If you are from Texas, then you most likely have seen or have reaped benefits from natural gas production, also known as fracking. In the most recent years, fracking has become a popular way for energy companies to drill for natural gas while keeping the U.S. number one in production. What many people don’t know about fracking is that methane leaks are more likely to occur, contributing to sicknesses and climate change across Texas and the world.
Fracking is a method of receiving natural gas by drilling a mile down into shale, horizontally or vertically, and pumping high pressure liquid to make the gas flow to the top of the well. Big corporations like Chesapeake Energy or Devon Energy sell the gas, unconcerned that the drilling they are doing is creating methane pollution.
The Barnett Shale region in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas is a large contributor to both natural gas and massive methane leaks. With more than 25,000 natural gas wells, the Barnett Shale is prone to have some sort of leak, but in the past few years, Barnett has leaked over 500,000 metric tons per year. To put that in perspective, that is more than 700,000 homes’ energy use for one year or over 8 billion pounds of coal burned. Instead of the methane going to power homes or cars, it is going into our atmosphere and into our bodies.
Methane itself is a very powerful gas that is very toxic to inhale. In towns near gas wells, families are getting sick, asthma is a higher risk, and they even have a possibility of birth defects. Not only is the gas terrible for us humans, but it’s even worse for the atmosphere. Compared to carbon dioxide, methane traps over 80 times the heat in less amount of time. With numbers like that, imagine how much heat will be trapped in the atmosphere within 10 to 20 years.
Texas officials and lawmakers that are supposed to look over the business ignore the methane leaks because most of them are supporters or receive donations from large corporations in the fracking industry. The state is also part of the reason why these methane leaks are hardly mentioned in the media or by Texas officials. Oil and natural gas production is the economic foundation of this state so no one in power ever wants to talk about the unethical outcomes that occur. This territorial protection Texas has on fracking can be seen when the Environmental Protection Agency released new methane regulations and Texas sued for “federal overreach”.
The unbelievable part of all of the methane pollution is that fracking is not slowing down or stopping any time soon, even with all of the warnings. The money and benefits that these large corporations are getting from fracking blinds them so much from seeing what they are doing to the environment. At the rate we’re going, by the time we have a satisfactory amount of energy in the world, we won’t be around to use it.
