The Alligators of Fracking

By Carolyn Raffensperger

American energy policy is a public health disaster and a grave injustice. We are hip deep in alligators. 

How can we say with such certainty that the energy policy is so dire? We have the evidence. Concerned Health Professionals of New York with SEHN and Physicians for Social Responsibility released the 8th edition of the fracking Compendium. The Compendium is a peer-reviewed, fully referenced compilation of science that exists not as a monograph in an obscure journal but as a fully searchable, public access document that is housed at www.concernedhealthny.org and www.psr.org.  

Sandra Steingraber described the evidence this way: 

“To summarize our findings in three words:  Fracking is injustice.  

Twenty years ago, we called fracking ‘unconventional’ oil and gas extraction. Now fracking is the norm. As of 2022, fracturing techniques have been used on an estimated one million wells across the United States to shatter rock layers with high pressure water and chemicals to extract the oil or gas trapped inside. Fracking now produces at least 79 percent of U.S. natural gas and 65 percent of U.S. crude oil. Fracking has become, in the United States, the standard method for getting oil and gas out of the ground. 

But despite its ubiquity, the harm caused by fracking and its ancillary infrastructure are not borne equally by all of us. Over and over again the studies show that, throughout the United States, Indigenous communities, communities of color, and low-income communities are disproportionately injured by fracking because well pads, pipelines, compressor stations, flare stacks, LNG terminals, and gas-fired power plants are disproportionately sited in non-white, Indigenous, and low-income communities. Recent data show that U.S. minorities, particularly Blacks and Latinos, including in Colorado, disproportionately live near fracking wells and flare stacks. 

The harms caused by fracking includes exposure to toxic air pollution. As documented in more than 100 studies, toxic air pollution accompanies fracking wherever it goes. More than 200 airborne chemicals have been detected near drilling and fracking operations. Of these, 61 are classified as hazardous air pollutants, including the cancer-causing chemicals benzene and formaldehyde. 

Fracking-related air pollutants combine to make ground-level ozone (smog), which causes asthma, stroke, and heart disease. We found that air emissions from fracking and flaring can drift and pollute the air hundreds of miles downwind.

In the lower 48 states, just six states produce nearly three-quarters of the nation’s natural gas and onshore crude oil. They are Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. These six states also experience the highest levels of ground-level ozone and fine particle pollution attributable to oil and gas extraction activities. A 2021 study found that the fracking boom in northeastern Colorado was a significant source of toxic and smog-making air pollutants, including benzene and toluene.

As documented by more than 180 studies, fracking has depleted or contaminated water resources, including drinking water sources. Studies provide irrefutable evidence that groundwater contamination has occurred as a result of fracking activities. Spills into surface water have profoundly altered the chemistry of streams throughout entire watersheds, increasing downstream levels of radioactive elements, heavy metals, endocrine disruptors.

Demand for water to use in U.S. fracking operations has more than doubled since 2016. The water used for fracking that remains in the shale formation is permanently lost to the hydrological cycle. Studies also show that fracking can deplete streams and aquifers in ways that create water scarcity in drought-prone regions of the West. 

The result is a public health crisis. As documented in more than 100 studies, public health harms now linked with drilling, fracking, and associated infrastructure are well-established. They include cancers, asthma, respiratory diseases, skin rashes, heart problems, and mental health problems. Again, fracking is injustice. Not all people are equally harmed. In Colorado and elsewhere, pregnant women, infants, children, and the elderly experience more severe health problems. 

Multiple corroborating studies of pregnant women residing near fracking operations across the nation show impairments to infant health. These include birth defects, preterm birth, and low birth weight. Emerging evidence shows harm to mothers, too. New research shows that pregnant women living near fracking sites suffer elevated risks for eclampsia during pregnancy. 

New research from Pennsylvania shows that older residents living in proximity to oil and gas wells have shorter lifespans. Fracking is also linked in new research to heart disease.

Dr. Sandra Steinberger holds a poster of the Fracking Compendium at the Denver Press Conference

Finally, fracking is injustice because fracking is accelerating the climate crisis, which disproportionately harms our children and future generations. We now understand that North American fracking operations for both oil and gas are driving the current surge in global levels of methane, a greenhouse gas 86 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year period and which has contributed 40 percent of all global warming to date. 

Methane escapes into the atmosphere from all parts of fracking system, from the well pad to the burner tip, at rates that exceed earlier estimates by a factor of two to six. And multiple studies show that old wells go on leaking even after they are decommissioned. The inherent leakiness of fracking makes the natural gas obtained by fracking at least as bad as coal in damaging our climate.

Liquefying natural gas to allow its overseas transport only makes this climate problem worse as LNG requires immense energy and evaporative cooling, both of which add further to the prodigious greenhouse gas emissions of natural gas obtained via fracking.

In sum, the vast body of scientific studies now published on hydraulic fracturing in the peer-reviewed scientific literature confirms that the climate and public health risks from fracking are real and the range of environmental harms wide. Our examination uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends.” 

The Compendium shows that “it is alligators all the way down” to paraphrase a little old lady who was arguing with the American philosopher William James about the sun being at the center of the solar system. When he made his case about the round Earth revolving around the sun, the woman said she had a better theory which is that the earth is on the back of a giant turtle and that there were turtles all the way down.

We at SEHN think James would have come to the same conclusion about energy policy—return the sun to its rightful position, abandon the alligators of fracking and its associated technologies like carbon capture and storage.

Real Alligators agree. We have a real treat for you in a bluesy musical and scientific interview about climate change between SEHN science director Dr. Ted Schettler and the marvelous musician Alligator. Alligator, who grew up on the Choctaw Reservation that straddles the Louisiana/Texas border, says his middle name is “Sularski,” the Choctaw word for Alligator. He says he got the name because a gator crawled up on his parent’s front porch the night he was born. The longtime musician began playing music professionally when he was just 3 years old. Recently Alligator began exploring the world of podcasts and, as you will see, one thing led to another.