What the Frack?

By: Alex Bridges

If you are a citizen of Lee County and have even the most basic of reading skills than you have heard of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. You may have heard of it referred to as simply fracking. You may think it will bring jobs to the county, you may think that it's just a trend that is doomed to poison our water tables making well water in the area unusable. What I bet you haven't heard is how the well is made, when the procedure was first developed and what all equipment is involved. 

In an effort to get some background for myself I ran across a promotional video from Chevron that goes into details of how a site is drilled. It's not all encompassing by any means, but it is a starting block for my own knowledge. As most of you citizens are aware, NC Legislation passed a bill that now allows for fracking under certain conditions. These conditions are not all laid out on the table, and another vote will be required
prior to equipment breaking ground. This was done in order to set the groundwork regulations and laws that companies would have to abide by before extracting natural gas. So the next time someone asks you why our legislature would allow a process they haven't even set ground rules for, you can inform them that they are not allowing any drilling until the safety regulations are in place and a majority vote passes to move forward with the project. 

All this being said, I still believe that drilling for natural gas CAN be a good thing as long as we are taking precautions, informing ourselves prior to engaging in actual drilling and holding the drilling companies to a standard to ensure the best practices developed over the last half century are used. I believe that this industry will get North Carolina and Lee County residence back to work either directly working with the drilling process or working in a supporting company.