Fracking. LOL.

The glaring stupidity of the whole enterprise would be comical if...well, it's pretty hilarious all things considered.   Sort of.

According to "industry", fracking *may* be correlated with earthquakes.   But it's not causal.   

I did a little wwwesearch.  I have piecemeal recall from high school and college class geology classes of terms like slip-fault, divergent, convergent, transform, and so on.  And there they were in the wiki article!  Earthquakes,  wiki says, are caused by a sudden release of accumulated energy in the form of elastic strain at fault lines.  A question is begged by the whole article: what causes the ponderous motion of the plates in the first place, resulting in a buildup of strain?  It turns out that the plates are being "jostled" by changes in pressure in the mantle below them, caused by super-duper-hot liquid rock (magma? lava?) moving up away from Earth's core as it cools, and then back down in a cycle.   The scientific term for earthquake might well be "natural hydraulic fracturing".  

Which is hilarious, since the technical industry term for fracking is "induced hydraulic fracturing".   It puts the question of causality in an absurdist light, lol.

Then, not to mention the whole contentious issue of groundwater contamination.   Intuitively, the belief that pumping pressurized chemicals into a wellbore in the ground somehow wouldn't cause groundwater contamination seems naive and actually pretty insane and scary.  But, it turns out there's more nuance.   Counter-intuitively, the issue of pollution and contamination isn't related to the fracking process itself (the hydraulic pressurization of the wellbore), and arises instead from the storage of massive amounts of wastewater in nearby underground reservoirs, and the unregulated transportation (piping) of wastewater to these reservoirs.   This wastewater pollution is primarily what was addressed by the famous EPA memo of October.   But the same initial reaction applies to the idea that the wastewater won't seep into the groundwater, particularly since the wastewater reservoirs may also be pressurized.  Don't we remember these pictures? 

  

And I don't buy the reasoning that the water and chemical "slurry" pumped into the wellbores during the actual fracking process won't  enter groundwater since the wellbores are well below the aquifers.  I'm no geologist but unless the drills and pumps can teleport, they have to pass the aquifer level to get below it, right?  And the working assumption is that there isn't any subterranean movement of water upwards toward the aquifers over time.  Could be possible, I dunno.  

I wish Obama would go ahead already and get casual and relaxed and not weirdly verbose yet guarded and do a comedy routine/roast of Americans for being so blindly addicted to petroleum that we might actually entertain even for a second the thought that fracking could be an answer to our oil thirst and desperate need for job creation.