PERRY: Aurora made the right call in fracking water sale to Anadarko

Now that science has finally answered the chicken-or-the-egg question, perhaps we can move on from the fracus over fracking as well.

At long last, as humans prove that the “God” particle does exist and is what is responsible for giving everything in the universe form, it’s easy to see that the chicken did indeed come first, which then laid an egg. Eggs do not spontaneously appear. And neither do hydrogen atoms.

More recently, Aurora city lawmakers laid their own egg this week when they agreed to take Big Oil’s cash in exchange for downstream city water to be pumped into the ground somewhere during an oil or gas fracking operation.

We’re talking serious money here. Anadarko Petroleum, the same people who brought you gasoline for your car, agreed to pony up a very cool $10 million to get access to what you flush down the toilet, after it’s cleaned up a bit and poured back into the South Platte River.

Fracking, which is the new Rocky Flats for tree huggers here in the metro area, is hot stuff across Colorado. If you don’t know or care, it’s the process of pumping a lot of water and some kind of secret sauce into oil and gas wells, forcing the wells to increase the amount of goo or gas to be extracted. It’s an expensive, complicated procedure. But at $3.60 a gallon for gas and the billions of dollars it takes to heat and cool your house each year, fracking is well worth it.

Here’s the rub. Besides water, oil companies mix up special fracking juices filled with ingredients that would pretty much kill you if you drank them straight. But then again, so would most of what you keep under your kitchen sink or on the shelves in your garage. In theory, most fracking chemicals aren’t much different from the nasty stuff you get from mixing water with oil-well excrement. In theory. The problem is that even though oil companies have been fracking wells for decades, they don’t like sharing what’s in the secret sauce because, they say, it’s a competitive secret.

That’s so much oil-well excrement. As petroleum employees bounce around the industry, there are few secrets left.

Now I tend to agree that you don’t have to be a petroleum engineer to understand that pumping vast amounts of nastiness into the ground under Aurora will some day come back to haunt us. But I also agree that if gasoline were to go to $6 a gallon, Colorado’s economy would grind to a halt. We would not simply switch to wind-energy driven cars, we would live the grapes of wrath for real.

I’m all for as pristine an environment as possible. And I believe we are killing ourselves and our planet with self-inflicted global warming. But we can’t go cold turkey without killing the patient.

Even if I and my crazy-liberal pals were put in charge of everything next week, it would be years before we turned off the gas pumps and climbed into our solar-powered Subarus to go mountain biking. I’m all for subsidizing wind and solar energy to get the country off of Arab-nation crack juice, but I’m not so naive as to think it’s going to happen the way I’d like it to.

So why not take Anadarko’s money to pay off Aurora’s very expensive water system? Why not let Aurora residents benefit instead of Denver residents, which could have been the case had Aurora lawmakers said, “no.”

I have to hope that a responsible, liberal-leaning state government will keep Anadarko and others from poisoning anyone with Aurora’s fracking water. And I have to hope that head-in-the-sand conservatives will be thwarted in trying to undo the road to new energies for the sake of good ol’ American greed. We’ve subsidized the oil industry for generations. It’s time to give someone else a shot and insist that they come up with something better.

But in the meantime, $10 million is a lot of money to a city that has problems keeping libraries open and Bicentennial Park green. By turning this cash away, Aurora won’t solve the fracking issue or get us any closer to driving flying cars. We have to get the chicken to understand what renewable energy eggs are before it’s going to lay one.

Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com