The Importance Of Civilization In My Life

Superior Essays
Summer of 2014, my life was changing quite a bit. As I come back from my first year at school in U.S. and more than prepared to live away from home, I pack my bags and go to São Paulo. Although it is very close to my hometown, Santos, it was still a great change: new swim club, new city, new friends. São Paulo it is much known to be a complete chaos: anywhere with 12 million habitants has to be at least somehow different. With too many people comes too many problems: air and river pollution, terrible traffic, bad government, violence. There is always something happening there, but sometimes that doesn’t mean anything good… at all. As I come back home, I hear on the news that millions of people have no water at their homes there, or at least …show more content…
It was painful to think that no matter what I did, some species were gone forever and this process was only gradual. I’m currently taking an Economics class. One day my professor wanted to discuss about the incredibly low gas price. He said that the supply is high because of a new technique it has been used to take the oils out of the mantle rocks called “fracking”. As an economist, he could not quite tell if the benefits overcomes the environmental costs of the new technique. Since my father worked his entire life at Petrobras, Brazilian’s biggest petroleum company, I can only think that petroleum is essential for the economy and low prices probably mean something very good. After what I saw and heard from Sao Paulo, and all my biology classes, I could not help but think it has to be wrong. There has to be another way to take the oil with less damage to Earth. I then started researching about it so I can maybe understand more about it and spread …show more content…
However, only recently fracking has become much more widespread. Only less than 2% of the well fractures have used the high-volume technology necessary to get gas from shale, almost all of these in the past ten years. This new approach is far riskier and bigger in volume than the conventional fracking of earlier. An average of 20 million liters of water are forced under pressure into each well, combined with large volumes of sand and other materials to help keep the fissures open, and 200,000 liters of acids, biocides, scale inhibitors, friction reducers and surfactants. The fracking of a conventional well uses at most 1 to 2% of the volume of water used to extract shale

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