Big frack attack: Is hydraulic fracturing safe?
This is an excellent article covering all aspects or hydraulic fracturing.
In the 1953 Looney Tunes cartoon “Much Ado About Nutting,” a frustrated squirrel hauls a coconut around New York City, aware it’s a feast but unable to crack it open. It’s reminiscent of an even trickier and more tantalizing jackpot that had, until recently, eluded the United States for nearly two centuries: shale gas, the hard-shelled dark horse of fossil fuels.
That squirrel never tasted the fruits of his labor, however, while the U.S. started figuring out shale gas by the late 1990s and early 2000s, after nibbling at it since the 1820s. But as shale fever sweeps the country — courtesy of a gas-drilling trick called hydraulic fracturing, aka “fracking” — some Americans have begun to wonder if, like the squirrel, we might be hurting ourselves as much as the protective husk around our prize.