Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has allowed the United States oil and gas production to increase over 50% in recent years. This has allowed a dramatic reduction in oil imports (to the point where the US became a net oil exporter in 2020), kept gas prices for electricity production relatively low, allowed for the retirement of older, more polluting coal-fired power plants, and aided economic development around the country. However, environmentalists and a number of scientists are concerned over the impact fracking has on the environment (see Figure 1). There are also very ideological members of the environmental organizations who see cheap natural gas as a roadblock toward a renewable energy future, and are opposed, in principle, to anything that involves fossil fuel exploitation.
Fracking requires large amounts of water to be pumped into the well to release trapped oil and gas. On average this is about 2 million gallons per well, which equates to a large quantity of a vital resource that is in very short supply in some parts of the country. There have been attempts going back to the 1990s to replace water as the main fluid used for fracking, particularly with carbon dioxide, and there are a
number of technologies that appear to have great promise. Some experts believe that
CO2 fracking could actually be more effective than water because the water that remains in the formation actually blocks oil and gas flow.
In addition to scarcity of water, the chemicals used to treat the water can make their way into ground water sources. There have been a number of high profile situations in which ground water was contaminated by fracking fluid, with the largest being the
North Dakota spill in January 2015. As is typical is such cases, the spill was due to errors in handling the fluid, rather than well failures or fundamental issues with fracking technology. In June 2015 the EPA issued their report on a
4-year study of the effect of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources. They concluded that there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources.
Another byproduct of fracking, methane gas, which often escapes from the well, can leak into the atmosphere. Methane accounts for 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions and approximately 30% of that, and the biggest contributor, is the oil and gas industry.
A final environmental concern is the cause-and-effect relationship between fracking and earthquakes. A number of locations with ongoing fracking activities, including Texas, Oklahome, and Ohio, have experienced series of small earthquakes, generally below magnitude 3.0. A study lby the Ohio Department of Natural Resources on the March 2014 series of
earthquakes in Poland Township, Ohio concluded that the earthquakes were due to hydraulic fracturing that activated a previously unknown fault. Although there are some who dispute such findings, most experts feel that fracking can trigger earthquakes; however, such earthquakes tend to be quite small and cause little to no damage.
In December 2014 New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's administration announced that it would
ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State because of concerns over health risks. While the decision was immediately hailed by environmental and liberal groups, residents of the poorer rural communities in upstate New York, which sit above the gas-rich Marcellus Shale, viewed the decision with dismay. One organization called the Upstate New York Towns Association vowed to look into
secession from the state. As of 2024, the fracking ban in New York was still in place; however, some companies were attempting to get around the ban by proposing CO2 instead of water as the fracking fluid.
New legislation broadened the ban to prevent such activities.
For similar reasons, but with a vastly different outcome, the citizens of Denton, Tx, which sits on top of the prolific Barnett Shale formation, voted in November 2014 to ban fracking within city limits. This prompted a series of lawsuits and a flurry of activity in the Texas legislature, and in May 2015 Texas governor Greg Abbott signed legislation that
prohibits cities across Texas from banning hydraulic fracturing.
Regardless of the political and emotional aspects of the issue, the fact remains that fracking, just like all oil and gas production, has the potential to harm people and the environment. Prominent individuals in the industry and across the US have stepped up and challenged the industry on whether it has sufficiently addressed the risks. They are calling for much greater emphasis on quality control from the oil companies, monitoring of emissions, and government oversight to minimize and manage these risks.