The "a few water tanks" is the bit that adds up - open air surface storage pools are far more commonly used than tanks, and as the aim is to get the used fluid to evaporate, rather than trucking it away, you optimise for maximal surface area. I know that's not the intended course of action, but it's a common resource extraction strategy - disposing of waste properly is an expense that can be avoided by making your waste magically disappear.

Thing is, in many places it rains, and the waste water doesn't evaporate, it just remains until a government body cleans it up or the pool membrane ruptures and it enters the water table - many smaller operators wind up after extraction, and leave their tailings for the EPA to deal with, and reincorporate and move on to the next parcel. Again, not just fracking - applies to a lot of stuff where waste is produced.

So, while in a perfect world fracking uses little land, in reality, it uses rather a bit - and is being heavily state subsidised both directly and indirectly.

All of that said, a silver lining might be that wellhead sites end up too polluted to be used for anything but solar farms.

> many smaller operators wind up after extraction, and leave their tailings for the EPA to deal with, and reincorporate and move on to the next parcel. Again, not just fracking - applies to a lot of stuff where waste is produced.

There is an easy way to protect from after-effects: the government must mandate that a specific percentage of revenue be set aside in a trust or other impartial entity (government itself doesn't count, because government funds are always open to be tapped for other purposes). This money is at the end either used by the government to fund restoration if the operator goes belly-up, or refunded to the operator.