Plans to exploit poten­tial nat­ural gas resources in County Leitrim using a tech­nique known as hydraulic frac­tur­ing, or “frack­ing”, raises the spec­tre of seri­ous envi­ron­men­tal dam­age and poses fun­da­men­tal ques­tions to recent efforts to estab­lish sus­tain­able envi­ron­men­tal and water policy.

Frack­ing aims to extract gas or oil reserves from rock for­ma­tions deep within the ground (e.g. per­me­able rock such as sand­stone, or shale), inac­ces­si­ble to stan­dard drilling tech­niques. The process involves pump­ing vast quan­ti­ties of water and chem­i­cals deep into a bore well under high pres­sure, to crack the rock, cre­at­ing addi­tional fis­sures which allow the gas or oil to escape more eas­ily and be col­lected in a reser­voir. Sand is added to keep open these arti­fi­cial fis­sures. The tech­nique has been utilised in North Amer­ica for many years, but has only become com­mer­cially viable in Europe with rises in fos­sil fuel prices.

There are sev­eral major issues with this tech­nique. First, in an era of water con­ser­va­tion, this process typ­i­cally uses mil­lions of gal­lons of water per well. And it intro­duces thou­sands of litres of toxic chem­i­cals into the ground — wellhome.com put it at 5,000 gal­lons of chem­i­cals per 1 mil­lion gal­lons of water, or per­haps as much as 80 to 300 tons of chem­i­cals per well (of which there are always many). These toxic chem­i­cals include volatile organic com­pounds dan­ger­ous to human and ani­mal life, and of sig­nif­i­cant con­cern is that the min­ing com­pa­nies — on the grounds of pro­tect­ing their trade secrets — do not even make pub­lic many of the chem­i­cals they utilise.

More­over, only 30% to 50% of the water is typ­i­cally recov­ered. Once pumped into the ground, no con­trol can be exerted over where this pol­luted water goes. As such, it is dif­fi­cult to see how there can­not be a sig­nif­i­cant risk of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of ground­wa­ters and envi­ron­men­tal damage.(In North Amer­ica, salin­iza­tion of drink­ing water sup­plies in the vicin­ity of fracked wells is one wide­spread prob­lem, due to postas­sium chlo­ride con­t­a­m­i­na­tion.) And it is surely reck­less to pro­ceed with such processes wthout thor­ough study to estab­lish risks. (The idea of tak­ing into account the whole life-cycle impact of a process, and not just the nar­row process itself, is a hard-won prin­ci­ple of EU policy.)

A fur­ther prob­lem arises from leak­age of methane (the main com­po­nent of nat­ural gas) into ground­wa­ter and the air. Methane has been mea­sured at lev­els 17 times higher than nor­mal in the vicin­ity of fracked wells, with reports of nearby res­i­dents being able to set their kitchen water alight. In the air, methane con­tributes sig­nif­i­cantly to the green­house effect. Pro­po­nents of frack­ing point to the lower car­bon emis­sions of nat­ural gas com­pared to oil or coal, but recent stud­ies sug­gest that the methane lost into the air dur­ing the extrac­tion process may well mean that fracked nat­ural gas pro­duces the higher emissions.

The water recov­ered from the frack­ing process is highly toxic and has to be stored on site close to the wells and processed through waster water dis­posal sys­tems. Expe­ri­ence in North Amer­ica sug­gests that sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of acci­dents occur in rela­tion to col­lec­tion and stor­age, often due to inad­e­quate reser­voir walls, and that waste water facil­i­ties are also often inad­e­quate to the major chal­lenge of treat­ing such vast quan­ti­ties of water or are not designed for the spe­cific chem­i­cals involved. The major prob­lem is that of cost: safety and proper waste treat­ment cost money, and these bud­gets come under pres­sure in com­mer­cial mining.

In addi­tion (as if the fore­go­ing were not enough), chem­i­cals can escape into the air (even with­out acci­dents), and the min­ing process can bring to the sur­face radioac­tive heavy met­als. Frack­ing also has a major impact on land­scape as it is typ­i­cally high den­sity (more than 6 drilling pads per square kilo­me­tre) over a wide area, with major sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture, reser­voirs, etc.. And there is grow­ing evi­dence that frack­ing can cause earth­quakes (1–3 on the Richter scale), with many doc­u­mented in areas where frack­ing is ongo­ing, but where no earth­quakes were pre­vio­suly recorded.

In light of all of these issues, the frack­ing process seem fun­da­men­tally at odds with Euro­pean env­iorn­men­tal pol­icy, not least, the EU Water Frame­work Direc­tive, which demands a holis­tic approach to water qual­ity and safety. How could frack­ing be rec­on­ciled with a pol­icy which makes the integrity of river basins as water-systems and eco-systems the mea­sure of water qual­ity, and which aims to restore river basins to their nat­ural con­di­tion, enshrin­ing in law the prin­ci­ple that a “pol­luter pays” the full cost of any pollution?

To date there are mixed mes­sages from Europe. A report pre­pared for the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion (by Phillipe & Part­ners) con­cludes that exist­ing envi­ron­men­tal laws are ade­quate to reg­u­late frack­ing, although only with rep­sect to the present sit­u­a­tion in which frack­ing is being used pri­mar­ily for explo­ration rather than com­mer­cial exploita­tion of gas and oil fields. Against this, how­ever, a sec­ond report, the LBSG-Wuppertal report pre­pared for the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment, stresses the envi­ron­men­tal and health dan­gers of frack­ing and the weak­ness of not hav­ing laws that directly address and reg­u­late the area. Gov­er­ments can all too read­ily argue that there are no explicit reg­u­la­tions on frack­ing and con­test the sig­nif­i­cance of exist­ing laws. As such, the report is con­sid­er­ably less san­guine about the ade­quacy of exist­ing EU law to deal­ing with the issue and high­lights sev­eral gaps that need to be closed. Most basic of these is that many of the pro­gres­sive EU laws that exist are sim­ply not effec­tive at the level of indi­vid­ual states. (For instance, Ire­land is only  threat­ened with fines after 2015 over its lack of imple­men­ta­tion of the 2000 Water Frame­work Direc­tive.) More­over, reg­u­la­tions designed for tra­di­tional nat­ural gas extrac­tion are not suited to the reg­u­la­tion of frack­ing. For exam­ple, envi­ron­men­tal impact assess­ments (EIAs) become com­pul­sory when a nat­ural gas extrac­tion process exceeds a pro­duc­tion rate of 500,000 cubic metres per day. How­ever, even in full pro­duc­tion, frack­ing does not reach these lev­els, so that com­pul­sory EIAs never come into force in rela­tion to frack­ing. Again, the report points out that it is not only that min­ing com­pa­nies do not dis­close which chem­i­cals they use. Rather, they them­selves may not know exactly which chem­i­cals they use, as their sup­pli­ers in turn typ­i­cally seek to keep the con­stituents of their prod­ucts a trade secret.

The report also argues that allow­ing frack­ing would take Europe in the wrong direc­tion, slow­ing down the tran­si­tion to renew­able, environmentally-friendly ener­gies. It would be to choose short term gain at the cost of long-term envi­ron­men­tal damage.

The pro­posed frack­ing for nat­ural gas in Leitrim (licensed by the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment and sup­ported by the cur­rent one) seems to be a text­book exam­ple of the kind of think­ing the LBSG-Wuppertal report wor­ries about. Uncer­tain short-term gains (of resources and jobs) are put ahead of likely long-term neg­a­tive effects on the envi­ron­ment, water sup­plies, health, and, indeed, tourism-related jobs. It is a clas­sic case of a local area and local com­mu­nity bear­ing the risk of state-sanctioned spec­u­la­tive activity.

You can bring pres­sure to bear by sign­ing the peti­tion to have frack­ing banned in Ire­land. Ban Hydraulic Frac­tur­ing for nat­ural gas in Ire­land Peti­tion | GoPetition