A battle is brewing between the energy industry and environmentalists about the dangers of removing natural gas from the shale using a process called hydrofracking. There have been reports of exploding houses, poisoned water supplies, and serious health problems as a result of the injection of chemicals, many of them toxic, into rock about a mile below the surface. These compounds can seep into underground and surface water supplies. As we don't even know what ingredients the energy industry is using to extract methane gas, we can only guess as to the long term ramifications of this process.
The Marcellus Shale, which reaches beneath the southern tier of New York and into Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia is one of the largest fossil-fuel reserves in the Western Hemisphere and could yield as much as 20 times as our natural current output of natural gas. You might think that such a large energy reserve seems too good to be true, and perhaps it is. It gets its name from a town in Western New York where there the shale formation juts out above the ground. The region's energy richness has been known for decades. But extracting the natural gas from the pores in the shale in a way that would be cost effective and efficient has always been a problem.
continued at Daily Kos....
