I’m sure you’ve heard noise of one kind or another (most likely negative) about fracking, a technique used to extract natural gas from the earth. Lots of people are up in arms about fracking (I think they just like saying it – “fracking” has a nice ring, doesn’t it?). Nick Gillespie of Reason TV interviews science correspondent Ronald Bailey about fracking; what it is, and why there’s controversy over this technique that could be used to keep us in domestically-produced natural gas for a long time. I think that is the real reason why people dislike it, especially environmentalists that want us to get our energy from windmills and solar panels, which won’t be economically practicable for a looooong time. From the Reason introduction to the interview:
Fracking has been around for more than 60 years and over 100,000 gas wells are dug per year, most of them in sparsely populated areas in the western U.S. With the discovery of the Marcellus Shale in the eastern part of the country, fracking is increasingly common in populated parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, leading to heightened tensions between drillers and environmentalists. Indeed, the attorney general of New York has called for a moratorium on the practice in the Empire State.
Is fracking safe? And what are the potential benefits that will be forfeited if the practice is ended? Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with science correspondent Ronald Bailey to learn the truth about fracking. Bailey reports that the cases of contaminated water supplies were the result of poorly designed wells that had nothing to do with fracking itself. As important, he notes that the gas generated by fracking would not only massively increase American energy supply, it would do so with a relatively clean and cheap fuel.
See the whole thing:
