Trucks, trucks and more trucks

A lot is made of the amount of water usage in the fracking process.

What is very concerning for residents about this water usage is what it means in terms of the degradation of our quality of life.

Fracking - trucks

If we take the water usage published by Cuadrilla for the 6 frack stages of their Preese Hall 1 well, we see they needed 8,400 cubic meters of water. If we then calculate how much that means in terms of transportation, we get a figure of 15,120 m3 needing to be transported to and from each well.

Even Using huge 26 m3 capacity trucks like this truckwe can easily calculate that to bring in the clean water and then remove the flowback water would require nearly 600 truck movements for each well. Remember this is just the water – not the neat chemicals or any of the other materials required to build and maintain  the wells and pads.

If we had 10 wells per pad that would mean each location would require nearly 6,000 truck journeys just to deal with the water required.

If we extrapolate this to 100 pads (and if Francis Egan’s projection of being able to satisfy 25% of UK gas demand were accurate we hate to tell you but experts say we’d probably need 200) then we get over half a million extra truck journeys in the area solely attributable to fracking.

It’s mind blowing isn’t it?

Can you imagine the damage that 6,000 fully laden heavy lorries would do to Peel Road which is already in a parlous state of repair?

Can you imagine the extra congestion and pollution?

Please try because if you don’t make your voice heard, then that is what you will get!