Is Coronavirus the End of Fracking?
Has the fracking industry been collapsing because of the pandemic?
Croix Ellison | BEnote Research Fellow
Fracking (technically) is not new science, despite how it is framed in public discussion. With a history tracing back to the 1860s, the modern-day fracking process we know now has prevailed since the 1990s. Additionally, the fracking process, as a result of being made from toxic pollutants such as oil and gas, is a significant contributor to the devastating consequences of climate change, which has led to drastic and dangerous disruptions in our daily lives: there is an increase in natural disasters that are not only destroying shorelines, lowering air quality or eating away at world economies, but they are disproportionately affecting lower-income communities across the globe. The impact on vulnerable Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations in the United States is a particularly prevalent problem.
What’s not discussed as widely is how the fracking process can go wrong. If this were to occur, it could lead to the contaminants from oil and gas wells leaking into streams and water supplies. Furthermore, fracking operations are industrializing (and destroying) both wild and rural landscapes and disproportionately putting agricultural and recreational economies at risk. Since the fracking boom hasn’t led to the type of environmental safeguards needed to regulate it heavily, restrict it or eliminate it (thanks to a very active and well-funded oil and gas industry that contributed nearly $100 million to candidates in the 2020 election cycle), the process could also lead to blighted landscapes and poison water.
Yet, since the beginning of the pandemic, one central question persists: Is the fracking industry collapsing because of the coronavirus? As a result of Covid-19, the world has seen many shifts in economy and livelihood. Due to a decrease in the usage of carbon powered machines, air pollution levels have seen significant drops – perhaps more so during the first months of the pandemic as U.S. cities instituted mandatory lockdowns, at least according to a University of Minnesota study. As a result, certain countries, like the United States, have seen some improvement of the environment’s air quality due to a decrease in the use of machines powered by oil and gas (cars, airplanes, boats, trains).
The recent 2020 election debate over fracking between presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump gave the American public the impression that the fracking industry was somewhat strong. However, what was missed is that the fracking industry is, in fact, not doing so well. In the first month of official quarantine in the U.S., as declining oil prices had shocked the oil industry, fracking companies had already started to file for bankruptcy. During this pandemic, not even one out of 100 of the largest fracking operations can profit from such low oil prices.
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