How Dangerous is Fracking? — Further Discussion
In response to my piece: How Dangerous is Fracking? my friend and colleague Glenn Doty makes some excellent points:
The question is not “is fracking safe”. The question is: “given what we know, how likely is it that fracking would cause more net trouble to society than not fracking”? The answer to that is: 0%.
Last year we went into winter with a record natural gas inventory level, and we came out with a low that we haven’t hit in 20 years. Had it not been for fracking, our inventory level would have been more than a trillion cubic feet lower going into the wintertime, and there would have been shortages that would literally have resulted in people freezing to death. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a real effect.
This year, because we drew down our inventory levels so far, there has been less reliance on natural gas for electric power production… And coal power has increased its load by 42 TWh for the first half of the year. That’s ~15 million tons of additional coal consumed in 6 months, because we had a draw-down of an extra Tcf. Imagine if our production level were 10 Tcf lower per year – due to the loss of Fracking. That would mean ~800 million tons of additional coal consumption, and people literally freezing to death.
There has not been one single shred of evidence that fracking results in more pollution than old-style vertical drilling. There’s no reasonable postulates put forward as to why fracking would result in more pollution than normal vertical drilling (aside from the obvious: greater consumption.)
And for that you’re willing to make thousands of people freeze to death and commit this country to burning 800 million more tons of coal per year?
(For comparison, during the first 6 months of this year, there was ~8 TWh YOY increase of additional renewable generation – counting all sources.)
The anti-fracking people are nuts. You have to prove to me that fracking is worse than coal in order for me to be against it… and to that effect they haven’t even found the singular first argument. Maybe in 30 years, when coal is no longer on the grid… I’ll consider entertaining the notion of trying to stop fracking… But for now, Fracking is doing far more good than harm – whatever the harm… it’s reducing our consumption of coal and keeping us warm in the winter. We need both of those services. 😉
Thanks for the excellent insight, Glenn. Here are a couple of things to consider, however.
1) You write, “given what we know…” What about: “given what we don’t know?” I hope what you’re saying turns out to be correct, but there is no reason to assume that, given that we’re talking about dealing with hundreds of billions of gallons of poison in a way that has no precedent.
2) The existence of low-cost fossil fuels provides an economic environment that is hostile to the development of renewable energy, which I believe is 100% required if humankind is to avoid wholesale catastrophe. The fact that fossil fuels are artificially inexpensive due to tax-payer subsidies, lavished onto the industry by a congress that it essentially owns, is deplorable, putting it kindly; you’ve heard me say worse in our private conversations.
3) We all need to be concerned that the oil/gas people refuse to tell us the exact set of chemicals they’re using. That our leaders refuse to fix this, and continue to subject the citizenry to this form of terrorism, is also “deplorable.”
4) We also need to understand that no one (outside of the industry) knows the truth about the scope of methane leaks that are routine in this practice.
Craig,
This is fair… and deserves a fair response.
Before we get into that, however, I need to correct my earlier statement – it would be ~300 million tons additional coal needs/year, not ~800 million tons. (I was typing quickly and thoughtlessly).
Now… on to your points:
1. What we don’t know is quite limited in scope, and the potential environmental hazzards are likewise limited. We don’t know the exact compounds they use in the fracking fluid (though we do know that the major constituent is “sand”, and we also know that the fracking fluid is essentially pumped several miles below any aqueduct. So any contamination of the aqueducts must be caused by exchange via micro-cracks that are literally thousands of meters long. We’re talking about miligrams of fluid per year per billion tons of water in the aqueducts. Whatever compounds they’ve added to the fluid would be diluted well below safe levels… PROVIDED THAT THE WELL CASINGS ARE BUILT TO CODE.
This is, of course, also critically necessary with standard natural gas drilling. Of course, I approve of tightly monitoring the industry and approve of tightening the codes..
The only other thing we don’t know is the exact causal relationship between increased seismic activity and the stimulation of horizontal drilling. But the energy differences here are 5 to 8 orders of magnitude, so it’s clear that the only risk would be doing horizontal well stimulation (oil fracking, natural gas fracking, or enhanced geothermal energy drilling) near a fault line that has higher activity levels. We can both agree that more should be learned before fracking near the San Andreas Fault Line… but aside from obvious risks, I just don’t get the issue here.
2. You are correct that low cost fossil fuels are a competitive problem for renewables… And we both agree that renewables need to have the field leveled in terms of pricing in the externality costs that fossil fuels get subsidized by being allowed to exhaust for free (dumping those costs onto the commons). You want to level the field by taxing fossil fuels, while I want to level the field by subsidizing all mitigation strategies… but we’re on the same page.
However, coal is the cheaper fossil fuel – by far.. and natural gas has much greater flexibility in dispatch, so it can more comfortably accommodate the penetration of renewables. In other words – a grid that had less natural gas would be far more difficult for renewables to have a hope of penetrating – until and unless politicians finally got around to pricing the externalities. (I’m thinking that might happen in 2017 – we need a filibuster proof democratic senate, a democratic majority house with at least 15 seats margin, and a democratic president. We haven’t had those conditions met since the 1930’s except for 4 short months in 2009… and President Obama had far too many other things on his plate at the time.)
3. I addressed this in #1. They are pushing a water/sand/salt solution into cracks via shaped explosives… the water forces the crack open and the sand wedges it open enough for the pressurized gas to start flowing out… That’s Fracking. Whatever salts they add to the water are left several miles deeper than the deepest aquifer. The only concern is the well casing – which should indeed be tightly regulated..
4. The methane can be measured. Here the anti-fracking crowd is as guilty as the industry itself, and the EPA has been MIA…
Anti-fracking hit jobs like “Gasland” are going to areas that have been extensively drilled for a full century – tens of thousands of wells drilled before the EPA was ever imagined, all on top of a rich energy dense shale formation… Yes they’ve found problems, but they made no attempt to separate what may have been caused by leaking well casings that were put down before my grandparents moved into the area vs what may have been caused by the newer wells that have strict well casing regulations. I’ve EAGERLY looked for that information – from government, industry, or activists… and no-one has bothered to release it.
I feel it’s highly unlikely that the net result will make fracked gas worse than coal… but it is something I’d like to know It’s probably going to be embarrasing to both the industry and the activists (else one side or the other would have published it), and it will certainly result in the environmental case for EV’s being even worse than it already is…
😉
Sorry about the last jab… couldn’t resist.
Again, we both want what is best for the environment… but I’ve learned what I could, I feel I have a good grasp of at least the scope of what I don’t know if not the actual content… and I cannot imagine how fracked gas could be worse than coal… There’s just not enough unknowns.