Fracking is depleting water supplies in America's driest areas, report shows
America's oil and gas rush is depleting water supplies in the driest and most drought-prone areas of the country, from Texas to California, new research has found.
Of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled since 2011, three-quarters were located in areas where water is scarce, and 55% were in areas experiencing drought, the report by the Ceres investor network found.
Fracking those wells used 97bn gallons of water, raising new concerns about unforeseen costs of America's energy rush.
Most of the western US finds itself in the throws of a serious drought. It is a region that can never take water for granted at the best of times, and the present is anything but that. While there have always been year to year fluctuations in the picture, climate change seems very likely to create a long term negative trend of changing weather patterns.
Fracking as a means of squeezing more oil out of the ground presents a number of environmental risks and concerns. The huge demands that it makes on the water supply is one of them. This chart shows where the most serious problems are.
The frantic attempt to maintain the American industrial economy in its present form is spiraling more and more out of control. Using natural resources on the assumption that there is an inexhaustible supply of them, has created our present environmental problems. Now we find ourselves confronted with the reality that the can be be kicked just so far before we come to the end of the road. Finding more oil uses up water that we don't have to spare. Many people are looking to desalination plants as a magic bullet to solve the water crisis. Those would with present technology require fossil fuels to produce water on a large scale. That would exacerbate climate problems and require more water for fracking.
There is no magic painless solution. We are going to be forced to change the way we do things to a far more sustainable approach to resources. Given the present political climate, it seems doubtful that such change will come about in any kind of orderly manner. It is much more likely to be forced by crisis and catastrophe.