Kevin Mooney
Ms. Babiuk
APES, Period 3
17 February 2015
Fracking Editorial Hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking, is a process used to extract natural gas, which is trapped in shale rock. The gas is extracted by first drilling deep into the surface of the earth, and then using a high-pressure fluid mixture to fracture the underground rock in order to release the gas and let it flow to the surface. Although using natural gas as way of producing energy may be cleaner and have fewer emissions when compared to the use of oil and coal for the same purposes, the copious consequences of fracking make it in no way more desirable than these other forms of energy. Therefore, the United States should not allow fracking as a way to extract natural gas due to the air pollution, water pollution, and other environmental impacts that it may have on an ecosystems as a whole. To begin with, hydraulic fracturing threatens the water that we drink. The process of fracking involves the use of toxic chemicals in order to release and extract the natural gas stored in the rock. Often enough, these chemicals are being injected into or fairly close to our drinking water supplies, regardless of the known consequences that contamination of these chemicals can incur upon us. When discussing these consequences, an environmental advocacy organization, known as Earthworks, wrote, “These chemicals have known negative health effects such as respiratory, neurological and reproductive impacts, impacts on the central nervous system, and cancer...” Advocates of fracking seem to simply disregard this information, and rather focus on the fact that the use of natural gas is a much cleaner energy source than that of our current primary source, coal, even though this isn’t necessarily true. Not only does fracking result in water pollution, but it has negative effects on the air that we breathe as well. Recent studies have discovered that fracking wells may in fact be releasing chemicals that cause cancer into the air that we
