Les États-Unis c’est le pays ou on trouve des centaines de milliers de sites d’exploitation du gaz de schiste et ce pays commence à venter son indépendance énergétique (pétrolier) !

OUI, mais est-que c’est vraiment si rentable pour les populations ?

L’article suivant apparue dans le journal The New York Times révèle les effets néfastes de l’exploitation du gaz de schiste dans des nombreuses États aux États Unis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/us/27gas.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&ref=us

L’article en américain couvre 5 pages ... c’est à partir de la page 2 que cela devient particulièrement intéressant !

Que signifié E.P.A. ? US Environmental Protection Agency

Quelques extraits :

Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

Yet sewage treatment plant operators say they are far less capable of removing radioactive contaminants than most other toxic substances. Indeed, most of these facilities cannot remove enough of the radioactive material to meet federal drinking-water standards before discharging the wastewater into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking-water intake plants.

“Hydrofracking impacts associated with health problems as well as widespread air and water contamination have been reported in at least a dozen states,” said Walter Hang, president of Toxics Targeting, a business in Ithaca, N.Y., that compiles data on gas drilling.

Gas has seeped into underground drinking-water supplies in at least five states, including Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia, and residents blamed natural-gas drilling.

Air pollution caused by natural-gas drilling is a growing threat, too. Wyoming, for example, failed in 2009 to meet federal standards for air quality for the first time in its history partly because of the fumes containing benzene and toluene from roughly 27,000 wells, the vast majority drilled in the past five years.

In Texas, which now has about 93,000 natural-gas wells, up from around 58,000 a dozen years ago, a hospital system in six counties with some of the heaviest drilling said in 2010 that it found a 25 percent asthma rate for young children, more than three times the state rate of about 7 percent.

Anywhere from 10 percent to 40 percent of the water sent down the well during hydrofracking returns to the surface, carrying drilling chemicals, very high levels of salts and, at times, naturally occurring radioactive material.

Cette technologie contribue à une des plus grandes catastrophes écologique initie par les compagnies pétrolières qui ont la vue très courte, seulement guidé par leur profit à court terme. L’environnement, notre santé, l’avenir de futurs générations ne compte pas pour ses gens !