The Fracking Debate: The Risks, Benefits and Uncertainties of the Shale Revolution.

• Author: Ozdemir, Busra Zeynep
• Position: Book review

The Fracking Debate: The Risks, Benefits and Uncertainties of the Shale Revolution

By Daniel Raimi

New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2018, 280 pages, $30.00, ISBN: 9780231184861

For decades, energy, especially oil, has been the weak spot of the United States. This indispensable economic resource has directly guided the state's policies for a long time. Correspondingly, by the beginning of the 2000s, the energy renaissance of the U.S. was launched.

There is no doubt that the U.S. "shale revolution" is a game changer in the global energy markets. In less than a decade, it has positioned the U.S. as a net natural gas exporter and the world's biggest crude oil producer. (1) The Fracking Debate, written by Daniel Raimi, a senior research associate at Resources for the Future, scrutinizes the activity of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking for short, and its realization of the shale revolution.

At the very beginning of the book, Raimi clearly gives his aim, "to present a full view of shale development in the United States... which has benefits and risks and uncertainties at the same time... and to provide a better understanding of all three" (pp. 6, 9). In his book, Raimi compiles and assembles information he gathered during his research from his own interviews and conversations with experts, businesspeople, and academics in the fields of energy economics and the environment, environmental law, hydrogeology, state regulation, locals who reside near fracking places, books, articles, and reports he had read (p. 8).

The book is comprised of twelve chapters and, in each chapter, Raimi tries to answer one of the questions that people ask the most. The first two chapters provide an introduction. The first chapter briefly describes Raimi's journey on the roads of the shale revolution; when he began to work on the issue, why he started out, how he came at the benefits and risks and uncertainties, and his aim behind writing the book. The second chapter tersely explains the process that brought the oil and gas industry in the U.S. to the point of revolution and what fracking has done for energy production in the U.S.

The third, fourth, and fifth chapters cover the topics that people are most anxious about. Chapter three, entitled "Does Fracking Contaminate Water?" and chapter four, entitled "Will Fracking Make Me Sick?" explain that the activity of hydraulic fracturing or that fracking needs liquids, (i.e. water) mixed with...