{"id":20998,"date":"2013-12-13T12:02:41","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T10:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zeus.aegee.org\/magazine\/?p=20998"},"modified":"2013-12-12T23:30:07","modified_gmt":"2013-12-12T21:30:07","slug":"what-the-frack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zeus.aegee.org\/magazine\/2013\/12\/13\/what-the-frack\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Frack?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might have heard about protests against fracking already. Romania is the most recent case of big protests this week, where an American gas company has started to explore their big reserves which may consolidate the country’s role as the largest gas producer in Central-Eastern Europe. But at what cost? What are the negative effects of Fracking?<\/em><\/p>\n

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Since the industrial revolution, our energy consumption has increased unceasingly. For many years this energy has been mainly produced by combustion of fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. After exhausting most of the natural conventional reserves around, every day many European countries look for more and more costly importation trades. Prices are reaching never-seen values, beacause of this new extraction techniques -with extra costs- have now started to become profitable. One of these methods is hydraulic fracture: ‘fracking’.<\/p>\n

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Photo by: ebachetti<\/p><\/div>\n

What is fracking about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shale gas is natural gas in sand or shale horizontal-layer formations. It is usually trapped, so conventional vertical drilling does not work. To make it easier to understand, imagine this: you have a cake and you love<\/em> icing. So you first go for the top of the cake and since it is easy to reach, you eat all the icing pretty quickly, but you want more.<\/p>\n

All that is left is a thin layer right in the middle, and if you drill a hole down into the cake you will only intersect a tiny little bit of icing, but if you have the capability of going down till that layer of the cake and then go sideways: you are in business. The current fracking method combines horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracture. The hydraulic fracture makes it possible to get the horizontal layers of gas out, by injecting huge quantities of water mixed together with sand and some chemicals under incredibly high pressures to crack over the rocks which keep the gas trapped, allowing to pump it up to the surface.<\/p>\n

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Why is fracking that controversial?<\/strong><\/p>\n