself is a much more potent Greenhouse gas and we are releasing so much of it in the extraction process and through flaring, that it has a larger effect on Climate Change than coal, the monster created when this industry was allowed to circumvent our Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act, has taken down many helpless victims across what used to be America the Beautiful. We need to wake up from the nightmare and stop the monster that is spilling radioactive, toxic substances on our farmland, into our streams and into our groundwater. The mere act of transporting, using or storing fracking fluids above ground makes it dangerous to our groundwater even though they claim they use it deep below the aquifers. The problem is also the pressure. Only one inch of cement separates the drilled hole for a fracking well from the precious aquifer above it and 50% of wells fail within 30 years. It was the failure of a cement well casing that caused the Deep Water Horizon disaster.
We can live without natural gas. We can’t live without water. And right now, the technology of fracking, regardless of the best intentions for creating it, is the monster threatening our most precious natural resource – life sustaining water. Even an ant colony will store its waste away from its food pile. These days we are fracking right where we are growing food. This is not only causing a price war over water – such that farmers are giving up farming and selling their water to the frackers, but some farmers – whose wells are now contaminated can’t continue to farm anymore. Water is now the new oil. That is one unintended consequence of technology that threatens our continued existence regardless of the storms and sea level rise due to Climate Change. I don’t know which scenario is more alarming. Not being able to grow food because of severe weather, or not being able to grow food from drought because frackers have taken and/or poisoned our available fresh water.
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