Wtf is fracking?

3 min read

Morning frackers!

So you wanna heat your home…?

That means you’re gonna need some energy!

How do you get energy?

Right! But, where do you get the fuel?

Ya! underground is absolutely packed with fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.

But how do you get it…?

THATs where fracking comes in…

Think about it, there's natural gas trapped in the rock wayyy underground.

You’re gonna need one of these:

A VERY big drill.

Then you use this drill to drill like 2 miles underground…

Ok stop!!

Now you're gonna wanna turn 90 degrees and go a mile this way through the shale rock.

The next step is to send in this little gun pipe thing that goes through and creates a small series of bursts into the rock layer.

Creating little cracks in the shale rock.

And finally you pump some special fluid into your hole at pressures so high it cracks the rock open, releasing a bunch of natural gas to be collected.

And used to heat your home!

But there's a problem…

Fracking is NOT awesome.

See it turns out all this pumping highly pressurized water underground to crack rocks open can actually cause earthquakes!

And that liquid?

When it gets pumped underground it collects all sorts of weird stuff, like…

And the trouble is, sometimes, this scary mixture can leak into the public water supply.

Causing a whole lot of contamination and potentially bad health effects.

As well as things… like this:

Ya that's flammable water!

Maybe fracking’s not the best idea.

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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