Questioning the Safety of Hydraulic Fracturing for Natural Gas Extraction
There is excitement and optimism about using improved hydraulic fracturing technology to stimulate natural gas production from shale rock formations that have been known for many years to contain methane. Until horizontal drilling and fracking technology became more available, that energy resource was considered to be inaccessible. In 2008, the U. S. Energy Information Agency (an arm of the Department of Energy), began reporting some shale gas reservoirs as “proven reserves” that “geological and engineering data demonstrate with reasonable certainty to be recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions”.
The improvements in extraction technology have helped to increase the quantity of proven reserves in the US by 22% since 2003; giving a total proven reserve number of 244 trillion cubic feet in 2008 for the United States. That is a rather modest reserve figure in a nation that consumes 20 trillion cubic feet per year. (Just in case math is not your strong suit, that is just a little bit more than 12 years at current consumption rates.)
A group called the Potential Gas Committee added reservoirs that are described as “probable, possible, and speculative reserves” to describe a total of slightly more than 2,000 trillion cubic feet of “available future supply” in a report released in the summer of 2009. That number represents a 39% increase over the amount reported in its 2006 report. The Potential Gas Committee report release was accompanied by a blitz of press reports, some of which were a cut and paste of the press releases put out by the natural gas industry.
A number of energy industry pundits (like Craig A. Severance, a man who has produced a number of reports declaring that nuclear energy is far too expensive to matter) seized on that reported increase in the amount of potentially accessible natural gas and declared that it was a game changer that provides a bridge to a future energy utopia powered by windmills and solar panels.
The drilling and extraction techniques that have made this “revolution” possible are creating fissures among the groups that traditionally support clean energy development. Some large groups that have been traditionally associated with efforts to protect the environment, like the national arm of the Sierra Club, are promoting the use of gas, even from fracked reservoirs, as a clean energy source that can help replace the need to burn coal.
Other energy observers, like Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, are discovering that there are many aspects of fracking that deserve to be questioned and seem to include underreported hazards. Here is a video clip from the April 14, 2010 episode of Democracy Now in which Amy and Sharif Abdel Kouddous interview Dr. Theo Colburn, president of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange.
I do not “get” why supposedly intelligent people are excited about increasing the use of a fuel that may run out within the lifetime of people who are already living today – even if we do not increase its rate of consumption. I especially do not understand the critical thinking skills of those people who severely criticize existing nuclear power plants for leaking small quantities of almost pure water containing tiny quantities of relatively benign tritium while supporting gas reservoir stimulation techniques that require injecting millions of gallons of water with tons of carcinogenic chemicals at high pressure deep into the earth.
Actually – I do “get it”. The coordinated endeavor to promote gas and discourage nuclear energy makes sense – in a twisted sort of way – if the actual goal is to put more money into the pockets of the people who own companies that explore, extract and deliver methane to be burned in massive quantities with the waste products dumped for free into the atmosphere.
If gas sales volume increases and prices increase as a result of the shift in the supply-demand curves, the end result is a nice improvement in corporate profits. Carefully placed contributions to groups with firmly established reputations as protectors of the environment provide a green washing cover to what is actually just a fairly standard search for monetary green. The return on investment would be pretty high – a $1 per thousand cubic feet increase in the price of natural gas yields a $20 billion annual increase in industry revenue.
Hydraulic fracturing for gas extraction is for wimps! Real Men use nuclear explosives:
http://bittooth.blogspot.com/2010/02/nuclear-weapons-and-oil-shale.html
Quote:
” conventional means for extraction, particularly the levels of capital required, … make it unlikely that these normal means will produce any significant impact on the gap in economic supply that will develop in the near future. The use of nuclear explosives has the potential to solve that problem. And to explain, rather simply how this might be done,,,, I will explain how, conceptually, this might be achieved.”
I think this was tried once before and the resultant gas produced was to radioactive for commercial distribution.
I think this was tried once before and the resultant gas produced was to radioactive for commercial distribution.
Just going by memory, I think the main problem was the methane was too contaminated by CO2 on account of a great deal of limestone being in the vicinity of the blast.
In addition, shale gas is more greenhouse gas-intensive than conventional natural gas. The fracturing process leaks more unburned CH4 into the atmosphere, and that’s a much stronger GHG than CO2.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62U2UY20100331
Here is the Wikipedia link discussing the results of Operation Plowshare natural gas stimulation efforts. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare
Note that current drilling for gas has now come quite close to the initial test areas.
I’m getting old. I forgot that I was the one that wrote the passage on natural gas stimulation in January 2006 for the Operation Plowshare entry.
For some reason I wasn’t automatically signed in. I am the ‘Guest’ in the first post and the reply to Rod in the second…
They are running around up here in Canada trying to drum up support in Provinces that have no natural gas fields like Quebec, telling everyone that there are huge amounts of gas to be had from the Utica shale formation under the Saint Lawrence Valley accessible by hydraulic fraking.
I’m thinking now that we should turn the tables on the gas industry. Maybe we should start a mime that goes somewhat along the lines of after the water method the next step will be nuclear explosives. If we don’t stop them now, that what it will come to.
unfortunately, when you read Dr. Robert Howarth’s two-page preliminary assessment http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/howarth/GHG%20emissions%20from%20Marcellus%20Shale%20–%20with%20figure%20–%203.17.2010%20draft.doc.pdf , you find that he cites Jacobson & DeLucchi (2009) wind, water, solar by 2030 treatise. Big downcheck from me. Perhaps the Cornell University David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology should talk to Prof Brook at the Univ of Adelaide.
On a interesting note, Prof Howarth brings up a good question: how much methane is released by coal mining. In the aftermath of the accident at the Upper Big Branch mine in WV, many articles noted that it was a “gassy” mine. I would think that it would be relatively easy to calculate the amount of methane being ventilated from a mine, given the mine volume and the amount of ventilation required to maintain the methane concentration at a “safe” level.
In fact, fire-damp (what coal-miners call methane) is a constant hazard in most bituminous coal mines, so much so that most mine disasters are caused by it (the hazard gets even worse when combined with coal dust, another fun explosive). Coal mining has to be a very major source of methane, which is just left to outgas and cause warming – if it doesn’t blow the mine up first.
Blowing up stuff underground seems a bit like an act of desperation. I can only imagine that this could lead to subsidence for people on the surface, if they don’t hit something like a fault, which would not be good.
I see fracking shale to produce natural gas is not a bad thing for nuclear energy, the fracked shale contains an enormous amount of uranium, and by opening up by fracking, the gas industry has laid the groundwork for in situ uranium mining with very low energy costs.
Rod, wonderful post!
I was just up in Montreal for a few days, spending my money in Canada, just like the rest of Vermont does. (Vermont buys electrons, my husband and I bought fabulous French-Canadian food and some museum entrances. More fun than electrons.) Anyhow, I read the Canadian newspapers. They always have a slightly different slant than our stateside papers. One news item up there was that “Canadian environmental activists” are once again threatening to blow up the gas wells and pipelines in British Columbia. They are doing this in response to the environmental effects of extracting and purifying natural gas.
Maybe these guys should meet the “Sierra Club environmental activists”? A good idea, you think?
How do you spell “environmentalist” in most cases?
N I M B Y
Dave
Subsidence is a problem in all areas where gas and oil are extracted. In mining areas, too. You don’t have to remove a mountaintop to mess up the surface.
Alas, I learned more about the oil patch than I really wanted to know, while I was in geothermal.