I have a friend who actually lives on an area of the Pennsylvanian Marcellus Shale. They have told me a little bit about what it is like to live in an area where there are various drilling operations going on at the same time. They are an eyesore, and the work is unpleasant to most senses. These are qualities that are not unique among various construction and natural resource collection jobs. However, they told me about a particular aspect of the fracking in the area that negates one of the biggest points that companies try to say is not a risk. The water on their land comes from a well, a source of what should be clean, underground water, without contamination due to filtering as it reaches the water table, and usually free of infestations. Fracking is often claimed to not prove a risk to groundwater, due to the depth of the wells and the many layers of rock supposedly providing a barrier to prevent easy contamination of water, and their supposedly effective well casings and safety protocols. But my friend has told me, from personal experience, that they have been able to light the water coming out of their tap ON FIRE due to the amount of methane that has managed to get into their well from the fracking activities. Perhaps there is a missed element of determining cause and effect in this situation. However, considering that methane is a flammable gas, that is to some degree soluble in water, and being released in abundant quantities from sequestration in the ground, the evidence paints a rather easily convincing story.
While it is known that America is trying to find ways to pre-empt the energy crisis going critical, they seem to be taking part in practices that are perhaps more dangerous than the sum of their parts with fracking. While methane does burn cleaner than typical gasoline, any methane that escapes and makes it into the atmosphere is a far more effective greenhouse gas than CO2, which is also released in surprisingly large quantities during the acquisition practices of the companies extracting the methane from the earth. And while methane may not last as long in the atmosphere as CO2 before it is removed through natural processes, it lasts long enough that it would play a role in the possibly upcoming "tipping point" that some expect will rock the global climate within the next few decades. Meanwhile, underground, the weakened rock left behind has to be supported somehow, or there is a high risk of something collapsing and taking some surface features with it. This leads to waste elements being used to help make up for the weakened structural integrity of the now broken and shattered stone. Commonly, waste water (complete with unknown, possibly toxic chemicals) from the project is injected under high pressure to kill two birds with one stone. However, the wells are sometimes used for carbon sequestration, and there are even some points that could prompt a shift from the use of water to CO2 gas in fracking operations, which would help reduce the usage of water that could otherwise be used for drinking water. Either case, however, seems to increase the risk of small earthquakes being generated. While the earthquakes that seem to be linked with fracking and carbon sequestration activities don't typically register as being particularly dangerous, I can think of a few situations which, while unlikely, have a certain level of high danger that might be worth considering.
First, I'll keep it relatively simple. With all of the structural damage to a layer of sturdy rock done by fracking, it has to be prone to shifting, either from the weight above it settling, or from small natural quakes. If there were enough wells spread out over an area, but close enough where such shifting manages to extend the cracks in the rock to meet with the cracks from another well, a large network of unstable sub-bedrock will be generated, and some sort of large stimulus could manage to turn it into some sort of collapse or large scale shifting/rearrangement, which could cause a "butterfly effect" type incident to occur on the surface, like a drop in land height, or other sudden changes in topography. Then again, considering the depths of such shale beds, perhaps the intervening layers of stone would provide a buffer region that would absorb any such risks.
The other situation that springs into my mind on the subject of hypothetical and possibly ludicrous situations, is the possibility that the well wasn't completely exhausted, or that there might be a couple of reservoirs of gas that escaped notice and extraction. If enough gas was still permeating the stone, and a shift in the ground occurred, would it be liable to ignite (given a possible sparking element being set off during the tremor/shift) and explode? Most likely not, given that the main factor in such a reaction is oxygen, to provide the necessary component for the combustion reaction. Unless there was some severe mix-up or an exceedingly bad compression system, there would most likely be no oxygen for such an event to occur. But hey, there could always be the day, where the CO2 reacts with one of the unknown chemicals left behind from an operation, and produces the O2 needed for the worst case scenario here. And even if it is unlikely, maybe it is right on some level. If that is the case, I do hope that it occurs as another unnoticed oddity of geology, or someone will most likely be hurt.
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