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German Brewers Warn Fracking Could Hurt Beer
Taco Cowboy writes "Those of you who like free beer, watch out! The practice of fracking for shale gas may ruin the beer you drink. Under the 'Reinheitsgebot,' or German purity law, brewers have to produce beer using only malt, hops, yeast and water. 'The water has to be pure and more than half [of] Germany's brewers have their own wells which are situated outside areas that could be protected under the government's current planned legislation on fracking,' said a Brauer-Bund spokesman. The Brauer-Bund beer association is worried that fracking for shale gas, which involves pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into the ground, could pollute water used for brewing and break a 500-year-old industry rule on water purity."
Seriously... People would die if they didn't drink fermented beverages in antiquity.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The real pollution problem with fracking for gas isn't the fact that it's fracking as opposed to more traditional extraction techniques, but that the drilling sites are not well monitored and even existing regulations are not well enforced. In other words, the same crap can happen with conventional drilling. It's also ridiculous that thanks to Dick Cheney, companies don't have to tell the EPA or state environmental departments what the ingredients of their fracking fluids are. At least that's the situation here in the US - as an American I can't speak to the German situation so well. Hopefully they handle it better.
I'm afraid that this is yet another industry that'll screw itself through short term greed, just as lax safety at nuke plants has trashed that industry.
Or if only there was a way to filter the water (they don't already filter it?).
Filtering works great for sand, grit, etc. but is not so easy w/ various mixed in chemicals.
Or if only you could take hydrogen and oxygen gasses and do anything useful with them.
You mean the hydrogen that you get from the electrolysis of water, and the oxygen you get either from that or liquefying air? That'll solve your energy problem.
Actually it is not a "law" as such. There is not law book that contains this law. It used to be a law in some places and guilds in the middle ages. But currently it is a well observed as a principle. The idea is to use the cleanest water possible. What is bad about trying to put the best ingredients into your product.