No sane civilisation poisons it's own water supply

no sane civilisation poisons it's own water supply.  Water is life.

http://www.refracktion.com/index.php/myth-busting/myth-8-fracking-water-usage-is-minimal/
http://www.refracktion.com/index.php/myth-busting/myth-8-fracking-water-usage-is-minimal/

John Hobson...

I do wish apparently intelligent people would stop repeating the rubbish spouted by the Royal Society about operating a well for 10 years using the same water as a golf course for 1 month. When I asked the Royal Society where this bizarre statistic came from they pointed me towards a trail that ended up with a promotional industry article from Chesapeake Energy which made this claim. Perhaps Will might want to consider the fact that Royal Lytham in the heart of PEDL 165 uses about 5,000 m3 of water a year, whilst fracking a well uses about 19,000 m3 in a month. For the analogy Will quotes to be true the golf course would probably have to be in Dubai in high summer. It's time respectable academics stopped trotting out this misleading silliness. Just saying

 (edited)

 

17 FEB

22 Likes

Maybe it depends on how many times refrack the well Steve :-) As a comparison though the golf course analogy is pretty meaningless. What concerns me is that a comparison designed by the industry itself to make fracking's water usage look minimal and harmless, was accepted, apparently without question, by the Royal Society and is now routinely quoted by fracking's political cheerleaders like Peter Lilley as coming from the Royal Society. It then gets quoted here by a respected academic who presumably (and perhaps reasonably) believes that if the Royal Society says something it must be trustworthy. In fact the analogy is full of holes - as a simple example, water used on a golf course can relatively easily be recycled - not much of that would end up radioactive enough to require tanker transport off site for treatment at special plants would it :-). Sadly, it does seem we need to ask questions about what we are fed as information, even from apparently reputable sources like the Royal Society.