Please consider adding some of your own comments to your letter. Below are some brief points that you
could look at to see if there are additional concerns that you have and would like to mention.
For example:
Are you concerned about impacts on your family’s health? Some examples of health concerns from
fracking which are becoming known are listed below.
Are you concerned about particular impacts in your community, or near your family’s traditional use
area? For example, what are the emergency plans for catastrophic events when trucks carrying toxic
products from fracking are involved in accidents in or near communities, their water supply, on busy
transportation routes, or in your traditional use area? What about toxic emissions from wells, compressor
stations, or flares – poisons that are known to affect human health and quality of life?
You might find some useful information in this table that you can use to personalize your letter:
Water
Uses huge
quantities of
water – a single
well can use 10 25 Million litres of
fresh water.
Land Use
Wildlife habitat
loss and
disturbance
Climate
Climate change
increased from
use of energy in
fracking process:
drilling, pumping,
quarrying,
transporting
Methane leaks
(methane 34 times
worse than CO2
for greenhouse
gas effects)
Health
Toxic chemicals
used in process;
left in wastewater;
linked to specific
health impacts
Socio-economic
Camp work
removes workers
from families
Reduced stream
flow, depletion of
aquifers, impact
on fish, impact on
wetlands
Roads, well pads,
quarries for sand,
man camps, fuel
depots, toxic
water storage,
flaring sites
Potential for
water
contamination–
toxic additives, oil
products,
sometimes
radioactivity
Huge increase in
truck traffic, road
dust, noise;
significant damage
to highways
CO2 and GHGs
released from
flaring off
byproduct gases;
methane from
incomplete
combustion
Increased
potential for spills
– oil and
wastewater onto
land and into
water bodies
Greenhouse gases
(GHG) released in
burning end
product
Air Quality -Toxins
from flaring;
methane; dust
from drilling and
trucking; vapours
from wastewater
storage; toxic
gases from
abandoned wells
Road safety;
increase in
trucking accidents
Jobs available to
northerners are
seasonal, low skill,
limited; oil & gas
sector provide
lowest number
jobs per million
dollars invested
High short-term
disposable income
may lead to poor
lifestyle choices;
increase in drug
and alcohol abuse
and related
problems
Each well turns
millions of litres of
freshwater into
contaminated
wastewater
Contamination of
groundwater in
aquifers through
leakage from well
holes and possibly
fractures
Influx of outside
workers; loss of
culture
Water
Spills from
transportation and
storage of
wastewater and
fracking chemicals
Underground
disposal of
untreatable
wastewater
permanently
removes water
from ecosystem
Land Use
Induced
earthquakes
Clearing of forest
cover and
permafrost loss
cause more
greenhouse gas
emissions
Climate
Distracts from
efforts to develop
renewable energy
that mitigates
climate change
Health
Well blow-outs
Dangers of
shipping highly
volatile/ explosive
product
Socio-economic
Rapid
development can’t
be accommodated
by community
services
Local costs rise so
local residents can
no longer afford
rent, food,
services
Great expenditure of money, intelligence, effort to extract difficult, expensive, diminishing
reserves of oil when money and effort could be spent on developing sustainable alternative
energies
Of course, if you simply google any combination of “fracking” and “concern/ environmental/ health/
risk/ impacts/…”, you will find hundreds of thousands of websites, from all points of the spectrum.
Read the information on several sites critically and then You be the judge of what you read.