Water Shortages in Oil Shale Plays Could Limit Rapid Growth of Fracking, WRI Says

摘要

With nearly 40 percent of the world's oil shale located in areas considered to have extreme water stress, limitations in water availability could hinder the rapid development of natural gas reserves, a report released Sept. 2 by the World Resources Institute said. "Our focus is on water availability because it plays [a] critical role in extraction of these resources," Paul Reig, an associate at WRI and the report's lead author, said in presenting the findings at World Water Week, which runs Aug. 30-Sept. 5 in Stockholm. Shale gas production through hydraulic fracturing is a water-intensive process "that has implications for other natural resources, not just water, imposing a number of environmental risks that stakeholders across-the-board from government to industry to NGOs recognize," the report said. The issue becomes particularly pertinent when considering natural gas production is growing rapidly, especially in the U.S., where hydraulic fracturing, or tracking, has largely grown up in the past five or six years, said Keith Schneider, senior editor at Circle of Blue, who moderated the panel that presented the WRI report.