Pop-up cocktail bar outside Barclays Bank highlights fracking risks

On Saturday 6 August 2016 Huddersfield Friends of the Earth  set up a pop-up cocktail bar outside Barclays Bank to highlight the risks of drinking water contamination from fracking and to call on Barclays to stop their fracking plans in North Yorkshire. Barclays Bank owns 97% of Third Energy – the company that recently gained planning permission  for fracking in North Yorkshire.

 

Coinciding with the Huddersfield Food & Drink Festival, the ‘Frackalicious’ pop-up cocktail bar  served ‘fracked water’ cocktails to passers by outside Barclays bank in Huddersfield.

 

Fracking and shale gas exploration has been linked to water contamination in US and has been found to potentially contaminate groundwater in a number of ways. The British Geological Survey has stated that: “Groundwater may be potentially contaminated by extraction of shale gas both from the constituents of shale gas itself, from the formulation and deep injection of water containing a cocktail of additives used for hydraulic fracturing and from flowback water which may have a high content of saline formation water.” *

Chayley Collis of Huddersfield Friends of the Earth said: “Water is essential to  life and we mess with it at our peril. We need to learn from the experiences of communities in the US and keep the UK frack free. Until Barclays cancel their fracking plans in North Yorkshire, Huddersfield FoE are supporting the Boycott Barclays campaign and calling on Barclays customers to move their money.”

Notes:

* The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection recently published details of 243 cases where oil and gas drilling contaminated drinking water wells between 2008 and 2014

Groundwater can be contaminated by:

• Chemical additives used in fracking
• Hazardous oil-based muds used in drilling
• Methane leaking from the well
• Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials disturbed by the fracking
• Flowback water, which is saline.

More information on the risks to groundwater from fracking is here:
https://www.foe.co.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/groundwater-fracking-75170.pdf