Fracking safety concerns a festering issue
By Stephen Ewart,
Calgary Herald
December 3, 2011
The fracking debate moved to the floor of the provincial legislature this week, where the government promised to get in front of the issue while con-tending it's nothing new.
In contrast to the heated policy debates among politicians elsewhere in the world, discussions in the Alberta legislature have been limited to a handful of questions - generally more speculative than penetrating - appearing in Hansard over the past three years.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the technological revolution that, when applied with advanced horizontal drilling techniques, has literally re-drawn the global map for oil and, especially, natural gas.
Nobody was predicting Pennsylvania or Poland were going to become major producing regions before the ubiquitous application of shooting jets of water laced with small amounts of chemicals and sand into rock deep under-ground.
It's opened oil and gas deposits once considered uneconomic so much that it caused gas prices to plummet to largely uneconomic levels. Some estimates say 90 per cent of North American wells now use fracking to increase production.
The great fear - among myriad fears - is groundwater contamination.
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