I hope those in favour are 'right'

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know

What's the worst that can happen Patsy?

A Pennsylvania gas well operated by Chesapeake Energy erupted, sending thousands of gallons of chemical-laced and highly saline water spilling from the drill site, heading over containment berms, racing toward a tributary of a popular trout-fishing stream and forcing seven families nearby to temporarily evacuate their homes. It's the latest and possibly the most serious fracking accident in the controversial seven-year hunt to unleash natural gas from the Marcellus Shale, the biggest natural gas fracking target in the U.S., which underlies large parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) believes the cause of the accident—which occurred almost exactly a year after the BP rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico— was apparently a double dose of bad luck: mechanical failure coupled with bad weather.

The leak happened at the Atgas 2H well in rural Leroy Township, about 175 miles northwest of Philadelphia. According to state and company officials, the failure occurred late Tuesday night when Chesapeake was in the middle of a "frack job." The controversial practice, essential to the extraction of gas from shale, involves pumping up to a million gallons of water treated with biocides, lubricants, surfactants and stabilizers a mile or more into the ground at pressures exceeding 9000 psi. Officials investigating the leak believe they have pinpointed the initial cause of the accident: A steel coupling located beneath the well's blowout protector, but above ground, appears to have failed, allowing thousands (and perhaps tens of thousands) of gallons of contaminated water to gush out of the well. (The blowout protector is the same technology as device that failed in the case of the BP oil spill. It didn't fail here, but if it had, both natural gas and water would have spewed forth from the well. However above-ground wells are much easier to shut down than those deep underwater.)

There were no injuries to the crew, no explosions, and no methane was released into the air, which would have happened in the case of a blowout. But there was also no way to immediately shut off the flow of water. And there was a lot of water.

Marcellus wells typically regurgitate between 30 and 50 percent of the water pumped into them. In normal circumstances, it comes back in a manageable flow, and the well operators collect it in pits or tanks. In some parts of the country that waste water would then be injected deep underground. But in Pennsylvania, the geology is not suited for deep-well injection, and so the water is kept in pits and tanks where it is treated to remove chemicals that are added by the drillers. It also must be stripped of contaminants it picks up while underground: bromides, chlorides and some heavy metals. The industry estimates that 70 to 90 percent of the time captured water is reused in another well. However, a small portion of the remaining water is trucked out of state to deep-injection wells, and the rest is diluted and released by treatment facilities into the state's rivers and streams.

I am amazed ! I am actually horrified at how many people seem to be in favour of fracking! I suspect that it isn't me that has been misled by publicity and media propaganda!

When I have a little more time to string some words together, I will endeavour to write an explanation about why I think fracking is totally the wrong thing to do on this comparatively tiny island of ours. I hope you will read my words carefully and think very hard about what I have to say.

I have already been a victim of TWO fracking earthquakes, for which Cuadrilla initially, and for nearly TWO years, denied responsibility.

Since modern large-scale fracking is relatively new in the UK, I believe, to quote Donald Rumsfeld:



There are 2,152 inland wells in the UK.

According to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, about 200 of these have been fracked.

In the USA, 25,000 wells are being drilled every year to be fracked in the pursuit of profit.

Scaling up any process increases the risk of malfunction.

For instance:

Pennsylvania Fracking Accident 2011

How would you provide energy for the people, and from where Omah?