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You might well know how fracking works. I, to be honest,
only had a sketchy idea but my man explained. Oil, it seems, created all
those millions of years ago, is held underground by a cap of hard rock. To
frack you first drill down through the cap, lining the well with steel and
then drill horizontally into the rock that contains the oil or gas. Next up
you need vast quantities of water (100-150m gallons per well) which you mix
with benzine, a derivative of petroleum most commonly used as a solvent,
glycol (what you and I call anti-freeze) and a special round grained sand
(it lubricates the extraction process), the combination of which is
injected at high pressure into the subterranean rock formation to force
open existing fissures to extract oil or gas. And just to be clear, a
fracking field requires multiple wells to be viable.
In theory, the water, with all its additives, returns
to the surface in what is meant to be a closed loop system. However, my
fishing buddy, asked his son, a fracking driller how often the pipe
linings fail. His son replied, ‘Dad, that is the wrong question. The
question is how often do the linings not fail.”
So, when I read that our government was considering lifting
the embargo on fracking in the north-east, I quailed. Part of me loves the
descriptor of the north-east as if it was some far distant land, a bleak
landscape akin to some vast empty plain devoid of rivers or human life.
Errr ..... Aln, Coquet, Derwent, Tees, Tweed, Tyne, Wear and that is
before you’ve even factored in Kielder Reservoir.
I hate to be a luddite but fracking, with all its attendant
risk, has no place in a tiny land such as ours. It is a racing certainty
that fracked water will make it into rivers and the public water system. I
have no idea what glycol and benzine would do to the natural environment
but surely it cannot be good? Adding to the toxic mix already in our water
from agriculture and inadequate sewage systems is just another problem we
can do without.
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