You are Fracking Blowing my mind!

From removal of underground, clean water and sand, to the many nuclear plants here in Illinois, we are able to supply alot of the residents of the Prairie State with electricity. The options are growing for even more clean energy like wind and solar, and we have all of these sources for energy right here where I live in Northcentral Illinois.

They may not be fracking in my backyard, but we are disrupting the ground here in Illinois to create the main component to allow for fracking. The sand used for this often debated, many times shut down, and often frowned up practice, originates in quarries along the Illinois river near Starved Rock State Park. If we are looking for energy sources for electricity, it turns out that Illinois leads the county in nuclear power generation, with one of those plants being just up the river. The cooling lakes line my drive into my office, and on a cold winter day the heat coming from those cooling lakes, not ponds, can fog out the whole road. When it comes to clean energy, one only need look up driving around Grundy and Lasalle counties. Wind turbines are apart of the agricultural fields blanketing the counties here, making Illinois 5th in the US for energy produced by this clean method (Bieneman 2015.)

Even with the annual flooding and often so called 100-year floods happening every few years now, we are still running into a problem with lower water tables. Several aquafers are showing dropping levels from irrigation where the water is pumped out, used and returned in a different body of water. The reservoirs are not being replenished at the same rates as they are being drawn down. The water that is returned to a body of water, is usually pumped into a creek, stream or river, without natural filtration. There are not enough wetlands, grasslands, and riparian buffers to stop the flow of chemicals out of the irrigated fields. Both the aquafers and the rivers are sources of drinking water for many areas, and we are running out of clean and safe water to use from these sources (Kelly et. al 2019.)

What if we re-routed the drainage tiles through grassland and wetlands systems that could then drain back into the aquafers? Wouldn’t that be great to return the waters from whence they came, better than when we borrowed it! What if we could make wind turbines give off a slight vibration or sound that would deter bats and birds from striking at night? Some farmers somewhere must be trying to grow crops of some kind under and between the rows of solar panels in a solar farm?

The constant removal of sand to produce more oil or underground clean water to produce crops, is just turning into a vicious cycle. The ability to produce cleaner energy like nuclear, if they can keep it from malfunctioning, is one of the best options we have for the future and the sake of the water. Alternatives of increasing wind farms and solar farms have their advantages for clean energy and clean water. All the sources of energy come with consequences from oil spills, destabilizing the land with collapsed aquafers, dirty unsafe water, nuclear meltdowns, and animal loss from turbine strikes. We have options and we have technology, we just need to adjust some of the ways we are doing things to minimize the negative impacts going forward.

Bieneman, D. (2015) Global Energy-Related Topics and their Economic Impact on Illinois. Illinois Department of Employment Security/Economic Information and Analysis Division.

Kelly, W. R., Zhang, Z., Abrams, D. B., Hadley, D. R., Mannix, D. H., Getahun, E., ... & Thomason, J. F. (2019). Water supply planning: Kankakee watershed assessment of water resources for water supply. ISWS Contract Report CR-2019-07.