right now, has NEVER been safer or more environmentally friendly.
HAHAHA ok.....
"how can advocates of drilling right away, including at least one politician who represents me, say that hydrofracking has been safely practiced for 60 years?
Perhaps the confusion comes because a kind of hydraulic fracturing using nitroglycerin to enhance production in oil wells was done as far back as the 1860s.
Or maybe the people who keep telling us hydrofracking has been safely done for 60 years old date its birth to 1947, when Stanolind Oil and Gas experimented with it in a gas field in Kansas. Two years later, Haliburton Oil Well Cementing Company applied for and received a patent for a “hydrafrac” process they used in Texas and Oklahoma.
But is this really the kind of hydrofracking we are talking about now? I don’t think so. Early wells were a few hundred feet deep. The fracking fluid consisted of gelled crude oil and kerosene. The sand used to hold the fractures open came from the river, and the quantities of all these materials was small — about 750 gallons of fluid and 400 pounds of sand.
Today, an average well is 5,300 feet deep. Drilling takes between 65,000 and 600,000 gallons of water, and the fracking done afterward uses an average of 4.5 million gallons of fluid and hundreds of thousands of pounds of sand. No more nitroglycerin, kerosene and crude oil, thank goodness, but equally scary substances like benzene, toluene and xylene have replaced them."
