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Students protest ‘fracking’ Thursday in Mount Pleasant

By Melissa Beauchamp on February 16, 2012 8:22 pm in Featured, Mount Pleasant / 10 comments

 

Walled Lake freshman Mariah Urueta, Midland freshman Alexis Loebig, and Waterford senior Alysha McClain chant "Once you frack you can't go back" in front of the Comfort Inn Thursday afternoon. "Fracking is a process where drills are used to harvest natural gas out of the ground," said Urueta. "The result ends up causing major harm to the water supply by sticking over 600 harmful chemicals into drinking water." (Charlotte Bodak/Staff Photographer)

Chants of “Hell no, hydro-fracking has got to go,” were heard near the Mount Pleasant Comfort Inn and Conference Center on Thursday.

Members of the Student Environmental Alliance and Taking Back the Tap were protesting from 2 to 6 p.m. outside the Inn, 2424 S. Mission St., where the Michigan Oil and Gas Association was holding a seminar.

A Facebook event was created by Saline sophomore Chloe Gleichman, president of SEA, to raise awareness by protesting. About 70 people attended the event, coming and going over the four-hour time period.

Gleichman said if water is poisoned, there is no turning back.

“Water is a basic necessity for life,” she said. “If there’s no water, there’s no life.”

Walled Lake sophomore Mariah Urueta, SEA member, held a sign that read, “You can’t drink money and oil.”

“We are here in opposition and protest of hydraulic fracturing,” Urueta said. “Fracking is absolutely outrageous and horrible.”

A fact sheet on the Michigan Oil and Gas Association’s website said fracking is, “a safe, proven and essential process for recovering natural gas and oil from reserves found deep below the earth and often in tight rock.”

Ureta said fracturing, “fracking,” is extracting natural gas from marcellus shale, and the process includes pumping gas that includes more than 600 chemicals into the ground that goes to the water table.

According to msetc.org, marcellus shale is “a geological formation that was formed by the accumulation of sediment into a sea. This formation was eventually buried over many thousands of years and compressed to produce an organic-rich black shale.”

Urueta said fracking is not in Mount Pleasant yet, but it’s prevalent in areas north like Pennsylvania with marcellus shale.

The problem with fracking, Urueta said, is it contaminates clean water sources.

“It affects people’s health and farming,” she said.

Hazel Park senior Carlos Coronado held a sign that said, “Poisoning our water.”

“I’m going to be here all day,” he said. “It’s a very unique opportunity on a local level to raise awareness.”

Coronado said many people are unaware of what fracking is, and this is a way to get the word out. People are recognizing what we are doing and honking to support us, he said.

“Previously, the list for fracking-fluid was a disclosed list,” he said.

Saline resident Kurt Gleichman came to support his daughter and spread awareness by holding up a sign that read, “Fracking jobs are grave digging our children.”

He said the fracking process harms the environment and the water supply. There have been accidents that have contaminated the water supply, specifically in Pennsylvania, he said.

“A lot of (it) flows back out, and they take those toxins and eject them into wells in the ground,” he said. “We are trying to nip it in the bud before it comes to Michigan.”

 
 

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Melissa is a staff reporter.

 
  • gawker

    Go girls you rock!!

  • Jo

    Ummm… This has been happening in Michigan for 60+ years. There have been 10,200 wells fracked in Michigan at depths as shallow as 1000 feet. There is not one case of contamination from this process in the history of Michigan exploration. I appreciate these kids concern as the fear-based dialogue on this issue is fairly one-sided and lacking in facts, but if people are truly concerned they should investigate the facts rather than stand out in the cold. I think they’d be surprised to see just how safe and controlled this process is in Michigan.

  • Dragon119

    All of our products and modes of transportation are made and run on oil, not gas. Natural gas provides only an illusion of decreased oil dependency as it enables us as a society to put off dealing with peak oil and the larger health of our earth, humanity, and economy. We as people would be no less dependent on oil as the prices would mostly affect industry. We would only be disillusioned into thinking we’ve solved the energy crisis, while having avoided the problem and then forced to face another costly energy infrastructure overhaul when resources run out.
               
                Also, there have been many reports that show that water shortages are going to be a bigger issue in the 21st century than oil shortages, especially third world countries. Fracking would rapidly accelerate this.
               
                What we ultimately need to work toward is an infrastructure based not on trading one fossil fuel for another, but reliant on efficiency, renewable resources, localization, and a decrease in consumption.
               
                Additionally, gas prices are not influenced as much as people think by resource availability. Gas prices are influenced far more by cartel-like bodies such as OPEC which will raise and lower prices in respect to the political climate and other factors unrelated to resources.

  • ChrisH

    lol, the below posters are out of touch conservatives with no concept of change.  While I agree that natural gas is a good stopover until we can develop good tech like the fuel cell, fracking definitely causes environmental problems.  This is coming from a traditionally conservative voter and ideologist. 

  • Energy

    If gas were any cheaper, people would waste it more than they already do. (This applies to gasoline, natural gas, coal, etc..). The entire planet would FIND ways to use more gas because it would be practically free, and we’d run out.
    All throughout college, whenever I lived with or visited someone whose utilities were included in their bill, they’d do things like turn the heat up to 90 and leave the windows open. I’d say something like, “Your windows are open..” “So?”Not smart, folks.

  • Jo

    Chris, I’m 31 years old and I voted for Obama. I also know how to think for myself and not just be led around by someone else’s political agenda. I think it’s important to question assumptions and statements on both sides of an argument. But guess what? When I do my due diligence, and come up with a conclusion on my own, I’m much more confident in standing by it. Try it for yourself. You’d be surprised how liberating it is not to be controlled by this two-party illusion. I stand by the facts as they are. This process is safe and well regulated. If you think it isn’t, then you haven’t looked into it at all. I have. 

    Jo

  • ChrisH

    I’m a Nader voter, but nice job in trying to paint me as a partisan hack.

  • fracktivist

    As a protester depicted above I would like to say that I am proud of the educated decision I have made to appose vertical and horizontal hydraulic fracturing expansion in Michigan. “Fracking” has gone on in Michigan for many years- I’ve experienced it! I’ve drove past the oil and gas wells in Northern Michigan and have never experienced any issues to date with the processes used for extraction. Here’s the issue- old natural gas extraction methods were inefficient and more safe. They only utilized vertical fracturing. New methods utilize not only vertical but horizontal fracturing methods to cover a larger surface area and extract more gas. This would be lovely if the process wasn’t known for polluting ground water. Because companies can’t predict how far the fractures are going to penetrate the shale (where the natural gas is stored) the fractures can go all the way through to the water table and pollute water with the gas and chemicals used to create the fractures. These problems have been documented in many states such as Pennsylvania where this method of natural gas extraction began years ago. I have learned about this issue in classes taught at CMU as well as took the time to look at both sides of the argument presented through online resources and published documents. 

    I encourage anyone who believes that vertical hydraulic fracturing is safe to really research the topic further and consider the lives of those that have had their water contaminated by the process. I don’t want that for anyone who lives in Michigan. 

  • Jo

    “the fractures can go all the way through to the water table and pollute water with the gas and chemicals used to create the fractures.”… That’s total BS. You are talking about literally miles through impermeable rock layers. There is no physical way that the micro-fractures created even by high-volume fracturing can travel even a fraction of the distance to the water table in Michigan. At most, the fractures travel 400 or so feet. The depths of the proposed wells are in the 10,000 or greater range. I truly believe that the people opposed to this in Michigan are woefully misinformed.

  • manthor

    Hal Fitch, Chief of the Michigan Geological Survey Division, which provides oversight of drilling operations has stated that there are no documented occurrences of fracking causing environmental contamination.   The statement that these things have been documented is false.