Oil and gas drilling poses significant future safety and environmental threats (“When Your Neighborhood Goes Boom!” HCN, 10/28/18). Wells are drilled and cased with steel and a layer of cement to prevent reservoir fluids from contaminating fresh water zones above the hydrocarbon reservoir and escaping to the atmosphere. Unfortunately, over time, the cement degrades, allowing corrosive underground fluids to attack and corrode the steel pipe. This allows those fluids and hydrocarbons to exit into fresh ground water and the atmosphere. Oil and gas development will eventually lead to legacy pollution similar to the hardrock mines of the West. Who will be harmed, and who will pay for remediation? Not the oil and gas industry.
Ronald Collings
Parker, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The other dangers of drilling.
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