Mark Pocan: “Thank you, Mr. Ellison, for all your leadership and your cochairing the Progressive Caucus. One other thing that is in…”

“Thank you, Mr. Ellison, for all your leadership and your cochairing the Progressive Caucus. One other thing that is in that budget, in addition to growing us out of the economic problems we have had in this country that we have slowly been rebounding out of, we also take away the subsidies to oil and gas companies, which save this country money that we can invest in creating jobs, but also deals directly with the issue at hand, which is the issue of fracking. What is fracking? It is hydraulic fracturing, or it is called fracking. Is a process of drilling by injecting a fluid, which is a chemical water-sand mix, into the ground, at a very high pressure, in order to fracture shale rocks to release natural gas inside. That is the basic concept behind fracking. There are about a half a million active natural gas wells in the United States right now. Here is what is involved in the process that I think people don't really realize: Every single gas well requires an average of 400 tanker trucks to carry water and supplies to the site. It takes 1 to 8 million gallons of water to complete each fracturing job. To run all the active wells in the U.S., that would be 72 trillion-- trillion with a t-r--trillion gallons of water and 360 billion gallons of chemicals that are used in this process. The water is brought in, it is mixed with sand in a chemical mix to create a fracturing fluid.…”