Happy Halloween!

You know what can be kind of scary?

Fracking.

For those of you who don't know fracking is the pet name for hydraulic fracturing.

It's one way to get natural gas out of the ground.

But in America, it's become THE way.

What you do is you inject a mixture of water, sand, and a whole cocktail of chemicals

into underground rocks at super high pressure.

And blast the stuff open, and natural gas comes out.

Fracking's been around for a while.

Halle Burton started using the technique in the late 1940s, but that was fracking with

vertical drilling.

In the past 10 or 15 years, fracking has been combined with horizontal drilling, where

you can go for miles and miles underground.

The United States is now the biggest producer of natural gas in the world.

And that means jobs, lots of good paying jobs.

But then there's the scary side of it.

With pumping chemicals into the ground comes the risk of spilling chemicals into water

sources.

With all those high pressure drilling machines comes methane gas being pumped into the atmosphere.

And like any work with gas and oil, you've got the risk of deadly explosions.

Deadly explosions close to residential neighborhoods.

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