The water-intensive fuel extraction expertise – identified internationally as fracking – has been banned in a number of European nations, however continues to be utilized in Hungary.
On 1 December, activists from Greenpeace Hungary positioned a 23-metre-long “Cease fracking” signal on a drilling rig within the Nyékpuszta fuel subject. Additionally they warned that local weather change implies that pure fuel manufacturing and use should be stopped as quickly as potential, and named the highway to the rig “the local weather disaster highway”.
What precisely is ‘fracking’ expertise?
“They drill down a number of kilometres into the bottom, into the rock, after which they proceed drilling perpendicularly, so that they drill sideways, and into this gap they push the fracking fluid, which is generally water and sand, but it surely incorporates acids and biocides that stop algae progress, and expertise reveals that there isn’t any assure that these is not going to escape into the surroundings,” defined Gergely Simon, regional chemical substances professional at Greenpeace Hungary.
Expertise reveals that in lots of nations these substances, together with the carcinogen benzene, have been present in groundwater within the surrounding space and will even have leaked into the air: it’s no coincidence that the method has already been banned in a number of European nations.
Germany, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Bulgaria have all banned it or imposed a moratorium. In Hungary, nevertheless, it’s nonetheless used, for instance within the Corvinus challenge in Nyékpuszta.
Greenpeace has carried out thermal digicam measurements within the space and has additionally uncovered a number of devices measuring air air pollution. The validity of their outcomes is disputed by the fuel dealer involved.
“After all, we reported the air pollution to the authority, and MVM reacted, making an attempt to refute our newest measurements, saying that there are different accredited strategies for measuring”, mentioned Gergely Simon.
“Clearly we, Greenpeace, have the likelihood to place passive measuring gadgets on website. We left them there for 13 days and we discovered that benzene was virtually double the one-day restrict in 13 days at one level, but additionally exceeded it at one other level. So, if we exceeded the one-day restrict in 13 days, we had been assured to exceed the restrict for in the future or extra,” he added.
Greenpeace Hungary is asking for the Hungarian authorities to present way more help to renewable vitality as an alternative of climate-damaging applied sciences.
