In a nutshell, fracking is the popular term for “hydraulic fracturing,” a process of drilling for gas and oil by blasting a high-pressure watery mixture into a specific type of underground sedimentary rock, called shale. When the liquid blast cracks shale, natural gas and petroleum are released. The technique has skyrocketed in use over the past half-century. Once limited to scattered hard-rock formations throughout the western United States, fracking is being used more often around the world.

Many environmentalists argue that the spread of fracking should be feared, and there’s strong evidence in their favor: The technique requires immense amounts of water and land, releases methane and other harmful gases that contribute to climate change, and occasionally sets off small earthquakes.

But energy is never a simple subject. And for all fracking’s apparent dangers, it also has numerous benefits: It provides access to difficult-to-reach oil fuel sources, and produces cheaper natural gas that is cleaner to burn than coal. Some advocates of fracking argue that the technique, when compared to all the other ways to produce energy, is, on balance, environmentally beneficial.

But that claim, like so much else, poses more questions. How do we balance the advantages and risks of fracking? Would we be safer banning it, as jurisdictions all over the world have done? Or can we manage and regulate it effectively, and rely upon the gas and oil it produces until a cleaner-energy future arrives? In advance of the September 22 Zócalo/UCLA event “Is Fracking Good for California?,” we asked a variety of experts on the technique: Could fracking ever be good for the environment?

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