Caroline Lucas, Green MP: "It's not that fracking itself is necessarily worse than ordinary gas extraction"

An interview in the Guardian with Caroline Lucas, the UK Green Party's only MP, makes for interesting reading. She's currently awaiting trial for her role in the protests at Cuadrilla's Balcombe drilling site.

She has some interesting comments about shale gas development in the UK:

For Lucas, the big problem with fracking has nothing to do with the risk that it will cause earthquakes, contaminate the water table or pollute the soil. In fact, she thinks it possible that stringent regulations could minimise those risks. "It's not that fracking itself is necessarily worse than ordinary gas extraction. It's the fact that we're just about to put into place a whole new infrastructure for a whole new fossil-fuel industry, at exactly the time when we need to be reducing our emissions." The problem, in other words, is climate change.

I've long been of the opinion that, at the upper levels of various NGOs and political groups, the primary opposition to shale gas is derived from a the climate change angle, not local pollution. The scare stories about earthquakes and pollution are a stalking horse for the real issue. Climate change concerns are unlikely to mobilise local support in any significant way, hence the need to exaggerate local impacts in order to foment local opposition. It's refreshing that Caroline Lucas has come clean about this.

The role of experts vs interest groups when science-related issues are dicussed in the media

A recent piece in the Guardian has criticised the BBC over its coverage of climate change issues, and in particular the release of the latest IPCC report. In the interests of so-called "editorial balance", there has a tendency to include non-specialists, so-called 'climate deniers' (not a term I'm particularly fond of, given its connotations, despite being a 'climate-believer' myself).

It was a complaint that immediately stuck me as ironic coming from the Guardian, given much of its recent reporting about shale gas. Particular Guardian highlights include letting Lucy Mangan, a lifestyle columnist, free reign make up whatever she liked about shale development, including, my particular favourite, the claim that the UK has no history of onshore operations, which must have come as a surprise to the operators of Wytch Farm (the largest onshore field in the EU) and the other 40 or so existing onshore oil and gas fields.

Similarly flawed was their piece accusing an operator of gagging a family claiming that their water had been impacted by drilling, while failing to mention that the Pennsylvania DEP had been in to test the water, and had found no evidence of any drilling-related contamination.

Meanwhile Andrew Rawnsley felt sufficiently geologically-qualified to claim that UK shales were unlikely to be profitable because they were "typically among the thinnest" of Europe, when in fact at over 6,000 feet the Bowland shale is probably the thickest shale deposit found anywhere to date.

These are the headline mistakes, but of course every piece on shale must be accompanied by a statement from a protest group detailing imminent environmental catastrophe, without ever being asked to provide any evidence or justification of any kind. Certainly there's been no attempt to highlight the difference between ill-informed shale hype (and there is plenty of this from both sides of the debate) and expert scientific opinion as expressed, for example, by the Royal Society report, by the BGS, or perhaps even from John Hanger, one-time Pennsylvania environmental chief (whose 'Facts of the Day' blog is well worth a read).  

There are many areas of modern life where science intersects with social and political viewpoints (global warming, GM food, nuclear power, vaccinations, creationism, all spring to mind). At this point I want to move my discussion away from shale gas specifically to treat the subject of expert representation in the media more generally.

With unsurprising regularity, wherever the science agrees with a particular viewpoint you'll see protagonists urging: "let the scientists speak - don't let the unscientific opponents be given equal footing to the actual experts", only to find that when the boot is on the other foot over a different issue, suddenly having balance in the debate is crucial: interested parties, even if not experts, should be given a platform to express their views.

I'm not sure where I stand on this issue. On the one hand, the scientist in me feels that on every issue we should ensure that it is the experts that are given prime time in the debate, and that editors/producers must make sure to differentiate what is evidence based from what is (socio-)politically motivated. We can see direct examples where the failure to do so leads directly to harm (the MMR scare and resulting South Wales measles outbreak springs most immediately to mind).

Sadly however, I suspect that many editors lack the expertise needed to do this, having neither the ability nor inclination to cross-examine their sources to differentiate expertise from BS. Moreover, we should not be insensitive to the fact that many of these issues provoke very strong emotions some sections of the non-expert general public, who will come to be represented by partisan organisations and spokespeople. Is there a case to be made that, if a certain view is held by a significant portion of the population, then it is right that the media provide air-time to that view-point, even if misinformed?

For me it's a difficult question, a difficult balance to be found. Comments and thoughts welcome in the comment section as always.

Guardian given lifelong ban on talking sense

In the latest Guardian shale shock story, a shale gas company in Pennsylvania (Range Resources) stands accused of poisoning a family's water (the Hallowiches), then imposing a court gagging order to silence the family, including the children, from ever talking publicly about fracking ever again.

In actual fact, this story has been 'out' in the US for quite some time, so it's hardly the scoop that the Guardian are claiming. More importantly, however, are the numerous facts left out in the name of a good scare story.

Court gagging orders are never going to make for good PR, but the key question must be: did Range Resources actually cause contamination of the Hallowich water supplies or air quality? Everything else is just lawyers throwing their weight around.

Pennsylvania DEP conducted an investigation into the Hallowich groundwater, and their findings are available. Here are their conclusions, which I shall selectively quote from below:

you allege that Range Resources has contaminated the supply [...] After a review of the information, including primarily water analyses, we cannot affirm your conclusions.

Importantly, Range actually drilled their well in July 2007. The Hallowiches only purchased the property in June 2007, and didn't drill their water well until October 2007, 3 months after the shale well was drilled. Therefore they can have no evidence regarding water quality prior to shale drilling.

Acrylonitrile and styrene appear to have been identified as an offending chemicals. However,

RT’s [a water testing lab] own sampling did not measure any styrene at the reported detection level. How styrene might be related to gas well drilling is not clear. However, the water lines in the Hallowich household, as well as from the water well to the house, are PVC which contains styrene.

and

Acrylonitrile is used in the manufacture of plastics, glues, pesticides, ABS pipe (common drain line pipe used in homes; the “A” in ABS stands for acrylonitrile ), synthetic rubber, acrylics, carpets, dinnerware, food containers, toys, luggage, automotive parts, appliance, telephones, among others. It can also be washed from the air by rain and then enter the groundwater system. There is a plastic rock which has been placed over the water well and could be leaching contaminants into the ground during rainfall events, which interestingly enough is when Mrs. Hallowich reports that the acrylonitrile values seem to increase based upon on-going sampling that apparently has been occurring.

This might be why, in the absence of any data prior to drilling, the DEP tested water from nearby wells close to the shale drilling, and did not find acrylonitrile or styrene:

the results taken at a neighboring property (163 Avella Road), which is also close to the gas well, only shows a lead problem; the other four parameters are either non-detect or within drinking water standards. 

In conclusion, the DEP summarise:

Mrs. Hallowich alleges that the drilling of the gas well polluted the aquifer. [...] we are lacking any direct evidence to prove this assertion.

we question your conclusions about the contamination problems to the Hallowich water supply. The only parameter that is clearly above the MCL is manganese, and we cannot clearly link it to the drilling of the Range Resources gas well. Therefore the DEP cannot issue a water supply replacement/restoration order to Range Resources.

This area also formed part of a DEP study into air quality impacts of Marcellus drilling, similarly finding that

the screening results found during the five-week study did not indicate a potential for major air-related health issues associated with the Marcellus Shale natural gas activities

Given the above data, it is perhaps not surprising to find that, in the court documents, the Hallowiches concede that:

1. With respect to Plaintiff minors’ alleged claims involve nuisance and personal injury claims, there is presently no medical evidence that these symptoms are definitively related to any exposure to the activities of Defendants...

2. The minors have alleged claims for nuisance and personal injury in connection with Defendants’ business operations.  There is presently no medical evidence supporting that these claims related to any exposure to Defendants’ business operations as set forth in Plaintiffs’ Complaint.

When the court order to 'un-gag' these documents were made, there was much excitement in the media in the hope that a smoking gun was about to be revealed. Much has been made about such gagging orders: surely now the release of one such set of documents would catch the frackers red-handed. Instead, they found instead that once again, water and air testing by the relevant government agencies had failed to find evidence of fracking-induced contamination:

There's no doubt that gagging clauses make for bad PR. However, this case shows that just because they have been used, doesn't mean that there is evidence for shale gas pollution. In fact, as the Pittsburgh-Tribune has the headline, it might be better to describe the situation as: Couple collect $750K settlement in fracking case with no medical evidence.

The information I've presented above is easily-locatable in the public domain. Which begs the question - why does none of it make it into the Guardian's latest scare story? I think we're all fine with media organisations that take a well established editorial line - it's unlikely the Guardian are ever going to favour shale gas extraction. However, I'm a lot less happy with irresponsible scare-mongering, which is what I see this to be.

Shale gas in the news this week

A fairly low-effort post this week, as I have just arrived back from the annual AGU conference in San Francisco. While it was interesting to compare the differences between AGU, which is a very academic conference, and the more industry-centered conferences which I more typically attend, it seems I went at a bad time, because shale gas has been all over the news in the last couple of weeks.

Firstly, we saw about 300 people erect a mock drill rig outside parliament in protest about shale gas extraction. Does 300 sound like a lot? Not sure. Hundreds of thousands once protested about the Iraq war, to little effect....

Meanwhile, the Independent reported that 60% of the UK countryside could be exploited for shale gas. However, DECC were quick to rubbish that statement.

Andrew Rawnsley wrote about how poor the UK's shale prospects are, unilaterally declaring that UK shales are the thinnest in Europe, despite the fact that the Bowland shale is in fact remarkably thick. The fact that this hasn't been corrected on the website version of the article is fairly shocking to me. Especially given that the piece comes up with a new term: 'frack-heads'.

Believers in shale gas have a tendency to rave about it as if they are using a mind-bending substance. So I suggest we call them frack-heads.

Fairly offensive from a main-stream journalist, especially from one who has gotten his facts completely wrong with respect to the main premise of the article.

I've never used mind-bending substances, but we've found a new chief frack-head who certainly looks as though he might have: Boris Johnson has waded straight into the middle of the fracking debate. Turning a phrase as only BoJo, love him or hate him, can:

Beware this new technology, they wail. Do not tamper with the corsets of Gaia! Don’t probe her loamy undergarments with so much as a finger — or else the goddess of the earth will erupt with seismic revenge

Of course, as I've mentioned before, James Lovelock, the inventor of Gaia theory, is actually hugely in favour of shale gas.

Meanwhile the EU parliament has taken it upon itself to regulate our moves towards shale gas exploitation. I'll admit to not being particularly pro-EU at the best of times, but sometimes they really don't help themselves do they?

So why all the palaver? Well, George Osborne has revealed a new gas strategy, promoting domestic gas extraction and the construction of new gas fired power plants. My only issue with this: we shouldn't be giving tax breaks to shale gas companies - we should take our full slice of the money they make and use it to benefit the economy!

The opposition to shale gas

Hats off to the Guardian once again for this article by Mariel Hemingway on why she opposes fracking. It would be easy to mock this piece for it's flighty, right-on loony-ness, but I shan't, because I'm sure the author's beliefs are held strongly and genuinely. What I will take her to task for is her sheer narrow mindedness:

Here at the Willingway, our retreat center near Malibu, my partner Bobby and I have been growing our own food and putting solar to work on our roof. It feels great to watch the meter feeding energy into the grid, instead of just pulling it out. 

Which is all well and good, and to be saluted, but really only possible if you're a wealthy Hollywood (ex?)actress. I'd love to have a solar-powered retreat near Malibu, where I could grow my food, but for the majority of normal people this simply isn't an option. I'd love to feed solar power into the grid, but I can't afford solar panels, even if I owned a house on which to put them (and I don't consider myself poor - I get paid above the national average wage). I'm not sure how the system works in the US, but in this country the feed-back into the grid is funded by feed-in tariffs (public money), so seems to me to be a useful method for richer people (who can afford to invest in these things) to get money from the tax-payer. 

Once again it's worth noting the outright falsehoods:

The hydraulic fracturing process utilizes large amounts of toxic chemicals – 10,000-40,000 gallons per well. Science has shown that it ends up in the water we drink, the water that's used on our food, and the water that nourishes fish, animals, birds, and plants

I've added the emphasis on the 'science has shown' part, partly to highlight how silly it sounds (like the 'here comes the science' part of any hair product advert), but also to point out that there is no documented case where fracking chemicals have been found in water supplies. A couple of cases of methane contamination, yes, but not the fracking chemicals. They're not buoyant, you see, so there's no force to drive them from the shale beds at 2km depth to surface waters. It'd be like making a stream flow uphill. 'Science has shown', my arse. But what's happened is that enough people have said it, and loudly enough, that it's become accepted as fact. A good example of the big lie.

She does get one thing right though:

There's nothing worse than finger-pointing – when we walk in and turn on natural gas to cook our food, or heat our house.

Anyway, I'm talking about this article because it fits very well with my latest experience with the local anti-fracking community. A couple of months ago I saw an advertised screening of Gasland at a local community center, and I thought I'd pop along, see what the anti-fracking community looked like in the south-west.

Perhaps I've spent too long around scientists, but the biggest thing that I noticed was the lack of curiosity, the lack of hunger for details. We were shown an abridged version of the film, followed by a Q & A session. Now, Gasland is notably strong on emotive filming and short on actual facts. You get to see about 5 families claiming to have been affected by gas drilling. Without context, this is fairly meaningless. The questions that anyone watching Gasland should immediately be asking are:

• what is the incidence rate of these contamination events, in comparison to the number of wells drilled?
• are there any other possible sources of contamination (and what is the history of water quality in the area prior to drilling?)
• have there been methane contamination incidences like this prior to drilling?
• have governmental agencies (like the EPA) made any comment?
• are local communities universally opposed to drilling?
• how does the hydraulic fracturing process actually work? How deep are the target formations? How large are the expected fractures?

Gasland gives the impression that the answers to these questions are: really high percentage, not other possible contamination sources, no prior incidents, EPA bought by industry dollars, local communities universally opposed, and no info on the process itself. In fact, I think that it'd be better characterised as: something like 0.01% incidence rate, many potential contamination sources, both natural (natural methane seepage) plus nasty leftovers from things like coal mining, many incidences of flammable water dating back centuries, EPA have investigated many sites and found no evidence of contamination, opposition to drilling is a minority in most communities, and the target formations are typically 2km deep, and fractures are typically 100-200m.

Now, I'm fairly sure that if you were to show Gasland to a group of scientists, people would be asking these questions. Scientists are trained to be sceptical, to distinguish provable fact from opinion. One of the key scientific fallacies is confirmation bias, where you selectively believe things that already fit your worldview, accepting them with a lower threshold for credibility.

I'll admit to being a victim of this myself in my work - I recently had to modify one of my papers which heavily cited another paper (by different authors) which agreed with my results, until the authors had to retract and significantly amend their work as they'd made a number of technical errors. Clearly I'd been too willing to accept their results (which agreed with mine) without properly checking that their work was accurate (for the record, my paper is still right: I had a better and more robust method for making these measurements on fracture compliance than they had). 

But my thoughts at this local anti-fracking meeting were that it was a classic case of confirmation bias. The view of the average participant was clearly that oil companies are heartless cheating bastards who spend their whole time causing awful pollution (even though we use oil every day, and for example we've had oil production in our backyard across the South of the UK for decades without any problems or issues).

So when Gasland appears to show evidence for more of this nasty oil company behaviour, it is accepted without questioning because it already fits into their worldview. Also, there was no discussion of any potential benefits: no mention of the reductions in CO2 emissions as they swap coal for gas, no mention of the shale gas possibilities in China that would represent the biggest and fastest way to reduce global CO2 emissions.

Unfortunately, I think this view is becoming increasingly entrenched, the big lie has been told loudly enough and often enough, and I think shale gas production in the UK is in for a troubled time.

I'll finish by bringing my piece full circle to mention the demographics of the meeting: I think I was pretty much the only person there under the age of 30, and I get the distinct impression that most would fit in well with Mariel Hemingway's holistic greenery. I didn't get the impression (I may be wrong of course) that the majority of people there had financial worries, or worries for the future of the economy at least in the sense that it wouldn't affect them. There's a general lack of understanding that just because they have the time, space and money for a holistic Malibu retreat (or whatever the SW UK equivalent is), the average person will not be able to follow them in this even if they wanted to. Therefore any solution to the energy and climate issues we face has to accept that the average UK citizen does not have the money to put solar power and windmills on top of their house (if they even own one, and more and more of the younger generation will never get to own a house), nor can they afford the increases in energy bills to pay to subsidise a wealthy landowner to festoon his hills with wind turbines.

So what we need are energy sources that can actually deal with the problems we face right now. I think David Miliband summed up our energy problems pretty succinctly here (skip to 49:10) - we're fussing about with energy sources that supply about 1% of our needs, when 30% of our energy comes from coal imported from Russia. The first thing we should be doing is replacing coal with gas. And that's just about the UK, so multiply this problem several times to talk about the US and China!

A few quick things....

Firstly, it seems the Guardian didn't read my last post, because they've gone and published this. I love how, when it comes to a choice between the International Energy Agency and Greenpeace on assigning the contribution shale gas has made to the US's substantial CO2 reductions since 2007, the default assumption is the Greenpeace must be right and the IEA wrong. It's not like Greenpeace have a conflict of interest in downplaying shale gas contributions to CO2 emissions reductions or anything. Meanwhile, the IEA, as an international body with a duty of care, years of experience, and who actually have environmental protection as part of their remit, can't be relied upon?

I'll let John Hanger have the last word on the matter:
http://johnhanger.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/another-analysis-of-role-of-gas-in.html
http://johnhanger.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/natural-gas-is-responsible-for-about-77.html
http://johnhanger.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/10-key-facts-to-understanding-decline.html


As usual, the doom-mongers say that shale gas can't possibly have an impact on our energy markets. Maybe their models are right, but this would completely discount the on-the-ground evidence from the US, where it's had a significant impact. But anyway, maybe there won't be enough shale gas to make a dramatic impact. But it can only help push things in the right direction - shale gas production will help stabilise volatile gas markets and reduce prices by boosting supply. This effect may be large, or it may be small, but I'd rather take my chances on a small benefit that could become a larger benefit, rather than just giving up before we even begin. And if companies want to take the risk by investigating money into shale gas exploration, that's their choice (I'm sure they did at least a little bit of research on the issue before sinking all that money in).

I should add that the rumour going round is that the next BGS shale gas reserves estimate is likely to be significantly upgraded. This is just a rumour at the moment, but it wouldn't surprise me.

BTW, I do love the contradiction inherent in so many anti-shale-gas commentaries - "shale gas would contribute considerably to our greenhouse gas emissions when we should be going renewable, but anyway there's not enough shale gas there to make an impact on our energy markets, so we shouldn't bother". Well, which is it? There's either enough down there to fry us all, or there isn't and we should be perfectly happy to let these companies waste all their money looking for something that will never be economic.

Finally, an interesting blog post from the US from someone in the heart of fracking country that is well worth a read. The author talks about how the money from shale gas exploration has helped her keep the family farm going, and about the wider economic boost that the area has experienced, while pointing out how exaggerated all of the shale gas scare stories really are.

The blog begins by talking about the new Matt Damon movie, the Promised Land, which is based around shale gas (Damon plays a company man tasked with getting the locals to sign gas leases, which goes swimmingly until all the pollution kicks off). There are some interesting rumours circulating about a final twist in the plot. Apparently, the OTT environmental campaigner turns out to be a company plant intending to discredit the environmental movement by smearing its members. I've no idea whether this will turn out to be true, but it seems pretty far-fetched to me!!! I guess we'll have to see.....

Another predicatably one-sided Guardian article

Isn't it frustrating when an organization that you otherwise identify with can be so completely dunderheaded over certain important issues. The Green Party's anti-scientific attitudes to homeopathy and to GM foods spring immediately to mind. And once again, my paper of choice (the Guardian) prints (yet another) poorly researched and in some aspects downright false articles about shale gas and fracking. So once again, my comments:

But evidence is mounting that fracking pollutes groundwater with a witches' brew of toxic chemicals, creating imminent threats to public health and safety. It has even caused earthquakes in Ohio.

One report from one test well in Wyoming. And some methane contamination from a poorly cemented well in Dimock, now dealt with and methane levels below acceptable limits once again. Does that count as 'evidence mounting'? I guess so. From several hundred thousand fracked wells across the US. No mention of the head of the EPA's views on shale gas. As for the earthquakes in Ohio - they were caused by waste-water injection, not fracking. Waste-water injection is a common practice throughout the oil industry. And if you're really against water injection, pass a regulation requiring companies to treat all their water at the surface - which is also common practice in many situations.

The detonation of explosive charges, coupled with the infusion of high-pressure fluids, fractures the shale, allowing the gas to bubble up to the surface.

The 'how-shocking-is-fracking' brigade love mentioning the explosives. Sounds dangerous, right? Truth is, explosives have been used to complete oil wells for as long as for ever. The explosives are not to blow the rock apart - they are small directed charges to pierce holes in the steel well-bore casing. It is the high-pressure fluid that moves into fractures and pushes them apart. Proppant (usually sand) is then injected to keep the fractures open, allowing the gas to flow to the well, where it rises to the surface.

The components of the fluids used for fracking are considered protected trade secrets, although they are known to contain toxins. Where the fracking fluids go is a key question.

The details of every chemical pumped down every well in the US is available on this website. It's getting to the point that one begins to suspect the journalists who still push the 'fracking-chemicals-are-trade-secrets' line are not just poorly informed/poorly researched, but outright promulgating lies to make their articles sound more dramatic (and thereby garner a larger following). As for this 'toxic witches' brew' - the latest fracking fluids are in fact safe to drink. Another thing that really bugs me is the use of the word 'cocktail' whenever people describe the fracking fluid (as in this 'cocktail of chemicals') - if someone handed my a cocktail that was 99% water and 1% active ingredient, I think I'd be finding a new barman!

As for where the fluids go? Between 30% to 50% come back up the well, meaning the rest is still in the ground, in the shale formation. These shale formations contain gas (of course). The gas will have been there for hundreds of millions of years. Natural gas, being buoyant and low viscosity, is one of the mobile fluids you can have in the subsurface. If the formation has been capable of trapping gas for 100,000,000 years, I'm pretty sure it can trap saline brines, which don't have any buoyancy force acting on them, and are much more viscous than gas. So in short, we know where the fluid has gone - it's trapped in the shale formation.

Fracking entered the national debate when the award-winning documentary Gasland, made by film-maker Josh Fox, showed how people living near fracking operations could easily set their kitchen tap water on fire.

Gasland did win plenty of awards, but mainly for it's artistic qualities (which, fair play, is really well shot) not for journalistic integrity. No mention of the state regulation findings that the gas coming out of the 'flaming faucets' was biogenic in origin, not thermogenic, meaning that it was gas from shallow bacterial processes, not related to the shale gas at depth (they have characteristically different isotopic signatures). Methane in water supplies is a common phenomena in many artisan wells across the US, and has been for centuries. Josh Fox knows this, but didn't consider it relevant to mention in his film. Gasland is not journalism, it's storytelling. Which is fine, but the Guardian is a newspaper, so it's supposed to do journalism.

Like every good journalist, and appropriately, in this post-Citizens United era, Fox follows the money

That would be the money flowing into his bank account as environmental groups around the world rush to buy screening rights and speaking engagements, on the basis of his film which strikes just the right controversial, highly unbalanced tone?

As I've said a million time now - shale gas extraction IS and industrial process, and as when any industrial process starts up in a new place, there should be a fair and rational discussion to weigh the potential risks and benefits. Which is why it's disappointing that the Guardian seems to be only interested in writing about scare stories and falsehoods.

Bought and paid for?

If shale gas companies are involved in funding research, is that research intellectually compromised?

It's a really important question - there have been several favourable reports about shale gas recently, and most have some connection to the oil and gas industry, as reported in this Guardian article. Does this mean we can't believe what is in the reports - are they intellectually compromised?

This is a particular issue for me in my own work. My funding situation is a little complicated. We have an industry funded research group at Bristol, which funds most of my office-mates. However, I myself am funded on a NERC grant (that's the government). However, part of the NERC grant involves being given data for free by BP. So although they're not giving me cash, there is a connection there, and the data is given in lieu of a cash payment that would otherwise have to cover 25% of my grant. So while I'm not directly getting any money from industry, there are certainly strong connections there.

But how does this affect my work? I can honestly say it doesn't affect it one bit. I've never hidden or not published data in case of embarrassing a sponsor. I've never massaged figures. The very idea that I would is completely offensive!

(Not that I would, but I guess I've never had to, because I've never come across data showing a problem with shale gas.)

I think some people miss the point as to why companies generally fund research. Usually, funding academic research is not a public relations exercise - they have different departments, different budgets and different people for that (besides - have you met academics - PR is not our strong point). They usually fund academic work because they want to get to the bottom of a question that is perhaps too broad in scope, or too specialised, for them to do in house. They fund academics because they want answers, not yes men. I think we'd be more likely to lose our funding if we were found to be making data up to cover a problem, than we would be by publishing about a particular issue.

Besides, it's not really surprising that authors of reports on shale gas have industry connections. If you had no industry experience, how on earth would you have the knowledge to write a report on shale gas? Do you know about well casing, drilling methods, pressure-based and microseismic monitoring methods? If you do, chances are you've worked in industry, because it's the only place you can learn about these things. And if you don't how exactly do you intend on writing accurately about shale gas extraction?  

So in reality, beyond the shock headlines of Guardian-land, it's not surprising that most of the reports about the shale gas have some sort of connection with the shale gas industry. Most reports about wind energy come from groups that have some involvement in wind turbine manufacturing or design. In fact, most of our information about wind seems to come from RenewablesUK, and they're not likely to be unbiased are they?

Indeed, the chair of Parliament's Energy and Climate Change committee is Tim Yeo, who receives something like £140,000 a year from renewable energy firms. This isn't some independent university report, which we (and our policy-makers) are free to read or ignore as the will. This is a parliamentary committee set up to advise parliament on energy issues, and it's chaired by a man who stands to gain considerably by promoting wind energy over other generation methods. Yet because it's wind, we're ok with this (well, except for the Mail and Telegraph, of course). Can you imagine the outrage if it transpired that the chair of such a committee was trousering hundreds of thousands of quid from Exxon?

And what about reports funded by environmental pressure group? Reports critical of shale gas have come from the Park Foundation, the Cooperative, and you won't be surprised to hear that Greenpeace are not fans. But do these reports have an underlying motive pushing them towards a certain conclusion before the study even starts? They don't have a profit motive as such, so surely they'll be unbiased? Not really. Just because there's not an immediate bottom line, organisations like Greenpeace have a reputation to uphold, and followers to keep happy.

Without the support of these followers, they'd become meaningless. And can you imagine the response of the Greenpeace faithful if they came out and said - 'you know, we've looked at all the evidence, and on balance, exploiting shale gas is the best thing we can do for the environment right now, because it's better than mining and burning coal'? Of course they can't say that - their supporters would be livid, and would leave in droves. For an environmental organisation to say that is as likely as an oil company saying 'do you know what, this whole shale gas thing is just too risky, we're not going to chance it' - it's just not going to happen. So I don't think a report funded by an environmental organisation is any more likely to be unbiased than a report from an oil company. The only difference is that an oil industry report is more likely to have up-to-date information to hand, helping to avoid this kind of fiasco.

So if all reports have the possibility (or even probability) of bias, who do we believe? How do we get anywhere? I guess the key is that ultimately, all reports have to be based on data. And sure, you can try to use statistics to get the result you want, but ultimately, data will show one way or the other. So the data is pretty clear that fracking caused 2 small earthquakes near Blackpool (earthquakes are notoriously difficult to hide, you see). However, we can see that for all the fracking in the US, no notable earthquakes have been caused (there have been quakes caused by re-injection of waste water in deep aquifers, but this is a different problem and one not unique to fracking).

We know that the EPA has shown evidence of water contamination at Pavilion (WY) from fracking. Pavilion is a difficult case, because the reservoir is much closer to groundwater aquifers than most typical shale reservoirs, so perhaps this isn't so surprising. In Dimock (PA) there was a methane contamination in 2009. After repairs to a well, all levels of contaminants have returned to normal. And that's pretty much it, two incidents for hundreds of thousands of fracks. Meanwhile, US CO2 emissions are plummeting as shale gas is used instead of coal in electricity generation.

Finally, the evidence from my speciality, microseismic monitoring is pretty unequivocal. This image shows the depth of every microseismic event in the Barnett shale. The coloured lines track where the fractures have gone during fracking. As you can see, even the shallowest fractures are very far away from any potential water source (the blue bars at the top). This is hard data - you can't fake this. But don't expect to see this picture in any Greenpeace report (or Josh Fox film) any time soon.

As I've mentioned before, the anti-shale groups have struggled to find proper geologists to support their cause. Academics, yes - but they tend to be atmospheric chemists, climate change specialists and biogeochemists, not proper geologists. I think that this is because it might take a geologist to fully understand how difficult it would be for contaminants to rise from the reservoir through 2-3km of impermeable rock (with little or no driving force, given that fracking fluid is less buoyant than gas) to reach potable water supplies. Usually, if there's legs in an idea, you can usually find someone to run with it. And I think that is probably the most encouraging thing I can say about shale gas - there are hardly any serious geologists who have a problem with it. 

Update [19.08.2012]: Thanks to my favourite (only) commenter Owain S for this, but I've just been perusing the links he posted, leading to something that has left me gobsmacked. Despite making hundreds of thousands from wind energy investments, while championing wind subsidies in his role as Chair of the Energy and Climate change committee, Tim Yeo is in fact opposing the development of turbines in his own constituency, on the grounds that they are unsightly and would spoil his view. Wow! Just, wow! That is an incredible level on hypocrisy - happy to foist turbines on everyone else, but not in his back yard please.

The Open Access Publishing Revolution

After a campaign championed by the Guardian, the UK research councils have announced a move towards open-access publishing. There's currently a huge amount of debate within the academic community about the best model for publishing.

Currently, academic publishing is dominated by the large publishing houses - Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, etc. When I write a paper with new and interesting scientific findings, it needs to be published to enable my fellow scientists to read about what I've done, enabling them to use my findings in their research. The typical business model for a journal is as follows: most journals do not charge me a fee to publish (some do, but it's usually not too onerous). They make their money by charging people to read them. University libraries will buy subscriptions to the journals (usually they will buy 'bundles' allowing subscriptions to an entire publisher's catalogue), allowing all academics at the university to read the article. Meanwhile, a company wanting to access the research is more likely to pay the upfront fee for an individual article, which is usually about £30. Similarly, private individuals wanting to access the research will have to pay the £30 fee per article.

The dissatisfaction with the current model stems from the fact that the majority of scientific research in this country is funded by the tax payer (including my own). How, then, can it be fair that tax-payers are paying once to fund the research (out of their tax money), and then have to pay again as individuals to read the research? Many in the academic community view this as a morally untenable position - the public should have free and unfettered access to the results of all taxpayer-funded research (and when you read the comments sections on various websites, you really do get a sense of moral outrage).

I disagree with this argument. There are many things that my tax-money pays for, yet I can't just access for free. Our taxes go to the BBC, but I still have to buy a license fee to watch it! Taxes fund the NHS, but I still have to pay a fee for my prescriptions. Let's face it, some of my tax money goes to the army to buy tanks - that doesn't mean I have a right to turn up at the gates of my nearest barracks and demand a ride on a Cheiftain!

But, under the pressure of the academic community, the government, via the UK funding bodies, has buckled to pressure and is now about to make things far worse. They are planning to mandate that we publish only in open access journals. The business model here is that, rather than a 'reader-pays' model, we switch to an 'author-pays' model. Journal articles are made available for free, so instead authors are charged a much larger amount (typically £2000 or so). As far as I am concerned, this is a very bad publishing model!

What are the benefits of a so called 'gold' open access publishing model, where the author pays? Well, the sole benefit is that anyone, anywhere, can read your article for free. The negative is that this could add an extra 5 to 10% to the costs of of UK research. For example, last year NERC (my funding body) spend £180 million on research, and about 5,000 papers we published as a result. With gold open access of £2000 per article, this would be an extra £10 million, so just over 5%. Of course, the funding councils are not being given any extra money, so that means they will be able to fund 5 to 10% less research. In a time where our science budgets are increasingly stretched, and grant money harder and harder to come by, can this really be a good thing?

Secondly, we must consider the pressures this will place on the publishing industry. Currently, in a 'reader pays' model it is in the publisher's interest to publish only the best and most relevant research. A journal cannot afford to waste money publishing work that will not get read. Therefore, the commercial pressure is on journal editors to accept only the best work. Under an 'author pays' system, the only commercial pressure on the journal is to publish as much as possible. Quality is no longer a driving factor, because it doesn't matter whether things get read, all that matters is that there's lots of papers. So an author-pays model will simply lead to a significant reduction in the quality of articles that journals are prepared to accept. Putting this as simply as possible, there would be no reason for a journal to ever reject any paper, ever. I don't want to spend my time wading through a ton of crap papers to find the one or two good ones that I need. I want a journal to have already taken editorial decisions to only bring the ones that are of the highest quality to my attention. 

What about the effects on libraries? Perhaps the libraries would be able to save money, because they wouldn't need to pay for so many journal subscriptions, and the money saved could be transferred over to cover author charges. However, this wouldn't cover all the back issues to which scientists need to access. Nor would it remove the need to subscribe to international journals to access work from people in other countries. Science is an international effort, so if the UK does something in isolation, it won't affect the need to pay subscription fees to read about work from every other country in the world.

Finally, what will be the impact on publishing academics. Obviously, the only barrier to publication will be money, so if you have money, you can publish, while if you don't, you can't. The model in mind is that university faculties will have central pots of money to pay for open access publication. So who will get the money for publication - the junior PhD student who has made a cool new finding, or the senior professor with his hand on the purse strings? At present, the quality of the paper is the sole deciding factor in where a paper is published. Under the proposed system, the deciding factor will be money. This would NOT be a fairer system, if would be significantly UNFAIR! I cannot understand how academics can be in favour of such a system.

The other proposed model is so called 'green' open access. This model takes the money out of the system entirely. Academics post their own content on their own websites (or possibly on a university-wide archive) or on archive sites such as the arXiv. To a certain extent, this system is already active, because many authors do post their work onto arXiv, and do post their papers on their own websites. Many academics see this as the model to which we should evolve. However, I think this is somewhat misguided, because the currently green open access exists off of the back of the mainstream publication industry, it cannot exist without it. Firstly, note that many green open access sites are heavily subsidised (as arXiv is by Cornell, for example, to the tune of about $500,000 per year).

More importantly, if I publish a paper in arXiv, it is not peer reviewed. Peer review as a process is vital to science, it makes sure only reliable results are published, and removes all the dross. I know it's not perfect, but it's the best system we have. The only way to get things peer reviewed is to submit them to journals, where they will undergo the full editorial process. Currently, journals are happy to provide this service, and publish the paper as their content, while allowing re-prints to be republished on author's websites, because it's not done widely enough to effect their margins. Just because a certain number of authors have put their papers on other websites, libraries are still forking out for subscriptions. If green open access became so widespread that it began to impact on the bottom line, I expect journals would begin to clamp down.

I guess this all comes down to whether publishers provide a useful service, or can we do without them. If they provide a necessary service, we should be prepared to pay for that service accordingly. If they do not, or if we believe we can achieve the same effects more cheaply, we should attempt to do so. Paraphrased from a comment on this blog, we need journals to provide (1) a decent and enforced peer review system, (2) an editorial system which can reject (or grade) papers (which provides quality control and therefore acts as a marketing tool) (3) a publishing system and (4) a citing system. The need for peer review is obvious, as is the need for a publishing system. Both cost money to administer. It is not free to put things on the internet - arXiv needs half a million dollars a year to function.

The need for a citing system is a key problem for green open access. Say I publish my paper, and put it on my website. Will it still be there in 15 years time when I have long moved on, or will a searcher simply find a broken link? It's vital that researchers can access older papers - journals provide the means of archiving them and an easy means to index and access them. This would not be possible with authors sticking their papers wherever under a green open-access system. The editorial and grading system is also vital, for both author and reader. Rightly or wrongly, as academics we are graded on the quality of papers we produce. When we can post whatever we like in an open-access mega-journal, it becomes very difficult to assess the quality of a academic's output (perhaps this is why so many favour this system). More importantly as a reader of papers, I much prefer to be able to look at the monthly output of my favourite journals, scroll through the list of papers that they have (which is a manageable list), rather than dive into a mega-journal and have to sift through all the dross to find some good papers. I'd rather pay an editor to do that for me.

Given these needs, how much will all these things cost? Let's imagine a typical medium-sized journal. They'll probably have about 5 staff: a senior editor to lead the editorial direction of the journal; two publishers to facilitate the peer review process - selecting the reviewers for each paper (or rejecting the really rubbish papers without review; an admin; and a guy to do the publication side of things. Plus within the publishing house they have the IT support and the rest. Let's say it costs £500,000 a year to cover everyone's salary, pension, computing costs, web archiving costs and the rest. This is a complete guess, but it doesn't seem like an exorbitant amount, right? In fact, this is probably on the low side. Well, for a medium-size journal publishing 500 papers a year, that's a cost per paper of £1000. So this must be paid either by the author, or through subscription. I don't see green open access as long term sustainable except on the back of a healthy publishing industry to bear most of the costs. As a commentor on the Guardian website put things rather well of the problems we'd face if we abandoned journals:

The real problem with getting rid of journals is that it means that there is no chance of anyone reading your work if you are a junior research at a non-high tier institution, which means there is very little chance of getting any recognition or promotion.
If you are already a big name in your field, or you are a young researcher at a place like Harvard/MIT then you could wipe your bum on a bit of paper and put a photo of it on your website, and people would download it to look. But if you are a postdoc at a place outside the top 50 (or so) then noone is going to read anything you write unless it is published in a good journal; does anyone really think that academics are regularly checking the website of Podunk State University to see what their guys are doing?
The main role of the journal system is to filter papers based on their quality, so that the ones that are worth reading on average end up in good journals, while the ones that arent worth reading end up either unpublished or published in so low a venue that noone willl find them. This is a good system because it means that academics can just follow a handful of general interest journals along with the websites of those they know are good in their field, without having to wade through the tens of thousands bad papers that are produced every year. It also means that any academic will get their work widely read as long as they can get it into a decent journal; which would absolutely not be the case if we abolished journals.

So, we come back to the question at hand, if we have to pay for a quality publishing industry, who should pay? For the reasons listed above, I think it should be the reader, not the author.

My thoughts on this are formed partly by my experiences while working as an intern at Shell. During my 3 months there, I must have downloaded at least 20-30 papers, paying the upfront costs each time. That comes to about £600-£900. Shell have a library system where you request a paper and they go off and get it for you, and they don't even (appear to) worry about the costs. I've no idea how much the average Shell employee downloads papers, but these are science-intensive companies, so I bet it's quite a lot. Whenever I meet employees, they all seem fully up-to-date with the latest research, so they must be reading it. This is money that goes back into the academic system, helping to contribute to a healthy publishing system that is necessary for research. And Shell are going on to use this research to make money. Under an author-pays model, they wouldn't have to contribute anything.

So what about the poor UK 'citizen-scientists', working independently, who want to read the latest research papers. These people are usually all over the Guardian comment pages complaining that they can't access research without paying. My first opinion is that they can't be that keen to read it - if you want to read a paper but can't find a non-paywall copy, your first port of call should be to email the author, who will likely be more than happy to furnish you with a copy. If you can't be bothered emailing the author, then frankly you can bugger off and stop moaning. Secondly, accept that the changes you require to the academic publishing industry would be seismic, causing immense disruption. I'm not allowed to pop over to my nearest air-force base to have a go on a Eurofighter. It would be immensely disruptive, even though it was paid for with my tax. Similarly, you don't have the right to cause immense disruption to academics just to fuel your hobby.

However, I think there should be a much more simple solution. We should develop a system where independent people are capable of registering with their local university library. Perhaps for a small admin fee, this would give them an online library log-in, giving access to all the journals they want to read. I can't imagine this would be taken up by more than a tiny fraction of the population anyway. This seems like a far more simple system to set up, rather than insisting that we either destroy the publishing industry or spend 10% of the UK's science budget on publishing fees that we have no need to pay.

And if you have a problem with Elsevier coining it on the back of your research, don't publish with them. There are loads of journals that are run by various learned bodies (in my field, for example, GJI is published by the RAS, GRL by AGU, Geophysical Prospecting by EAGE, ERL by IoP). Any money made by these journals is pumped back into the subject by the learned bodies, funding conferences, research fellowships and the rest. So if you don't like the big publishers, find a journal run by a subject and publish in there instead.

James Lovelock on shale gas

Really interesting interview with James Lovelock by the Guardian this weekend:

Summary here and fuller transcript here

For those living under stones, James Lovelock is a renowned environmental scientist, famous for the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that the earth and its biosphere many of the features of a living organism, such as internal regulation of temperature and chemical composition. His work in detecting the increase in atmospheric CFCs that created the hole in the ozone layer was also crucially important.

The interview covers a range of topics, but as this blog is about shale gas and fracking, I'll obviously focus on these parts. Here are the most relevant parts of the transcript:

Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it: the amount of CO2 produced by burning gas in a good turbine gives you 60% efficiency. In a coal-fired power station, it is 30% per unit of fuel. So you get a two-to-one gain there straight away. The next two-to-one gain you get is that methane has only got half its energy in the carbon, the other half is in the hydrogen, so there's a four-to-one gain in CO2 output from the same amount of electricity by burning methane. Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it. The fear of nuclear is now too great after Fukushima and the cost of building new build plants is very expensive and impractical. And it takes a long time to get them running. It is very obvious in America that fracking took almost no time at all to get going. It happened without any debate whatsoever. Suddenly you found there was this abundant fuel source. There's only a finite amount of it [in the UK] so before it runs out we should really be thinking sensibly about what to do next. We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price. Hydro, biomass, solar, etc, have all got great promise, but they're not available tomorrow, or even in 10 years.

and:

The most sensible thing is nuclear, but I'm afraid the great bulk of people are not going to have it after Fukushima. They think nuclear actually caused the disaster. It's so bizarre that's it's almost unbelievable to a scientist, but they do. They conflate the two together. But maybe we've got enough shale [gas] under Britain. There's certainly lots of it. Now, that's not the complete answer, but it will carry us on for the next 20-30 years. Fracking buys us some time and we can learn to adapt.

It's clear that Lovelock is on board with the fact that, if we're serious about cutting CO2 emissions, replacing coal-fired power plants with shale-gas-fired plants is an excellent way of quickly reducing CO2 emissions. Nuclear would be too, but it takes a long time to build new plant. The risks of all out renewables and abandoning all base-load generation capacity are made clear by Germany's post-Fukushima example of shutting down all nuclear power:

Germany is a great country and has always been a natural leader of Europe, and so many great ideas, music, art, etc, come out of it, but they have this fatal flaw that they always fall for an ideologue, and Europe has suffered intensely from the last two episodes of that. It looks to me as if the green ideas they have picked up now could be just as damaging. They are burning lignite now to try to make up for switching off nuclear.

(lignite is a low-grade form of coal - very dirty and polluting)

Finally, I find his ideas about both ultra-Greens and Tea-party-ers as becoming quasi-religious really interesting.

It's just the way the humans are that if there's a cause of some sort, a religion starts forming around it. It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the sort of terms that religions use. The greens use guilt. You can't win people round by saying they are guilty for putting CO2 in the air

Certainly, you only have to scroll into the comments section to note the baying crowd calling to burn the heretic who dares praise shale gas as a potential solution. Certain ideas, once out there, are clung to with what can only be described as religious fervour, regardless of the evidence.

For instance, I still regularly come across the claim:

 Companies are keeping secret the chemicals they're putting down the wells. Why are they kept secret? What have they got to hide? It must be a big conspiracy....

despite the existence of this website, where you can find details of every chemical put down every well in the US.

My response to the Guardian letters page

With fracking all over the headlines in the last week or so, the Guardian has helpfully collated a letters page on the issue (link). The content of these letters usefully highlights many of the myths and misconceptions about fracking. This in turn inevitably leads to me getting angry, and therefore writing a blog about it (much like the credible hulk I imagine).

I thought the best way to structure this post would be to address the letters one by one. So we start with:

It beggars belief that fracking is recommended to be extended and earthquakes the only risk taken into account (Gas fracking gets the green light,  17 April). Other risks are not just theoretical; appalling consequences have already happened on a wide scale in the US. Fracking has been carried out in rural areas where people's off-grid water supplies have been made unusable by pollution. There have been cases where people cannot use water from the tap at the kitchen sink because methane comes with it, with the risk of explosions. Only half the chemical-laden water used in the process is recovered. It is then kept in lagoons on the surface where it is allowed to evaporate volatile toxic chemicals into the air.
We cannot afford the risk to our water supplies. We don't have the open spaces which have been affected in the US. Even now we are faced with water restrictions and drought. We don't have the necessary huge quantities of water available to be used and made dirty for ever. The landscape would be dominated by well heads spread out over the whole gas field. It is likely that the air around these installations would be polluted by volatile toxic emissions. Come back wind turbines, all is forgiven.
Marion Watson
Sheffield

By 'appalling consequences on a wide scale' I assume the writer means 'one confirmed incidence of a contaminated well (Pavilion, WY), and one possibly contaminated well (Dimock, PA) which has now been remediated'. These two incidences from the tens of thousands of fracked wells in the US. Hardly appalling consequence on a wide scale.

The second point, 'we don't have the necessary huge quantities of water available to be used', nicely exposes a common fracking myth: it takes something like 0.5 - 3 million gallons of water to frack each well. This sounds like a lot, and in these drought-ridden times, do we have enough water to frack all these wells? As ever, though, the key is in the context. The total leakage rate reported by water companies in the UK last year was 3295 million liters (660 million gallons) per day. Per day! If you're worried about water shortages, I'd be writing to your water companies if I were you: you could frack 200 to over 1000 wells per day on the amount of water lost by our utility companies every day. So I'll rewrite the statement. Fracking a well takes 0.5% of the total water lost through leakage in the UK in a single day.

The final point raised is 'The landscape would be dominated by well heads spread out over the whole gas field'. It seems the author has never seen a well head in her life. Here's what a well head looks like:

For sure, not to everyone's taste, but plant a couple of small trees or a large hedge next to them and they're hardly a blot on the landscape. If you're going to come out as anti-shale-gas and pro-wind on the basis of 'blots-on-the-landscape', I'd suggest you'd be more than a little confused (for the record, I'm both pro-fracking and pro-wind, I think both will be important for our energy futures).

Right - next letter, and by our only Green Party MP, no less (who I quite like in general):

The Department of Energy and Climate Change report recommending that shale gas exploration be allowed to continue says nothing about water and air pollution, nor the consequences of shale on renewables and our efforts to tackle climate change. The UK is the richest country in Europe in renewable energy potential, but the new focus on gas threatens to displace investment in those renewables, making it even harder to achieve our targets and nurture this jobs-rich sector. A number of studies have shown the overall climate impact of shale gas to be as great as that of coal. If carbon capture and storage technology is not in place, burning just 20% of the gas which Cuadrilla claims to have found in its licence area in Lancashire would generate 15% of the UK's total CO2 allowance to 2050. And despite claims from gas lobbyists that shale gas will bring down energy bills, we know from Ofgem and DECC that recent energy bill rises resulted mainly from high gas prices. Analysis by Deutsche Bank concludes that the impact of shale on bills would actually be low.
This report does not give the full picture, The government should reconsider its policy on shale gas so that we can make a genuinely green transition that will deliver both energy security and a cleaner environment.
Caroline Lucas MP
Green, Brighton Pavilion

One reason I like her is that I agree, the UK has bundles of renewable energy potential and should be making use of it. But I don't think it's true that an increased supply of gas will displace our renewables sector. Burning hydrocarbons has always been (and still is) a lot cheaper and easier than renewable energy - it's why we've been doing it for so long and so effectively. Therefore, renewables are reliant on governmental initiatives, incentives, subsidies etc. So long as the government keeps these in place, then there will be space for renewables. In the meantime, if and when we decide to burn lots of gas (as we currently do) we could either get it from our own shale deposits, or we could get it cheaply from Russia and/or Qatar. Either way, it'll be cheaper than the renewables, but it won't eat up government subsidies. If we're going to burn gas (and we are, we really are), I'd much rather it was our own, rather than lining the pockets of that nice Mr. Putin, or those nice Bahrainian Princes we've had all over our TV screens during the recent F1 Grand Prix.

In fact, we could use the billions of £s of tax raised on producing shale gas to fund renewable initiatives. If you're still worried that we're generating too much CO2, then increase your carbon tax, reduce your emissions quotas (or whatever other method you favour) and the first thing to close down will be the coal-fired power plants (which emit a lot more CO2 than gas fired power). And that's the key: managed properly (i.e., ensuring that the greenhouse-gas emissions reductions incentives that promote renewables remain in place), the main competitor for shale gas isn't renewables, it's coal. And nobody likes coal.

Next, we come to one of the classic contradictions commonly made by anti-fracking types. On the one hand, Caroline argues that shale gas will fundamentally change our energy landscape, choking off the potential for renewables to break through, while at the same time 'the impact of shale on bills would actually be low'. You can't have your cake and eat it. If you think that the impact of shale gas won't be particularly significant anyway, you can't also claim that it's going to destroy our budding renewables industry.

Finally, an I'll address a point that simply makes no sense to me; if 'recent energy bill rises resulted mainly from high gas prices' then surely a technology that increases gas supply (and therefore lowers gas prices) would help lower our energy bills?!    

Right, next letter:

The fact that a scientific committee thinks earth tremors can be reduced by using the right equipment does not mean fracking to obtain shale gas is acceptable. Fracking results in atmospheric releases of methane twice that found with conventional gas. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, seven times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame. For shale gas to be environmentally friendlier than other fossil fuels, methane emissions from fracking have to be kept below 2%. Current operations release around 10% and, in the US, the fossil fuel industry is strenuously resisting methane control legislation by the Environmental Protection Agency. Development of shale gas is impossible to reconcile with the low-carbon economy the planet so desperately needs.
Dr Robin Russell-Jones
International conference organiser, Help Rescue The Planet

I think I've dealt with this issue already here. The figure used here (10%) is above even the upper estimate from the Howarth paper. As always, no mention of how widely panned this paper has been, just a bold assertion of fact.

The next letter is fairly measured and bland, so I'll skip on one more to this:

One of the most disquieting sentences in the fracking report said information on the chemicals involved in the process had been withheld "for commercial reasons". There are references (What's the truth about fracking?, G2, 18 April) to chemicals, and chemical lubricants (and to 75% of these remaining underground) but not to what the chemicals are. Part of the planning approval process for such extraction must include an environmental impact assessment – how can this be completed to the satisfaction of the public, or courts, if the nature of the chemicals involved is kept secret? How can public confidence be won if the companies say "you do not need to know, just trust us"? That trust does not exist, so Cuadrilla – what are you using?
Martin Hemingway
Leeds

So, Martin Hemingway would like to know more about the chemicals used during fracking. Apparently they've been withheld. Martin is obviously a very lazy man (or maybe I'm just a brilliant hacker, but I doubt it). One click on the Cuadrilla website takes me to this page, which gives an overview of the fracking chemicals used. One more click takes you here, where each component of the fluid is listed in full. Unknown fracking chemicals, companies keeping secrets? Lazy pillock!

Next!

The government report on "fracking" makes it sound as safe, economic, and environmentally friendly as nuclear power. No worries there, then.
Steven Thomson
London

Can we compare fracking to the nuclear industry? More importantly, as a 'fracker' is that a comparison we'd like? After all, a lot of people who live near nuclear power plants are often in favour of them. The French in particular are quite fond of them, which is lucky for us because there are now parts of southern England that now get their electricity from French nuclear power. So long as you don't build your power stations on earthquake and tsunami-prone islands, or use Soviet-style technology, nuclear power generally seems to do ok at producing a lot of electricity for very little CO2 emissions, with very few incidences of contamination. I'm sure the writer is trying to be funny, but it's a silly letter really.

I'll skip the next one, which is more about our energy policy in general than about shale gas, and move on to this:

Nigel Smith of the British Geological Survey is either very young or has an extremely short memory if he seriously believes that "we have just had 30 years of getting our gas from the North Sea [and] it's not caused any problems to anyone". The Elgin platform is still leaking gas, and threatening a major fire, after nearly four weeks, and is predicted to continue for several months, but at least no one has died. Earlier disasters entailed major loss of life. The pollution toll will not be known for some time. In 1988 Piper Alpha, in Norwegian waters but not much further from Scotland than the Elgin, exploded, causing 167 deaths. It was producing gas and oil. Earlier, the previous record-holder, the Alexander Kielland, simply turned over in 1980, killing 123. That was an oil rig, but the same fossil-fuel lessons hold. Previously, in the same Ekofisk field, a blowout in 1977 released some 120,000 barrels of oil. So, Mr Smith, perhaps it's time to look at genuine alternatives?

It's true that there have been bad accidents in the North Sea in the past, particularly in the 70s and 80s. But Piper Alpha was in 1988, so while Nigel Smith is technically incorrect to say "we have just had 30 years of getting our gas from the North Sea [and] it's not caused any problems to anyone", he wouldn't have been far off had he said 25 years. In my view, the industry is pretty good at learning from its mistakes, and that safety record extending back for a quarter of a century is pretty good. The argument 'wouldn't it have been better if we hadn't bothered to develop North Sea oil and gas' wouldn't be likely to win much support beyond the hard-core green community. After all, North Sea oil and gas development is one of the central planks in Scotland's push for independence. If we could guarantee that shale gas development took a similar trajectory to North Sea oil/gas, I think the majority of the UK public would be in favour.

Finally, I'd add that whatever the issues with respect to the North Sea, remember that the majority of shale gas development will be on land, which makes life a lot easier and safer when you have direct access to the ground surface, rather than being separated from it by several hundreds of metres of water.

Nearly at the end now: the final letter. Thank you, dear reader, for pushing on this far.

According to the University of Texas, fracking has caused some hundred earthquakes in the US. One, in Youngstown, was recorded at just over 4 on the Richter scale. However, the government-sponsored report on fracking is a diversion, it has simply looked at the geological implications. The important issues are:
1. Water. Around 2-3m gallons of water are used for each well, which can be fracked up to 18 times. In the US there are at least 35,000 wells, so a lot of water is used over there, and here, in the UK we are facing a water shortage.
2. Pollution. The United States house of representatives committee on energy in April 2011 reported 652 different chemicals used in fracking, 29 of which are human carcinogens. In addition, the New York Times (27 February, 2011) reported the presence of radium, unintentionally extracted in the process. Between 40% and 70% of the water used comes back to the surface and has to be disposed of. Then the US Environmental Protection Agency recently announced, for the first time, that fracking may cause groundwater pollution.
3. Climate change. Increasingly large amounts of energy will be required to extract shale gas – methane. Some 2-4% of this escapes from the well, and it is several dozen times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO². Anyway, shale gas distracts from the real task which is to find effective renewable energy because, whether you accept climate change or not, we are going to run out of gas, oil, coal and even uranium one day soon.
Fracking has been banned in Bulgaria, France, New York, New Jersey, Quebec and Switzerland, and in parts of Australia and South Africa. We need to consider the implications of the process before we allow powerful international companies to start drilling in the UK.

Firstly, a correction. The Youngstown earthquake was not caused by fracking. It was caused by geological disposal of flow-back water. When fracking is completed, the left-over fracking fluids must be disposed of. Sometimes this water is treated on the surface, sometimes companies will inject the water into deep-lying saline aquifers. It was this waste-fluid injection (and not fracking directly, as at Blackpool) that caused the quake. Again, I should stress that this was a very small earthquake, and it has happened once in several 1000 waste-water injection programs.

As for the points listed from 1 to 3:
1. Water consumption. As above, although 3 million gallons sounds like a lot, it's represents 0.5% of the water lost by our water companies through leakage PER DAY!
2. Water contamination. The US EPA has documented one case of contamination (Pavilion, WY) in the thousands of fracked wells drilled across the US. As for the hundreds of scary secret chemicals, they're all readily available on Cuadrilla's website.
3. Climate change. I agree that we should be putting a lot on energy into developing renewable energy sources. But that doesn't mean that, if we're burning gas, it'd be better for our wallets, our tax man and for our geo-political security if we burned our own gas rather than Putin's gas or the Prince of Bahrain's gas.

So, there you have it. A complete dissection of the Guardian letters page. Sorry it took so long, thanks for sticking with me. There's a lot of straw-men out there being attacked in the fracking debate that we're currently having. And yes, there is a place for genuine debate about fracking. But let's have it based on reality, not scare stories and myths.

More on the U of T shale gas study: public and media perceptions

Given how long I'd rambled on, I decided to split my analysis of the University of Texas hydraulic fracturing study into two posts. Another issue that I found particularly relevant was the UoT analysis of media output and public perception of shale gas. The findings were overwhelmingly negative - for the majority of the public shale gas is connected mainly with water contamination issues. I'm not sure which way round these things work (does the media inform public debate or merely follow it?) but it's not a coincidence that media reporting of the shale gas issue is generally strongly negative. The UoT study found that between 63-70% of media reports were negative about shale gas, 19% to 30% were neutral and balanced, and 3-18% were positive. Perhaps equally non-coincidental, only 15-33% of these reports contained any reference to scientific research and reports on fracking. Which is very worrying. I clearly need to be getting a lot more vocal and putting myself out there. It was the lack of any scientific basis to most of the shale gas debate in this country that got me angry enough to get up and write this whole blog (and believe me, you have to get me pretty angry to get me off the sofa and onto the laptop when I could be watching Spurs draw 0-0 with Stevenage).

An example of fairly unabashed negative reporting of shale gas comes from the Guardian. For me, this report says that there's nothing inherently problematic about hydraulic fracturing, so long as companies stick to the rules and don't do anything stupid - i.e. that, just like in conventional oil and gas reservoirs around the world, they ensure their casings are intact and that they don't dump anything at the surface - then shale gas is unlikely to cause environmental problems. You'd have thought a report like that would be good news all round - so long as gas companies play it straight and don't cut corners, we can have the shale gas without polluting the environment. However, I can't help feel like this Guardian article manages to make things look extremely negative. My feeling is that the Erin Brockovich-style story the little guys from the country versus the monolithic industrial empires, is the kind of story that the media likes to write. It's a very powerful and pervasive cultural meme.

The 'memetic' nature of the debate has been revealed recently in a Texas court case. A couple living attempted to sue a gas company for contaminating their water supply with methane. As part of their case, they posted videos on YouTube of their garden hose spouting flame as a result of gas-contamination of the water supply. However, it has since transpired that their hose was in fact connected to the gas, not the water supply, making their case a complete fraud. The couple are now being counter-sued by the operators for defamation. What is interesting is that the flaming tap phenomenon has become such a cultural meme associated with shale gas that the public is now ready to believe such things with little evaluation of the evidence. Mainly because it appears that 85% of media reports on shale gas do not contain any scientific evidence.

I'll leave with what might be considered to be a snide little remark (sometimes I just can't help myself): in my experience so far, the main opponents to shale gas and fracturing are wealthy Tory councillors, and millionaire Hollywood actors. Hardly surprising: if you're actually a 'little guy' from a rural backwater (rather than a relatively well-off journalist from a large city), then a natural resource capable of turning around your struggling local economy is not something to be sniffed at or dismissed casually.