¶ … Anthropogenic Technologies Such as Fracking on the Environment The people living in the Midwestern United States and most especially Oklahoma have become increasingly alarmed by the number of earthquakes they have experienced in recent months due to the efforts of the oil and gas industry to extract every last ounce of petroleum from the ground using hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") technologies.. On the one hand, these efforts can be viewed as laudable since they optimize the amount of natural energy available, but on the other hand, these extractions methods have caused unprecedented earthquake activity in regions that have not experienced any earthquakes for more than a century. What is particularly problematic about these events is the fact that regulatory agencies have failed to implement effective policies that could potentially prevent these manmade disasters. For instance, according to a recent report by Cook (2015), "Although injection induced earthquakes have become commonplace across broad swaths of the central and eastern United States over the last few years, building codes -- and the national seismic hazard map used to update them -- don't currently take this increased hazard into account" (1). To determine the facts in this situation, this paper reviews the relevant literature concerning the...
Fracking requires that a mixture of various chemicals, water and sand to be injected into oil and gas wells that have been depleted to recover natural gas and oil from shale deposits (Beckrich 10). This mixture of chemicals, water and sand is termed "fracking fluid" which is injected at high pressure underground to fracture the shale contained trapped natural gas and oil deposits (Beckrich 11).Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
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