I recently heard a piece on the radio about farmers in the United States who are being forced to sell livestock because they cannot raise them in drought conditions that are plaguing America in the wake of one of the hottest summers in history.
It got me thinking about how fracking uses water. A lot of water – two to four million gallons per well. I found myself wondering how many areas of the country that are at risk for drought also have shale gas in play.
Notice how much overlap there is between the two maps?
Just sayin’….
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Maps from droughtmonitor.com and gasland.com. Here is another map from the Energy Information Administration showing the same thing as the gasland map.
I’m not seeing either the overlap as significant, or a likely relationship between fracking as a potential cause and drought as an effect.
Using a lot of water for fracking MAY increase water costs for farmers who irrigate, and that may be a problem. And fracking may be environmentally problematic in terms of spreading toxins and such.
But I’m not seeing an easy overlap in the maps, and even if I did, I’d be suspicious of mistaking causation for correlation.
Bradiac –
Not suggesting that fracking causes drought (hence my title – bad company – suggesting that these two together are trouble, not that one causes the other) , but withdrawing water from already drought stricken areas cannot be good. There actually is plenty of overlap, esp in texas and Kansas.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/10/news/economy/kansas-oil-boom-drought/index.html?section=money_pf
Peggy