Fracking and California’s Historic Drought

February 10th 2014, 09:00 am

Good morning!

It’s raining in LA!

And in the mountains, it’s snowing. By the time you get this, Mammoth Mountain will have added two to three feet of snow over the weekend.

That’s nice, but Slate estimates we could need another 44 storms this year to get back to normal!

The situation is summed up in this long-term graph from the New York Times:

This trend is why“California’s reservoirs are holding just 39 percent of their combined capacity, when typically they should be 64 percent full by this time in winter.” (Businessweek)

I won’t go into the many extreme consequences we can expect – Bloomberg does a great job of listing a few, from wildfires to spikes in the cost of food.

What will all this do to fracking?

Last year, California passed a bill to permit fracking in the state. The state needs the revenue, but each “frack job” uses millions of gallons of water.

If the state wants to frack, then it needs to put very effective water recycling guidelines in place, and we have part of the answer.

That could make our frack water cleanup showcase, scheduled for March, a very big deal indeed.

Here’s our brain trust hard at work making it so…