The upsides of the Bakken boom are not difficult to see or imagine. For one thing, such a mammoth supply of domestic oil means, for the time being at least, less reliance on foreign oil. For another, the boom has stimulated a once-declining regional economy. “It’s that long term investment that’s important,” Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, told Fox News in April 2014. “The Bakken has been a huge asset to the state, the region and the nation.” The prominent business magazine Forbes agreed: “If 2013 taught us anything going forward, it’s that fracking oil is a big deal for growing state economies.”

But in North Dakota, the downsides are equally apparent. In fact, long-time North Dakota residents say it’s not just the economy that’s growing. The crime rate is growing, too. And so is the homeless population. And the potholes and air pollution are increasing as well. Hundreds of trucks per day carry sand, water, chemicals, and drilling equipment down roads that once saw barely 100 cars in a month. In 2011 Pro Publica reported that McKenzie County alone—an area of just 6,000 or so people— required nearly $200 million in road repairs.

Another problem is that the amount of oil being fracked has outpaced the existing capacity to transport it. Without a pipeline to rely on, oil companies have resorted to using railways. But the sheer volume of oil to be transported is bogging down the rail system nationwide and shipping tight oil this way is a hazardous undertaking. It turns out that tight oil is “light oil”—it consists of more shorter-chain hydrocarbons than typical crude oil and contains methane (natural gas) dispersed throughout. This means that tight oil is more volatile than crude oil and is similar to jet fuel in its combustibility. In the summer of 2013, the brakes on a train carrying Bakken oil failed just outside a tiny lakeside village in Quebec; the resulting crash leveled 30-some buildings and claimed 47 lives.

The environmental costs of fracking are equally significant. The presence of methane in local wells near fracking sites is a concern. A 2013 study by Duke University researchers looked at methane contamination of drinking water in northeastern Pennsylvania. They found that contamination was highest in areas closest to fracking wells. While it is true that regions with methane deposits may normally have some methane in the groundwater, the researchers’ chemical analysis of the contamination linked it to fracking, not to natural sources. The researchers acknowledge that it is unlikely that contamination comes from the fractured shale formations themselves because they are so far removed from groundwater sources. Contamination more likely comes from leaking pipes or improperly handled fracking water. Improved drilling methods and stricter fracking water storage requirements are decreasing that risk, industry experts say.

The water footprint and production of toxic wastewater is also a concern. The volume of water required to frack a well is huge—around 11 million liters for a Bakken well. The chemicals added to the water make up only about 0.5% to 1% of the mixture by volume (about 90% is water and another 9% to 9.5% is sand or other material to hold open the cracks), but many of the chemical additives are toxic. In addition, the total volume of toxic material is not insignificant: 1% of 11 million liters is still a lot of toxic material.

373

During fracking, between 20% and 40% of the water injected into the ground resurfaces with the oil or natural gas, bringing the chemicals along with it. This wastewater also contains contaminants picked up from the rock such as salt and small amounts of naturally occurring radioactive materials. Bakken wastewater is 10 times saltier than seawater. Most wastewater is injected into deep wells, but some is still stored in open pits; in the past, it was sprayed on roadways. To determine whether spills or direct disposal of fracking wastewater on land surfaces was potentially damaging to the land, Mary Beth Adams of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service applied fracking wastewater to a small patch of forest in a 2008 experiment. Within a few days of application, ground vegetation died, and after about a week, many of the trees began to lose their leaves; 2 years after the application of wastewater, more than half of the trees had died. Though land application is not allowed in North Dakota, spills of wastewater and oil are significant: More than 6.4 million liters of wastewater and 2.6 million liters of oil were spilled between February 2010 and July 2011. In North Dakota, new state laws prohibit storing wastewater in open pits; some wastewater is recycled and used to frack other wells, but most is stored in injection wells.

Wastewater injection wells have their own environmental issues. Concerns that link fracking to an uptick in earthquakes are not centered around detonating explosive charges deep underground or pumping in the pressurized water mixture but focus on injection wells used to dispose of fracking wastewater. Oklahoma, for example, is experiencing an unprecedented increase in earthquake frequency. An area within a 320 kilometer (200-mile) radius of Oklahoma City experienced 31 earthquakes (2.0 magnitude or greater) in a 1-week period in July 2014. To put this into perspective, whereas the state experienced only 6 earthquakes between 2000 and 2008, it experienced 6,345 earthquakes between 2010 and 2013. Research published by Katie Keranen of Cornell University linked this earthquake swarm to nearby wastewater injection wells.

374

Other unconventional sources of energy also have unique drawbacks. Tar sands deposits can be mined and the oil recovered, but the process is energy and water intensive and produces three or four times the amount of greenhouse gases as conventional oil and gas production. David Schindler, an ecologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, has spent years studying the effects of tar sands extraction on the water quality of the Athabasca River, which cuts through the heart of one of Alberta’s biggest tar deposits and mining sites. Research by Schindler and his graduate student Erin Kelly showed that concentrations of 13 toxic compounds were higher in the river’s tributaries located downstream of tar sands mining than they were upstream, which suggests that the extraction is at least partly responsible for them.

Tar sands oil also requires more processing steps than conventional crude oil, and the resultant thick crude bitumen is difficult to ship; it will flow only in heated pipelines. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would transport tar sands oil south to the Gulf Coast refineries of Texas is supported by industry advocates but strongly opposed by many environmental and citizen groups. Other pipeline routes to the west and east coast of Canada have also been proposed; these too are opposed by those who live in the areas through which the pipelines would pass. Also of concern are the huge lakes of acidic and toxic wastewater that oil companies store at the mining sites as a by-product of the refining process. The pools are so large that they can be seen on satellite images from space.