Jonathan Franzen’s second novel, Strong Motion, featured a seismologist who discovers that an outbreak of earthquakes is the byproduct of industrial drilling. Brian Ted Jones takes a deep breath:
This past Saturday, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck the tiny town of Sparks in Lincoln County, Oklahoma. … Up through 2009, Oklahoma had averaged about fifty earthquakes a year. The total number of quakes reported in 2010? 1,047. This swift and dramatic change in Oklahoma’s vulnerability to earthquakes has some people wondering if the practice of hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — might be the culprit. Fracking is the process of injecting highly-pressurized fluids into the earth to break up shale and rock and release otherwise inaccessible sources of natural gas. The waste fluid is then shot back underground at sites called “injection wells.” There are 181 active injection wells in Lincoln County Oklahoma.
Chris Wood takes a closer look at fracking and the dangers it poses to underground water supplies. We no longer use the original frackant, napalm. But companies are pretty secretive about what they do use:
Some ingredients, such as tallow soap and crushed nutshells, are benign. Others are pure poison. … In his second week in office, President Bush assigned Cheney to craft a new energy policy. The 2005 energy bill that emerged contained, among other features, a plum for the fracking industry: a unique exemption from the US Safe Drinking Water Act’s prohibition on injecting any substance underground that might endanger potable groundwater.
The Dish 