Fracking in the United States: 10 Key Questions

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is spreading across the United States. But what is fracking, really? And what risks does it pose to our health and environment? Why do we believe fracking is so risky for our water, air, wildlife and climate that it should be banned?

1. What is fracking?
Fracking is a method of oil and gas production that involves blasting huge amounts of water —  mixed with sand and toxic chemicals — under high pressure deep into the earth. Fracking breaks up rock formations to allow oil and gas extraction. It also pollutes our air, water and climate and endangers wildlife and human health. 

Fracking has been documented in more than 30 U.S. states and is particularly widespread in North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas. And it's expanding into new areas, making states like California, New Mexico and Nevada increasingly threatened by a potential fracking boom. 

2. How does fracking contaminate our water?
Fracking requires an enormous amount of water — as much as 5 million gallons per well. It routinely employs numerous toxic chemicals, including methanol, benzene, naphthalene and trimethylbenzene.
About 25 percent of fracking chemicals could cause cancer, according to scientists with the Endocrine Disruption Exchange. Evidence is mounting throughout the country that these chemicals are making their way into aquifers and drinking water. 

Water quality can also be threatened by methane contamination tied to drilling and the fracturing of rock formations. This problem has been highlighted by footage of people in fracked areas accidentally setting fire to methane-laced water from kitchen faucets. Water pollution from fracking can happen in variety of ways, including through surface spills and well casing failures. Such accidents are disturbingly common. A fracking boom in North Dakota, for example, has led to thousands of accidental releases of oil, waste water and other fluids, according to a ProPublica investigation. 

Fracking can also expose people to harm from lead, arsenic and radioactivity brought back to the surface of the land with fracking flowback fluid. In fact, fracking waste water is so dangerous that it can't be reused for other purposes. The water we use for fracking is permanently removed from our water supply — a serious problem, especially in western states, where water is an extremely precious resource.

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Samples of water before and after fracking, related to research by Dr. Helen Boylan, Westminster associate professor of chemistry, who presented "Shale Happens: An Investigation of the Environmental Chemistry of Hydraulic Fracturing" at Westminster College. Photo courtesy Flickr/wcn247.

3. How does fracking pollute our air?
Fracking can release dangerous petroleum hydrocarbons, including benzene, toluene and xylene. It can also increase ground-level ozone, a key risk factor for asthma and other respiratory illness. The pollutants in fracking water and flowback fluid can enter our air when waste water is dumped into pits and then evaporates. Air pollution caused by fracking may contribute to health problems in people living near natural gas drilling sites, according to a study by researchers with the Colorado School of Public Health. 

4. How does fracking worsen climate change? 
Fracking often releases large amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas that traps heat at least 87 times more effectively than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Fracked shale gas wells, for example, may have methane leakage rates of as high as 9 percent. Studies have shown that leakage rates of more than about 3 percent would make burning natural gas in a power plant even worse for the climate than burning coal.

Fracking also allows access to huge fossil fuel deposits that were once beyond the reach of drilling. In California, for example, oil companies are interested in using fracking and other dangerously extreme fossil fuel extraction methods in the Monterey Shale. This geological formation under the San Joaquin and the Los Angeles basins may hold a large amount of extraordinarily dirty, carbon intensive oil. Oil fracking in North Dakota is already yielding about half a million barrels of oil a day.

We need to leave 80 percent of proven fossil fuel reserves in the ground in order to have a reasonable chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. We simply cannot afford to use dangerous techniques like fracking to keep extracting more oil and gas.

5. Does fracking cause earthquakes?
There are reports from British Columbia and the United Kingdom that fracking has caused small earthquakes, so there is some risk from fracking itself. The greater problem, however, is earthquakes induced when the wastewater from fracking is disposed of in injection wells. A recent study points to underground injection as a key factor in a 5.7 quake outside of Prague, Oklahoma, that did hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to local homes. Scientists also concluded that a series of earthquakes in Youngstown, Ohio, were induced by underground wastewater injection.

Read our own March 2014 report covering the subject of fracking and earthquakes, On Shaky Ground: Fracking, Acidizing, and Increased Earthquake Risk in California.

San Joaquin kit fox. Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

6. How does fracking threaten wildlife? 
 Fracking comes with intense industrial development, including multi-well pads and massive truck traffic. That's because, unlike a pool of oil that can be accessed by a single well, shale formations are typically fractured in many places to extract fossil fuels. This requires multiple routes for trucks, adding more pollution to the air and more disturbance of wildlife habitat.
Fish die when fracking fluid contaminates streams and rivers. Birds are poisoned by chemicals in wastewater ponds. And the intense industrial development that accompanies fracking pushes imperiled animals out of the wild areas they need to survive. In California, for example, more than 100 endangered and threatened species, including the San Joaquin kit fox and California condor, live in the counties where fracking is set to expand.

7. Don't state and federal laws protect people and wildlife from fracking?

Fracking is poorly regulated at the federal level. In fact, in 2005 Congress exempted most types of fracking from the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, severely limiting protections for water quality. In April 2012 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized new Clean Air Act rules called “New Source Performance Standards” that will limit air pollutants from fracked gas wells … but the rules don't cover oil wells, don't set limits on methane release — and won't take effect until 2015. Even oil and gas companies that are fracking wells on federally managed public lands are rarely fined for violating environmental and safety rules — and the few fines that are levied are small compared to industry profits, according to a 2012 congressional report. As a result, regulating fracking falls largely to the states.

Inadequate disclosure and poor protections are common features of state fracking laws. In Texas, for example, companies routinely exploit a trade-secret loophole to avoid disclosing which chemicals they're using in fracking fluid. Companies used the Texas trade-secret exemption about 19,000 times in the first eight months of 2012. Pennsylvania state agencies have also confirmed more than 100 cases of pollution in the past five years, despite the state's fracking regulations.

Fracking pollution occurs even in states with regulations. The best way to protect our water, air and climate is to ban fracking now.

8. But hasn't fracking been done in the United States for many years?

Yes — but today's fracking techniques are new and pose new dangers. Technological changes have facilitated an explosion of fossil fuel production in areas where, even a decade ago, companies couldn't recover oil and gas profitably.

Directional drilling, for example, is a new technique that has greatly expanded access to rock formations. Companies also employ high fluid volumes to fill horizontal “well bores” that sometimes extend for miles. And oil and gas producers are using new chemical concoctions called “slick water” that allow injection fluid to flow rapidly enough to generate the high pressure needed to break apart rock. 

As fracking methods have changed and fracking has expanded, so has the threat to public health and the environment increased.

9. How can fracking booms damage infrastructure and create social problems?

Heavy truck traffic associated with fracking in North Dakota has caused extensive damage to state roads. Drilling and fracking a single well can require more than 1,000 truck trips. North Dakota must spend $7 billion over the next 20 years to maintain local roads, according to a 2012 study.

The North Dakota fracking boom has also led to increased traffic accidents and traffic fatality rates. Hospitals in the state's oil-boom area are suffering a debt crisis fueled by the need to treat workers who don't have health insurance or permanent addresses.

10. But won't fracking lead the United States to energy independence?

In a word: No.

While U.S. oil production is increasing, even at its peak we'll still need to import millions of barrels of oil per day. Moreover, oil is a global commodity whose price is dictated by global supply.

Even with extreme extraction techniques, the United States will never completely satisfy its oil needs through domestic production or become closed off from the global oil market. As climate change grows increasingly dangerous, fracking only postpones our necessary transition to an economy that doesn't depend on fossil fuels. The real path to energy independence is through investments in clean-energy technology that we can develop here at home.

 

Top Questions About Hydraulic Fracturing

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1. How Big is Fracking in the U.S.?
   
   According to the IPAA, there are about 1.7 million fracked oil and gas wells in the U.S. as of 2021, producing more than 7 billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Expansion of unconventional oil wells are generally dependent on the price of oil on the world market, while natural gas activity is focused more on local markets and tends to be more stable.
    
2. Does Fracking Really Create Millions of Jobs?
   According to the American Petroleum Institute, the unconventional energy sector directly supports 9.8 million jobs, while the projected increased availability of natural gas is expected to indirectly generate more than a million additional jobs by 2025 by boosting the manufacturing industry. It should be noted that these numbers are based on a study published in 2011.
   
   However, when COVID-19 brought the world to a temporary standstill, the rapid decrease in demand for gasoline and concurrent crash in oil prices due to oversupply resulted in the loss of about 107,000 oil sector jobs over just 6 months. Currently, although demand has already rebounded, shale jobs are not expected to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2027 or later. The delay in meeting the current demand for gasoline and other fuels is blamed on risk-averse investors and materials shortages, as well as a shortage of oil field workers, many of whom have left the industry. Ironically, in 2022, the mining sector had the largest rate of unemployment in the country, at 15%.
    
3. Is Fracking Still a Booming Industry?
   In early 2017, industry analysts predicted that fracking would be a $68 billion market by 2024, a prediction that’s still frequently referenced on industry websites. However, in 2022, a more updated prediction was made that included the disruption of COVID-19. In this analysis, the global hydraulic fracturing market is expected to reach $28.93 billion in 2028. The large disparity is partially related to the pandemic-caused decline of 51.5% in 2020 followed by a slow recovery. Still, a larger issue looms on the horizon, namely the persistent volatility of global oil and gas markets. Investors are no longer willing to buy the assurance of industry experts who once described fracking as the “biggest boom in world history.”
   
   Removing the rose-colored glasses, it’s clear today that the industry’s unprecedented extreme price volatility makes it difficult to invest in long-term oil projects whose economics may become unviable at a future date. The high cost of unconventional oil extraction coupled with gains in renewable energy leave continued profitability highly questionable.
    
4. Is it True that Frack Fluid is Mostly Just Water and Sand?
   It’s true that, for most formulations, fracking fluid is primarily fresh water (98%), and a proppant like sand (1.5%). It’s the 0.5% left where the concern about water supply contamination and health effects lies. That doesn’t seem like a lot to be worried about, but it doesn’t take a high dosage of carcinogens or other toxins to cause significant illness or even death. Keeping in mind that fracking a single well can require 4 million gallons of fracking fluid, that equates to 80 tons of chemicals. When you calculate that there may be 10 or more wells on a single frack pad, the amount of chemicals being used represents a significant risk to the local environment, whether from underground leaks into groundwater or from surface spills into surface water supplies.

5. How Much Methane is Leaked into the Atmosphere During Fracking?
   There is no firm agreement between interested parties when estimating how much methane is typically leaked during fracking. Major differences in results appear not only because limited data is available, but because there’s little agreement on methodologies, the researchers’ biases, and use of the calculations themselves.

In 2011, The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that 2.8% of gas produced from wells (both conventional and unconventional) leaks each year. This number doubled the EPA’s previous estimate. In response, the American Petroleum Institute (API) responded in 2012 saying the EPA’s 2011 study “substantially increased estimates of methane emissions from petroleum and natural-gas systems.” In 2013, the EPA reported that tighter pollution controls instituted by the industry drastically lowered their estimate of methane leaks from gas drilling to 1.5% “based on industry guesses.” Many have argued that the EPA’s changing estimates were published in response to political and industry pressure at a time when fracking regulations were being debated.

In 2020, a new report derived from satellite data indicated that oil and gas wells of the Permian Basin (west Texas and southeastern New Mexico) leak an incredible 3.7% of the natural gas captured in that region, a number more than twice the revised estimate from the EPA and higher than the amount recorded in any U.S. oil and gas field previously. Researchers involved in that analysis suggest that production has expanded so quickly in that area (due to fracking) that there simply isn’t enough infrastructure to gather all the methane, so a significant amount is simply vented or burned off.
 

6. How Many Gallons of Wastewater Does Fracking Produce?
   According to a Duke University study published in 2015, between 2005 and 2014, US unconventional oil wells generated an average of 23.3 billion gallons of wastewater per year. While that number represents only 1% of total industrial water use nationwide, it’s important to note that this number refers to the ongoing production of briny wastewater (i.e., produced water) over the life of a well, not during the fracking activity itself, which returns only a fraction of the (now contaminated) chemically laden fracking fluids that were originally injected.
    
7. What percentage of energy comes from fracking?
   As of 2017, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that 67% of natural gas and 50% of the nation’s oil is produced from fracked wells. In 2022, the EIA indicated that about 65% of US crude oil output in 2021 came from tight oil.
    
8. Is Shale Oil Still a Growth Industry?
   Shale, or Tight oil and gas is still the dominant method of production in the US, largely because most conventional production has already been tapped. An important indicator of the future of shale oil production is the number of uncompleted vs completed wells across the country.
   
   The first stage in developing a shale well is drilling the borehole and the horizontal arm(s). This stage may take two to four weeks per well, but at this point it’s essentially just a hole in the ground. These wells are called “Drilled but Uncompleted” or DUC. Once a well has been fractured, it’s completed and ready to go. It’s useful to keep track of these numbers since developing a large-scale shale play from start to finish could take as much as a decade.
    

In the US, prices for oil were already beginning to collapse pre-pandemic due to a sudden oversupply coming from the fracking boom in the US. As prices fell, fracked oil became unprofitable and major industry players were already beginning to scale back production even before the pandemic triggered more chaos. According to the EIA’s July 2021 Drilling Productivity Report, there were 5,957 drilled but uncompleted (DUC) wells across the US. This was the lowest in 5 years, which suggests a healthy resurgence of shale oil development, but that’s not necessarily the whole picture. This number reflects not only an increasing rate of completions (particularly in the Permian basin) but a reduction in new drilling. This results in an overall reduction in the inventory of uncompleted wells (DUC). Since drilled wells represent, essentially, a storehouse of potential production, a significant reduction in this inventory not only represents the industry’s increased caution about market stability but could significantly limit the industry’s ability to respond quickly to changing markets.

 

9. Isn’t Fracking Regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act?
   As the shale gas industry has boomed, hundreds of thousands of new oil and gas wells have been drilled in more than half the states in the US. The appetite for “energy independence” and some level of control on prices has allowed fracking practices, from well stimulation to wastewater disposal, to continue without important safeguards.
   
   Based on the Energy Policy Act of 2005, hydraulic fracturing is exempt from Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) regulations unless diesel is used in the fracking process. Diesel is specifically mentioned because it contains highly toxic chemicals, particularly BTEX compounds (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene). These chemicals are soluble in water and are so toxic that the EPA has declared that no level of exposure above zero is without risks. Despite such heavy warnings, the SWDA focuses only on diesel, leaving plenty of toxic alternative chemicals available to use in its place, many of which also contain BTEX compounds.

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