Opting To Desist

"Since the advent of hydraulic fracturing, more than one million hydraulic fracturing treatments have been conducted, with perhaps only one documented case of direct groundwater pollution resulting from injection of hydraulic fracturing chemicals used for shale gas extraction. Impacts from casing leakage, well blowouts, and spills of contaminated fluids are more prevalent but have generally been quickly mitigated."
Review in the journal Science

In this 2011 file photo, workers stand behind the top of a pump for the hydraulic fracturing process in the Marcellus Shale layer to release natural gas at a site in Claysville, Pa. . (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File)

Environmentalists are fairly well united in their opposition to mining Mother Earth of her stored petroleum resources. Environmentalists seemingly take umbrage with development of natural resources at every level, it would appear. Scientific advances like genetically modifying grains don't appeal to them, either. Humankind has always been noted for its adept exploitation of the resources that Mother Nature has made available for their use.

That exploitation, sometimes done with respect for the environment and just as often with careless abandon to the effect on the environment with practices such as, for example, clear-cut logging, or mining enterprises leaving great wastelands of expended earth and waste pilings on their wake, has often given sound reason to protest the cavalier attitude of enterprise to the environment all living things depend upon.

Fracking operations and equipment at natural gas drill site in Barnett Shale

Photo (c) W.L. Sunshine

In the matter of New Brunswick Mi'kmaq for example, protesting against the exploration and development plans relating to freeing up gas resources deep within the Earth's crust by hydraulic fracturing, within a community that badly requires employment opportunities, which that development would result in, rather than continuing to live off welfare, it seems to make little sense when the science appears to give fracking a clean bill of health.

Concerns over groundwater contamination and the potential for creating seismic activity through pumping waste water back into the areas where fracking had produced freed up oil and gas appear not to have materialized. Fracking is a combination of two pre-existing technologies: horizontal drilling and pressurized liquid meant to crack underground geological formations for the purpose of freeing up trapped oil and gas.

Liquid used in the process is approximately 99% water and sand, with a small amount of common chemicals. Horizontal drilling was developed in the 1920s, and hydraulic fracturing was produced in the 1940s in the United States and dates to the 1950s in Canada. In Alberta alone, over 174,000 wells have been fracked. Which goes a far way to explaining why Alberta is a wealthy province; resource revenues amounted to 20% of the province's $37.3-billion in revenues.

The U.S. National Academies of Sciences reports the risk of earthquakes caused by fracking is low, noting that "very few events have been documented over the past several decades relative to the large number of disposal wells in operation." The popular environmental movement to stop all such energy development results in under-development of natural resources, according to fracking proponents.

Who point to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec having paltry few revenues from the extraction of the gas and oil resources available to those provincial governments by permitting resource development to take place.