Natural Gas Fracturing

There is a common consensus amongst everyone that the US is going to face an energy crisis in the future. The world has increasingly sparse reserve of oil, prices going up. Therefore, America went to find new alternatives, one of which is natural gas.

Today, let us talk about its advantages and its problems. Natural gas would seem to be the best source of energy to rely on at the moment. It is much cheaper than the current sources such as oil and coal. Its reserves are also in much greater amounts than oil and coal, lasting until 2065.

However, the process of obtaining and refining the gas has its own share of problems. When trying to create wells for the extraction of natural gas, there has been the problematic usage of chemicals. Chemicals such as methane and radiation have the capability to harm the environment, and this harm does spread to the rest of the country.

Furthermore, we need to think in the long term, where the only real possibility is to depend on renewable energy sources as a source of power, and this possibility is best developed now, as we continually discover new technologies to be more efficient and effective. This would ensure a smoother transition over to renewable energies.

I propose two solutions. First, I propose to redirect some of our funding in areas of subsidies and incentives. The problem we face is that some 79% of our subsidiary spending is used on non-clean measures such as oil, coal and gas exploration, while it could have been better spent on investing in other forms of renewable energy. When there is so much spending on the oil and gas, then companies and corporations have lesser of an incentive to develop and place funding in the other renewable energies. Evidently, the conservative doctrine of “burn it if we’ve got it” is a roadblock for our future energy usage – we simply cannot afford to discard the energy crisis as relevant just because we have a supply of gas for the short term. In comparison, I still recognize that citizens still largely depend on current non-renewable sources as of now, so we should shift our funding from subsidies to tax incentives for them, such that those companies who do their job get rewarded. At the same time, we should slowly shift our energy focus to renewable sources by providing subsidies for the technological developments in these areas. This would encourage more corporations to start looking into the area of renewable energy because they are generally profit-oriented.

Second, America should close up the loopholes that are present, for instance the Halliburton loophole in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. This means that we should clear up the definition that encompasses the idea of developing our natural gas systems. Despite this year’s change in the EPA, we need to recognize that things such as water bodies are not discussed. Granted, corporations cannot release their wastage into surface water sources such as lakes, oceans and rivers, but there is no mention of the aquifers and underground sources. There is a need to end the vagueness in the policies that we create that allow for exploitation. At the same time, we should not be wasting the gas that we are trying to get in the first place. Gas leakage at our extraction wells are costing us 15 million a year – by minimalizing this amount, we maximize the usage of our spending in the area because a short term expenditure on the system has a great long term effect on the amount of gas we obtain.