About a mile below the surface of most of the earth, there’s a layer of shale that’s filled with natural gas. While it’s called a “fossil fuel”, natural gas is naturally formed from minerals and the heat produced by decaying thorium and uranium in the earth’s core. Most natural gas is sealed beneath the surface by layers of rock, clay, and water.
Fracking consists of drilling a hole a mile, or more, into the earth. Then, holes are drilled sideways, through the gas-bearing shale. Chemicals, mostly water and diesel fuel, are pumped at very high pressure into the shale, allowing the natural gas to be forced into the vertical shaft.
The gas is brought to the surface, where it provides heat for homes at a very low cost.
The fracking process has been demonized. Sellers of more expensive energy are doing everything they can to slow or stop the process of producing such cheap gas. To do so, they’ve hired mercenary environmentalists to demonize the process. What follows is a big, overlooked problem that fracking may be said to cause, and may be used as a letter to the editor in areas where fracking takes place:
A Message We Can Send to Let People, Particularly Pennsylvanians, Know the Real Dangers of Fracking:
The word “fracking” derives from “fracture”. When fracking is used to obtain natural gas, the very earth is deeply fractured. Pennsylvania’s strong, stone sub-structure is being fractured from one end to the other.
Being separated from the earth’s crust may not be a problem. Most scientists agree that gravity will probably be enough keep holding down our newly fractured land mass.
But, what if a careless drilling operator were to flick just one burning cigarette butt down a well hole? It could ignite the huge, pool of natural gas that underlies all the land from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. An immense state-wide, subterranean explosion, equal to at least a billion Hiroshimas, might turn Pennsylvania into the tin can over a giant firecracker. The entire state would be launched into space like a rocket from Cape Canaveral.
The consequences are staggering. Cities, roads, homes, and schools would be shattered. Worse, in the moments that the whole State of Pennsylvania was rising into the sky, it would hover for a few micro-seconds before falling back to earth. The globe would rotate Eastwards beneath it. The state would fall back to earth several miles to the West. The City of Erie would land on top of Cleveland. Pittsburgh would drop closer to Zanesville. Profound legal problems would emerge. In which state would the survivors vote? Who would own the land?
When the huge explosion shifts the State to the West, a huge gulf will open between solid, un-fracked New Jersey and over-fracked Philadelphia. The Atlantic Ocean will rush hundreds of miles inland, the biggest tsunami in history. Global sea levels would drop. Precious coral reefs all over the world would be destroyed.
These are just some of the frightening fracking scenarios that must be considered. Fortunately, we have a generation of Americans so uniquely qualified to think deeply about such problems that they do little else.
Many people have no respect for these concerned, worried citizens, and speak of them in derogatory terms, like: “Environmentalists are a horde of lying, pseudo-intellectual nincompoops.”
Others suggest that environmentalists are mercenaries, paid to frighten people to protect the huge cash flows going to overseas oil producers. “How can we respect them?” they ask, adding that “Hysterical environmentalists changed from global freezing to global warming, and interspersed the flip-flop with acid rain, the ozone hole, and dioxin scares.” Lots of people describe environmentalists as easily deluded lemmings with no rational consistency beyond believing that they must spread the fear of what they are told is frightening.
We each have a duty to ask ourselves, “Is it really more important to provide jobs and have lower energy costs than to deeply concern ourselves with vitally important possible problems, like not having our entire State blasted into sub-orbital flight?”
