“What we see is a type of platform. I don’t even know what it’s for. There’s also this huge swimming pool at the bottom full of water”, explains Shakira Johnson. This American settled in the middle of the cozy hills of Fallowfield Township in Pennsylvania in the United States, in 2019, before discovering cisterns and pipes at the end of her road. It is a “fracking” zone – hydraulic fraction, in French – to collect shale gas.
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Previously, the United States did not receive orders from Europe. But since the war in Ukraine and Russia lowering its gas supply, the old continent finds itself under the threat of a winter punctuated by power cuts. Europe has therefore decided to import American shale gas.
Pennsylvania is the state that produces the most shale gas, particularly through “fracking”. Water mixed with chemicals and injected at high pressure into rock underground to fracture it and extract oil and gas.
A technique prohibited in France which has upset Shakira’s daily life since day one. “I said to myself, what is that noise?says the American. And that’s when we found out they were fracturing, just down there, 400 meters from my house. We hear it, we smell it and we feel it.” Shakira now wants to move to Pittsburgh. She says at least in the city, you can’t do fracking.
Mechanic Jack O’Neill has also had a pit behind his home for nine years, on land that belongs to the County. The compensation for the dozens of trucks from the gas company EQT, which use the path alongside his house, is meager. “This is what EQT pays me on a well. This is what I earn over eleven months. Royalties on gas: 2.79 dollars”explains Jack. “I get rich with it I can sayhe quips. It’s a joke.”
One more lie around the extraction of shale gas for Lois Bower-Bjornson, responsible for the environmental NGO Clean Air Council for southwestern Pennsylvania. “We’ve been told for almost two decades that this would enable America’s energy independence.“, recalls the activist.
“If we are energy independent, then how can we be at war in Ukraine right now?”
Lois Bower-Bjornson of the NGO Clean Air Councilat franceinfo
The United States, the world’s leading gas producer, has also become the leading exporter since the start of the war in Ukraine, particularly to Europe, which until now had never bought American shale gas.
Life next to shale gas extraction in the United States – report by Sébastien Paour
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