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Big Oil Is Fracking the Nile

At least three major companies—the Dutch oil giant Shell, the American oil and gas corporation Apache, and the United Arab Emirates-based Dana Gas—have launched major hydraulic fracturing operations in Egypt.

Some 97 percent of Egyptians get their drinking water from the Nile, a little north-flowing river in Africa that is also probably the most famous body of water in the world. Without the Nile, civilization in water-scarce, rainfall-allergic Egypt isn’t possible. No wonder, then, that some of the nation’s 90 million citizens are incensed by the growing number of oil and gas fracking operations popping up a little too close to the region’s lifeblood.

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At least three major companies—the Dutch oil giant Shell, the American oil and gas corporation Apache, and the United Arab Emirates-based Dana Gas—have launched major hydraulic fracturing operations in Egypt. Apache and Dana have been fracking directly in the Nile valley.

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Nile River Delta at night 

Dana just announced a brand new natural gas discovery yesterday: between 4 and 6 billion cubic feet lie below the Nile Delta, where it plans to frack. And according to the "Egypt Independent":http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/are-oil-and-gas-companies-fracking-egypt-s-environment, Apache has a fracking operation "in the Western Desert near important aquifers."

Shell is the latest to the game; it's using a new waterless technique, foam fracking, to tap into gas reserves previously thought unreachable. In August, it began drilling 65 exploratory wells, and hopes to ramp natural gas production up from 0.5 million cubic feet a day to 5 million. The map below reveals the extent of Shell's activities in the region, including wells, terminals, and pipelines near the Nile valley:

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Citizen groups say the operations threaten vital aquifers and fear they could contaminate the drinking water for millions of Egyptians.

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“Fracking threatens Egypt's drinking water, but Shell and Apache's drilling is mired in secrecy," Reem Labib, an environmental researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said in a recent statement. "Egyptians have a right to know how their resources are managed and how that impacts their environment and life. It is unacceptable that the Government allow the application of such a controversial technology without a thorough independent assessment of its impacts on public health and the environment.”

EIPR wants the government to put a moratorium on fracking, at least until it can impose proper regulations on the industry. Because right now, there aren't any. That's right; there are now three separate corporations drilling in or around the Nile valley, and there are no fracking-specific rules anywhere on the books. There is a body charged with regulating standard oil and gas operations, but it's unclear as to whether it is equipped to monitor fracking. Which is understandable; the previous government was helmed by a dictator who was notoriously friendly to foreign corporations, and the new one is just that: brand new. Egypt is in the process of reorganizing its entire civil society; restrictions on arcane-seeming fossil fuel extraction methods probably aren't the top priority.

And the oil and gas companies know it, citizen rights groups argue. They charge that Shell and Apache are exploiting the turmoil and lack of a regulatory framework to drill in vulnerable regions. The companies, of course, say that they're drilling safely: Apache's Bill Mintz told the Independent that "the big problem in the US [was] that many irresponsible fracking procedures were dumping their wastewater on surrounding surfaces.”

Wastewater is a major concern, as is the water use in general. Fracking a single well can suck down millions of gallons of water, much of which will end up as contaminated wastewater. Even if it is safely dumped, that's millions of gallons being diverted from drinking water stocks and irrigation for agriculture. Remember, Egypt is classified as a water scarce nation. Egyptians need every drop. Because this is the current relationship between water availability and consumption in Egypt now:

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Meanwhile, companies like Shell and Apache keep the ingredients of the chemical cocktails they use in their fracking solutions secret. As such, the public can't properly understand the risks; they can't be certain what the immediate or eventual health impacts will be should all that toxic junk leech into the water supply. Which has happened before.

Yet it may be difficult to convince the government to halt the flow of fracking, since the government itself is a major stakeholder in the project. The Shell operation, it turns out, is a joint venture with Egypt's national oil company (NOC). Fracking is contentious everywhere; there's ample reason for anyone who lives near an effected site to worry about groundwater contamination and wastewater dumping. But when nearly every single citizen in an entire nation relies on a single body of water, the stakes are higher. If ever there was a time and a place to take fracking as seriously as possible, this is it.