Fracking - Its Water and Land Use Advantage

Deroy Murdock has an interesting article on fracking and its green advantages on the CFACT website.  Fracking is often denounced because of its use of water to fracture deep shale formations to allow trapped natural gas to flow to the collection pipe.  Yet, compared to many other sources of energy, especially many favored by so-called greens, fracking actually uses very little water.  See the amazing comparison chart below and evaluate for yourself how distorted a viewpoint many so-called greens and environmentalists promulgate.

So contrary to the impression many people have, fracking uses far less water to produce a million BTUs of electricity than do nuclear power, coal, corn ethanol, or soy biodiesel.  But note that natural gas, nuclear power, and coal all use vastly less water than do the so-called renewable energy fuels.

Let us look at the land use comparison as well:

Once again, natural gas as a source of energy does best with respect to land use.  Note that nuclear energy and coal use less land than any of the so-called renewable energy sources, especially less in the case of solar and wind energy.

Murdock also points to the "Cuisinart" nature of the wind generation farms with respect to birds and bats.  Some versions of solar energy plants that use mirrors to concentrate solar light deal out death to birds by frying them.  So wind and solar have a wildlife cooking theme, leaving fracking with a wildlife preservation advantage.

Of course none of this would matter if fracking had proven a significant cause of ground water contamination.  Even the EPA with its determination to undermine fossil fuels as energy sources has not been able to document any significant ground water contamination.

Still another concern with solar and wind power generation is the fact that these plants are usually far from population centers and due to their low-density energy generation over a large plant area, they have a huge copper wire requirement.  In addition, each wind power generator uses about 3 tons of copper in its pick-up coils in its electrical transformer.  Given the increased cost of copper in recent times, this large copper requirement is not an insignificant cost factor in the price of electricity from solar or wind energy plants.