text: Fracking unfairly attacked - Opinion - Castanet.net
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  Fracking unfairly attacked
  Contributed - Nov 28, 2017 / 9:00 am | Story: 212633
  A coalition of environmental groups, community groups and Indigenous bands are calling for a "full public inquiry" to "investigate the risks and harms associated with fracking."
  A resource analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives rejects the New Democrat government's proposed plan to appoint a scientific panel to review hydraulic fracturing. He claims that another scientific review "won't be enough to fully address the true risks of deploying this brute-force technology throughout northeast B.C. Current realities dictate that we need a wide-ranging public inquiry."
  Perhaps the anti-fracking coalition isn't satisfied with the idea of a scientific review panel because there has been at least a dozen such reviews and expert panels empowered by governments around the world, staffed with highly-respected scientists and engineers, that all come to basically the same conclusion: Yes, hydraulic fracturing poses a range of environmental and social impacts, but they're relatively rare and manageable with existing technologies and regulatory practices.
  On water contamination, a 2013 review article in the journal Science found that "since the advent of hydraulic fracturing, more than one million hydraulic fracturing treatments have been conducted, with perhaps only one documented case of direct groundwater pollution resulting from injection of hydraulic fracturing chemicals used for shale gas extraction."
  A 2011 report of the New York State Health Department (which then had a ban on hydraulic fracturing) found that "no significant impact to water resources is likely to occur due to underground vertical migration of fracturing fluids through the shale formations."
  With regard to air pollution, a 2014 study conducted for the B.C. Ministry of Health found that short-term exposures to air pollutants were low enough that they didn't pose a significant risk of adverse health effects to people living in the area, while long-term exposures to air pollutants from hydraulic fracturing were generally associated with a low potential for adverse health effects.
  On seismicity, the Canadian Council of Academies found that although hydraulic fracturing operations can cause additional seismicity, most of the earthquakes felt by the public aren't caused by hydraulic fracturing itself, but by the underground injection of waste water. They are mostly very low-strength tremors not felt at the surface of the Earth (although one 4.6-magnitude quake has been linked to hydraulic fracturing, but it didn't cause damage to persons or property). The CCA suggests that the risk of hydraulic fracturing causing earthquakes is low, and can be minimized through "careful site selection, monitoring, and management."
  It's hard to see how a public inquiry into hydraulic fracturing will produce anything significantly different than the voluminous literature that shows the risks of hydraulic fracturing, while real, have been and continue to be managed by traditional engineering and regulatory practices.