Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Water Environment

摘要

Over the past 20 years, global energy use - largely from fossil fuels - has increased by 45% (Tollefson and Monastersky 2012) and is predicted to increase by 56% by 2040 (EIA 2013). Recently, the extraction of unconventional energy from deep formations (in the form of shale gas and oil) has emerged as an opportunity to meet the ever-increasing energy demand (Tollefson and Monastersky 2012; Vidic et al. 2013). Shale formations are quite impermeable and to extract this unconventional resource, a special technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is used. Large volumes of water augmented with special chemicals are used for fracking. This has led to growing concerns of possible contamination of the aquifer resulting from contact with frack water, flowback water or gases released from the formation.