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There are no examples of chasms, or even cracks, opening as a result of fracking
From Binghamton, New York to the village of Balcombe in England’s rural West Sussex, holding up fracking has joined halting the oil sands as the great cause for anti-development radicals and their celebrity supporters.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves pumping water with a tiny proportion of chemicals under high pressure into deep subterranean shale formations to release natural gas.
Last Friday, when President Obama gave a speech in Binghamton, protestors and supporters of fracking jousted outside. In recent weeks, there has been an even mightier ruckus at Balcombe over drilling by a company called Quadrilla, whose activities were brought to a halt by up to 1,200 protestors. The stand-off ended last week after hundreds of police were brought in.
In fact, President Obama has embraced the shale gas boom, but New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been hemming and hawing on state approval, concerned both about the power of environmental NGOs and the good opinion of anti-frackistas such as Yoko Ono and Lady Gaga. Nevertheless, the shale gas train has left the station in the U.S., which is the reason why radicals are keen to pull the wheels off before the industry can establish itself in Europe.
Last year, Greenpeace activists occupied and closed down a natural gas plant in England run by French energy giant EDF, which had been targeted because of its support for shale gas development. When EDF threatened to sue, celebrilefties including Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Mark Ruffalo were recruited to force EDF to back down.
As is so often the case, the anti-frackistas are rebels without a genuine cause, except for an ideological one, or that of simple self-promotion. Their objections – based on alleged threats of earthquakes, excessive water use and groundwater pollution by frankenchemicals – are either greatly exaggerated or entirely bogus.
Certainly, local communities must decide whether they want such projects, but environmental NGOs tend not to be great fans of informed choice, unless all the information is coming from them.
Fracking has been used for 60 years in the petroleum business, but advanced techniques, such as horizontal drilling, have made it much more productive in recent years. The result has been an energy revolution, particularly in the U.S.
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