Imagine this. You come in from school and you go to your
sink to pour a glass of water. It tastes a little funny, but you ignore it.
Then, a few days later you are admitted to hospital, as you are constantly
vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea. This is because your water supply has
been contaminated by dangerous chemicals. Your parents or carers now have to
fork out for bottled water – an expensive alternative. This is something that
shouldn’t happen to anyone. And what can cause this? Fracking.
What is Fracking exactly? Fracking, or Hydraulic Fracturing is the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at high pressure to fracture shale rocks and release natural gas found inside, and this gas is used as an energy source.
Fracking may create instant energy to power houses across the UK, but it won’t last, and it has terrible long term negative effects. And I strongly believe that we should ban it from taking off in Britain.
Fracking requires and wastes our money and resources. It costs roughly £3 million per fracking job, and each fracking well can only be fracked 18 times. So if you do the maths for that, each fracking will use up £54 million. For one fracking well. It takes up to 8 million gallons of water to
complete each fracking job. The water is mixed with sand and chemicals.
Approx. 40,000 gallons of chemicals are used each time. Currently, the United States has 500,000 fracking wells in use, so if you do the maths here too it amounts to 72 trillion gallons of water and 360 billion
gallons of chemicals to run the US’ current fracking wells. So we can clearly see that fracking wastes our money and resources to a huge extent.
Up to 600 different chemicals are used in the process. For example, it uses Lead, Uranium, Mercury, Radium, Methanol and Hydrochloric acid, all very dangerous to the human system. During the process, methane gas and these toxic chemicals leach out from the system and contaminate nearby groundwater, letting these chemicals get into your system. Mercury can have a negative effect on your brain and nervous system if you consume it, whilst Lead is devastating to the human body, inhibiting oxygen and calcium transport and altering nerve transmission in the brain.
Methane concentrations are 17x higher in drinking-water wells near fracturing sites than in normal wells and there have been over 1,000 documented cases of water contamination next to areas of gas drilling as well as cases of sensory, respiratory, and neurological damage due to ingested contaminated water. The waste fluid is left in open air pits to evaporate, releasing harmful VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) into the atmosphere, creating contaminated air, acid rain, and ground level ozone. So we can clearly see that Fracking is dangerous to the environment and can negatively affect the water we drink.
As shown by the number of MPs who voted in favour of fracking, it's shockingly clear that too many of our politicians are pro-fracking. David Cameron and George Osborne have both shown support to the idea of fracking over the years, and it is highly likely that they voted in favour. Even more ironically, our own environment minister Liz Truss is pro-fracking.
Politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, Andy Burnham and Tim Farron have all shown that they're against fracking.
Public opinion also swings this way. This survey carried out by the Guardian shows that in 2015, the number of anti-frackers overtook the number of pro-frackers. Maybe our representatives can listen to the public for once.
There are many other and cleaner alternatives to this process such as wind power, wave and sea power and poo-power (yes you read that right), and our politicians should be committing to finding more ways to power our country, rather than using the unsafe, inefficient and unsustainable process of fracking.
