Fracking and Fatal Traffic Accidents

Yes, you read that headline correctly.

According to research out of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, hydraulic fracturing, the process involving injecting water and chemicals into underground rock formations and then extracting the wastewater and hauling it away, has some serious consequences for motorists.

According to Yilan Xu, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at Illinois who worked on the study, “Fracking requires large amounts of water, and it subsequently generates a lot of wastewater. When trucks need to transport all that water within a narrow window of time to a disposal site, that poses a safety threat to other drivers on the road—especially since fracking occurs mostly in these boomtowns where the roadway infrastructure isn’t built up enough to handle heavy truck traffic.”

Xu’s study looked at the area of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota from 2006 to 2014.

“Our back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that an additional 17 fatal crashes took place per year across the sampled road segments, representing a 49% increase relative to the annual crash counts of the drilling counties in North Dakota in 2006.”

She added, “That’s a significant number when you’re talking about a sparsely populated area like North Dakota.”

A Solution?

Xu suggested that a tax be placed on each fracking well, as well as tolls for each mile the wastewater trucks are driven. “The tax could serve as an economic instrument that affects operators’ drilling and fracking decisions and thus alleviate the hazard of the associated truck traffic indirectly. Likewise, a toll fee by miles driven by trucks could be collected on highways to absorb the negative impacts of fracking-related trucking.”