Fracking Will Exacerbate Future Water Wars

5 September 2014

 - Natural gas fracking operations use massive amounts of water.

In addition to contaminating groundwater supplies and destabilizing fault lines, fracking is exacerbating water scarcity worldwide. Close to 40 percent of the world’s shale gas and tight oil resources are in areas that are either arid or under high to extremely high levels of water stress, according to a report released Tuesday by the World Resources Institute.

As other nations begin to exploit these resources as the United States already has, “limited availability of freshwater could become a stumbling block,” the report says — a consequence environmentalists can only hope will come to fruition.