Tiki’s Quick Guide to Fracking
You’ll probably have heard about fracking. But what is it? Is it good or bad? Does it cause more pollution? Does it add to climate change? Or is it just another source of energy? There’s even a song about it! In this mini-guide, I’ll answer these questions. But first, check out my gallery to get some idea of what fracking is and why so many people around the world want it banned. By November 2019, fracking was banned totally in England so “no new fracking can take place anywhere in the country. The industry is effectively over in the UK” (Friends of the Earth).

What is fracking? It’s a way of squeezing yet more What are fossil fuels? fossil fuels out of our planet. The word ‘fracking’ comes from ‘hydraulic fracturing’. The fuel in question is usually called ‘natural gas’ or just ‘gas‘ .
Normally, natural gas comes out of deep boreholes drilled to get at underground reservoirs of the gas (and usually oil too). The gas comes to the surface very easily because it’s at high pressure deep down. If you shake up a bottle of fizzy drink and then take the top off, the frothy gas comes gushing out. Natural gas from a normal drilled well behaves just like this. But petroleum geologists have discovered that there’s a huge amount of natural gas trapped in rocks called shale. If you bore a hole through it, the gas doesn’t come out. You know it’s there so how do you get it out? This is where fracking comes in.
Petroleum engineers have become very smart in the way they can drill holes deep into the rock formations which lie beneath our feet. They can now get the drill to bend round so that it can chew its way at any angle, even flat (horizontal). This means they can accurately drill for a long way through a flat-lying ‘bed’ of shale with the trapped gas in it deep down below. What’s more,they can repeat this in different directions from the main borehole at the surface. Then the fracking starts. Engineers first must carefully ‘case‘ the well to prevent leaks and pollution of water-bearing rocks at shallower levels. Then they pump a fluid — water with sand and special chemicals in it — at very high pressures through the holes they have drilled in the shale deep below. This actually breaks up the shale by making lots of tiny fractures. Because the fracking fluid contains sand grains, the fractures can’t close again because the sand grains prop them open. When the fracking is completed, the shale gas begins to flow out of the fracked rock bringing the fluid with it. Some shales are rich in oil so oil is released as well as gas. And that’s it. The shale gas, as it is called, is then pumped along pipelines to wherever it’s needed just as with ‘normal’ natural gas.
Is fracking good or bad? As you’d guess, there are two sides to this. Some people think it’s wonderful and others think it’s going to be a disaster. Let’s look at the good points first.
Fracking: the good stuff
Coal not only makes more than double the carbon dioxide — CO2 — pollution for the same amount of heat, but adds a toxic cocktail of other pollution too (sulphur dioxide, radioactive ash, mercury). So although coal is a filthy fuel, it powers around 40 per cent of the world’s electricity generation and looks set to increase.
And the bad…
fracking creates serious leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas which is around 25 times more powerful than CO2. Eventually methane breaks down to CO2 and water vapour, both major greenhouse gases themselves
it can cause small earthquakes
it needs vast amounts of water plus sand and many different chemicals. The sand and chemicals aid in keeping the fractures open so the gas can come out
some of this fluid may contaminate groundwater (drinking water underground) and the waste fracking fluids — called ‘flowback’ — can cause more pollution because they bring up from deep below stuff like salt, hydrogen sulphide gas and even radioactive radium
fracking also makes it possible to get methane out of deep coal seams and can be used to extract more oil from old oilwells and oilfields. Using more fossil fuel is not good when you think about pollution and greenhouse gases
because the USA has increased its use of shale gas to generate electric power by such a large amount, it is now using much less coal. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But that coal is still being mined and sold to Europe which doesn’t have so much gas. So as carbon emissions have gone down in the US, they’ve gone up in countries like Britain and Germany which have started guzzling cheap American coal. It’s an unfortunate fact that electricity-generating companies will always burn whatever fossil fuel is cheapest. For now, shale gas is cheap in the US whilst coal is cheapest in much of Europe. So the mining of coal — the filthiest but cheapest fuel for most countries — continues to go up. This ‘law of the jungle’ where the cheapest fuel is always burned to make the cheapest electricity (never mind the pollution) is, to be fair, not entirely the fault of the generating companies. It’s that no-one wants to pay more than they have to for energy and so they look for the cheapest supply.

Extract from The Facts on Fracking by SUSAN L. BRANTLEY and ANNA MEYENDORFF, New York Times, March 13, 2013
So kids: what do you reckon? You’ll be the ones who benefit from fracking… or, more likely, not. It’s easy to find information on fracking but I have included a few links (below) to sites you may find interesting or useful
Wikipedia article Hydraulic fracturing
Frack on or frack off: Can shale gas save the planet?
Frack Off Extreme Energy Action Network (UK)