Hydraulic Fracturing: Why the Bad Rep?

Natural gas has been used in the home since the first century A.D. as a perfect heating source for daily living. It is used as a heating fuel and also used to cool. Natural gas is essential for everyone's daily life and it is more efficiently produced through a process called hydraulic fracturing. Hydraulic Fracturing, or fracking for short, is a technique used in commercial gas drilling. Fracking involves drilling into deep underground shale, sand stone and coal beds. These deposits hold large amounts of natural gas and bubbles like fossilized soda (Schmidt). The way fracking is achieved is by mixing large quantities of water and sand with chemicals, and blasting it into wells at extremely high pressure. This causes the surrounding rock to fracture, the sand keeps these fractures open allowing a continuous stream of gas to be pulled from the well and then able to be used in daily life (Ehrenberg).

Fracking is misconceived by the U.S. public because of the political rhetoric pushing the ethical side over the scientific evidence, not only does it help our economy, fracking is environmentally sound and lessens our dependence on foreign resources.

Though fracking introduces chemicals into the earth and has been portrayed negatively through political rhetoric by inaccurately explaining contaminated water, it actually would be more beneficial to replace the most common form of petroleum, such as coal or oil, with natural gas because it supports cleaner emissions there are on recycling the fluids used in the process (stateimpact.org).

Hydraulic fracturing produces cleaner emissions because it is a cleaner burning fuel. By replacing coal with natural gas people will not inhale as much pollution. Using and burning coal has caused thousands of premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases of illness...