Frack Free Somerset and the ASA

Earlier this year I was contacted by a local Somerset resident. He'd attended a meeting hosted by Frack Free Somerset, and had concerns about the accuracy of the promotional materials they'd used.

The resident was intending to submit a complaint to the ASA regarding these materials, and got in touch with me for some advice about some technical details, which I was happy to provide.

The ASA began their investigation, but the issue has now been resolved as FFS have agreed to withdraw the offending literature without rebuttal (Informally Resolved Cases, Date 7th May 2014). By doing so, there is no requirement for formal investigation.

As far as I see it, this represents tacit acceptance that all of the original complaints are valid. However, by withdrawing rather than making a challenge, FFS have managed to avoid the media fanfare associated with a full ASA investigation.      

There is an obvious comparison here with Cuadrilla's ASA investigation. Of the 18 complaints made by anti-fracking groups, only 6 were upheld by the ASA. In contrast, it would appear that FFS are not even prepared to try and defend the contents of their own promotional materials.

I have re-posted the original FFS brochure here, and the complaint from the local Somerset resident here.




The complaint cites a number of supplementary materials. These are as follows. Attachments 1a-e were data sheets taken at random from Barnett shale wells on the FracFocus website, summarised in attachment 1f. Attachment 2 was DECC's document about fracking and water. Attachment 3 summarised cancer incident rates in Barnett Shale counties (Denton, Johnson, Parker, Tarrant, Wise) taken from http://statecancerprofiles.cancer.gov. Attachment 4 detailed key health indicators for Denton County taken from Mickley and Blake. Attachment 5 was the DECC document on shale gas regulations and safety. Attachment 6 shows US natural gas prices and shale gas extraction rates (easily available just about anywhere), and Attachment 7 compares coal and CCGT power station efficiencies, Figure 6 in this EIA report.

Guest Post: Frack Free Somerset Meeting, 22nd March

Dr Doug Robinson, now retired, but until recently a Senior Lecturer at Bristol University, attended a public meeting held by Frack Free Somerset last week. Following his visit, Dr Robinson contacted me to discuss the experience, and to outline his concerns about the group. His comments follow:

Notices posted by the frack free Somerset group for a meeting in Wookey Hole village about fracking “heading our way” attracted my attention being a retired geologist and local resident. I went along assuming it was a bona fide group raising rational concerns about unconventional gas recovery, and that there would be an opportunity to have an informed discussion on the pros and cons of the issues involved. At the introduction it was stated that the group had no political or other agenda and wanted to provide a balanced account of the pros and cons of the fracking controversy and that in the discussion, views and comment allied to both sides of the argument were welcome. 

The hour-long film produced by the group was said to present to provide a balanced and true view of the debate on unconventional gas development. The film, however, was largely based on opposition to the exploitation of unconventional gas, and of little more than a propaganda style repeating many of the unsubstantiated and well-known scare stories that have already been widely aired in the press and online. The film did use various cuts from interviews with professional Earth scientists, and also showed and gave quotes from the 2012 Royal Society report on “Shale gas extraction in the UK: a review of hydraulic fracturing” (available at http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/shale-gas-extraction/report/), attempting to show engagement with scientific issues. These examples were however of negative points, and didn’t attempt to use such sources to present a scientific analysis of the process. Two examples can be used to demonstrate this point:

My first media hack job: "The Truth Behind the Dash for Gas"

The Truth Behind "The Truth Behind the Dash for Gas"

Talk to media people enough, and something like this was inevitable, but it seems that I am the star in a new anti-fracking documentary entitled "The truth behind the dash for gas" (my part starts from about 20 minutes in).

Back in November last year I received an email from a young guy who said he was looking to make his way as a film-maker just out from film-school. His email to me is quoted below:

I am putting together a short film about fracking in Somerset. The aim is to present a fair and informative assessment of the potential for fracking in Somerset, the risks and dangers associated with it, and the views of local people. The film and those working on it are independent of both the anti-fracking campaign groups and those who stand to gain from the fracking industry.

I think just by watching the first few minutes of the film you can see that their  claimed intent "to present a fair and informative assessment of the potential for fracking in Somerset" is barefaced lie. Even more barefaced is their claim that "the film and those working on it are independent of [...] the anti-fracking campaign groups". However, the film has a facebook page, in which it clearly states that the film is facilitated by Frack Free Somerset. The FrackFreeSomerset and FrackOff websites appear prominently in the credits at the end of the film.

Given that the very first contact between myself and the film makers was a lie, one can hardly expect the remainder of the film to do any better. I find it especially ironic that the 2nd word in the film title is "truth", while their very first contact with me was an obvious, barefaced and outright lie. It's not worth my time to address the content of the film as a whole, but I do want to comment on the parts in which my comments have been used.

Comment #1: that debate over hydraulic fracturing has descended into a media slanging match, and I don't think anyone could disagree with that. However, the film moves straight to the same science denialism more usually seen in the anti-climate-change world - if you can't trust the Royal Society for advice on scientific matters, the British Geological Survey, or the Geological Society, for matters geological, or Public Health England for public health matters, then I'm not sure where is left for you to turn, and the term conspiracy theorist begins to apply (see my final comment for more in this vein).  

As for my own 'close ties', I spent 3 months in the BP Institute in Cambridge as a 20-year-old M.Sci student. While BP provided the funds to set up the lab, the students who do projects there are  university students, and have no connection to BP (I certainly spoke to noone from BP while I was there, and in fact the majority of research being done when I was there was on developing energy efficient buildings). I also spent a few months in Rijswijk in Shell's research facility during my Ph.D. During my Ph.D I developed geophysical techniques to ensure safe storage of CO2 in geological reservoirs - so-called CCS, a potential method to mitigate climate change. During this time Shell asked my to come over and help apply some of these methods to their test site at Ketzin, Germany. All of this is made abundantly clear on my website.

Comment #2: I say that in many cases the impacts have been exaggerated. The Scranton Times-Tribune investigated claims made by residents about shale developments in Pennsylvania, finding that 77% of accusations were without substantiation. Surely an example of impacts exaggerated? Equally, even in cases where regulatory breaches by companies have lead to issues - the example of Dimock springs to mind - the impacts of this have been regularly exaggerated. At Dimock, while methane was found to have contaminated groundwater, there was no evidence of fracking fluids in the water. It's not good to have methane in groundwater, and this should be prevented from occurring at all times. However, methane is not toxic or harmful to human health, barring the risk of explosion if it allowed to accumulate in significant amounts. After the company had been cited and forced to repair its wells, levels of methane dropped, returning below the minimum safety levels set by the EPA (a fact never mentioned by activists, who will tell you that once contaminated, an aquifer can never be restored).

Comment #3: The most famous flaming tap in Gasland, the Markham well, had nothing to do with oil and gas drilling. This has been made abundantly clear by the Colorado State regulator (COGCC), which felt the need to release a comment to "correct several errors" in the film. The flaming tap is the headline image of Gasland, it appears in all the trailers and promotional material. That the gas is of biogenic origin, from shallow layers well above those targeted for drilling, implying that gas drilling is not the cause. This film attempts to argue that poor well casing still allowed shallow biogenic methane to migrate. However, the COGCC report makes clear that "there is little or no temporal relationship" between gas drilling in the area and the complaints made about the Markham and McClure wells. This is a fairly massive oversight to be made, one that I think that is worthy of comment. Clearly the film-makers find it easy to relate to other films that are economical with the truth in order to tell a story.

The regulators did rule that a drilling company was at fault in the case of the Ellsworth well. This company reached a settlement with the claimant (again, a fact that the film neglects to mention). The COGCC conducted sampling over a 170 sq mile area, and the Ellsworth well was the only one where any impact was detected. Strangely, we don't get to see Josh Fox setting the Ellsworth taps on fire - one can only guess at why?

The next sleight of hand is either quite clever, or monumentally dumb, I'm really not sure which. They move on to discuss the Duke methane studies, which I have discussed in previous posts here and here. Of course, there are a number of studies performed along along these lines, all of which come to very different conclusions to the Duke study. For some reason the film makers don't mention these (one wonders why). However, these film-makers can't even get the Duke PNAS study facts right! A screen-grab of the PNAS abstract is shown, highlighting an apparent claim that methane was found in 82% of drinking water within 1km of a gas well.

 How about we look at that section of the abstract in full:

In fact, you can clearly see that the 82% figure refers to all the water sampled, not just the ones near gas drilling sites. Methane was found in 82% of water samples, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THEY ARE NEAR GAS WELLS OR NOT! Incidentally, this is a similar percentage to that found by Molofsky et al., who sampled a much larger dataset (1,700 samples vs 140 samples), finding that 78% of samples contained methane, regardless of proximity of gas wells. In fact this is why establishing whether shale development has caused problems is so difficult in Pennsylvania - there is already a lot of methane in the groundwater. Where studies have been conducted in areas where natural methane is not present in shallow water, they have not seen an impact from drilling.

I honestly find it hard to believe that this accidental highlighting of parts of two sentences, conveniently removing the context to make a scarier quote, is accidental. Either way it is particularly dumb to hope that people familiar with the source material won't spot the attempted trick.

Comment #4 is about well integrity. The astute among you will notice a cut in the editing between the start and end of my answer. Clearly, other things I've said have been edited out. Sadly, this interview was conducted a year ago, so I can't remember exactly what I said, and back then I was too naive to make my own recordings (not a mistake I'll make again), but presumably it was something that didn't fit with the narrative being portrayed.

The films then cuts to the SLB Oilfield Review from 2003. Always a good litmus test of a shale gas commentator is how they treat this report. Firstly this report covers data from deep offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a very challenging drilling environment, so it's not surprising to have more problems offshore than onshore. The only statistics relevant to onshore UK shale drilling are stats from other onshore wells.

More importantly, the film describes the stats as showing either "leakage" or "failure". In fact, they depict incidents of Sustained Casing Pressure. SCP isn't a good thing, and again it should be avoided, but it doesn't equate to the mass leakage of hydrocarbons into shallow layers. Categorically, these stats have no bearing on the rate at which well integrity issues are causing contamination, which is what, misleadingly, the film tries to claim.

The most obvious place to look for wellbore integrity-related contamination issues from onshore wells drilled under a UK regulatory system, is of course to look onshore in the UK, where we have drilled 2,000 wells already, many of them in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (making most of them 30 years old at least). One of the few things this film gets right is that whether a well is fracked or not has no bearing on wellbore integrity issues. Therefore, if the statistical claims made in this film were true, there would be 1,000 onshore contamination incidents already. If the bold claim that follows ("all wells leak eventually") were true, we'd surely have 2,000 incidents by now. Clearly the claims made in the film do not add up, because I'm not aware of any problems associated with onshore wells in the UK.

Similarly, after the Piper Alpha disaster, regulations were significantly tightened to prevent such an event ever happening again. Again, the North Sea has not been turned into an environmental wasteland - we're still so keen to eat North Sea cod that there's almost none left!

We can also look to the US, which has hundreds of thousands of onshore wells, and actually examine statistics relating to actual incidents of groundwater contamination, as opposed to SCP. Luckily, the US Groundwater Protection Council has done exactly this, in a study released in 2011. They find that of 187,000 wells drilled in Texas, and 33,000 wells drilled in Ohio, only 21 and 12 wells respectively had seen casing issues leading to contamination, rates of 0.01% and 0.04%.

Comment #5 regards regulatory differences between US and UK, and resulting differences in operating practices. The above statistics show that contamination is not endemic to shale drilling. However, even the handful of cases that have occurred is a handful too many. These few incidences are inevitably the result of poor practice, and/or the contravention of regulations.

While I'm speaking, they cut to some shots of flowback waste pits. What they fail to point out is that these are not allowed in the UK - any waste flowing back from the wells must be stored in double-lined steel tanks. This is with good reason: in the GWPC report I mention above, the majority of drilling-related contamination incidents (172 in Ohio, 190 in Texas) have come from surface activities, not from processes happening under the ground. In the US it is common to store the waste fluid in open, plastic-lined pits. These have been known to overflow during heavy rain, or for the liners to tear, allowing the contents to leak. I think the endless shots of waste-fluid pits that activists like to show indicates either that they are not aware that these are banned in the UK, or that they do know this but don't like to let facts get in the way of the story.

For example, in one well-publicised case XTO opened the valve on one of their tanks, allowing the fluid to flow out into the ground, while in another case a trucker dumped his load into a nearby storm drain, rather than taking it to the treatment plant. This sort of illegal activity should absolutely be prevented, and it is important that regulators keep a sharp eye on operators to ensure that this doesn't happen. But it doesn't show that shale gas development is inherently problematic. Again, we can look the the UK example for dealing with produced water. The existing UK onshore industry handles 70 millions barrels of produced water a year, with no apparent contamination problems.

The next interviewee, Laurence Rankin, is presented a "Former Environment Agency manager", with the obvious intention of making us think that he is an impartial commentator. Since my 3 months as a 20-year-old M.Sci student at the BP Institute is worthy of mention, maybe the film should have also pointed out that he is also a coordinator of the Sefton Green Party and member of Friends of the Earth, so perhaps slightly less impartial than first appearances might suggest. While the Green Party man seems to have a problem with Cuadrilla's activities, the Environment Agency itself doesn't, and hasn't claimed that Cuadrilla have broken any of their regulations. The fact that the Green Party man isn't familiar with fracking, doesn't mean it hasn't happened. For example, horizontal wells have been fracked at Wytch Farm in Dorset. Update - this comment reflected media reports regarding Wytch Farm. Water is injected into the Wytch Farm reservoir, but this is to increase the reservoir pressure and drive oil towards production wells (a common practice in conventional fields), not to fracture the rock.

The use of the term 'slick-water' is another slight of hand, somehow implying that slick-water is somehow worse that what has gone before. In fact, in the good old days it was common to use a mix of gelled gasoline and napalm as the frack fluid. Given the choice of water with 1% chemical additives, or gasoline and napalm as the frack fluid, the use of slick-water represents an improvement. And the fact that there were no specific references to fracking in exploration licenses is that it was considered such a normal part of oilfield and drilling activities (with 10% of existing onshore wells being hydraulically stimulated). The main difference between now and what has gone before is one of scale, with modern treatments using higher volumes, rather than any major differences in the technique itself.

The film moves on to the Cuadrilla-induced earthquake near Blackpool. The next mistake made comes with the claim that the increase in earthquakes seen in US is directly attributable to hydraulic stimulation. In fact, the increase in seismicity is caused by an increase in the volumes of waste fluids, from both conventional and unconventional operations, being disposed of by deep injection into saline aquifers. I know this because I have worked in depth on these events, including writing a report for parliament, because they have implications for CCS. There are no proposals in the UK to dispose of fracking fluids through injection into deep aquifers. As far as I am aware, we do not have suitable deep saline aquifers onshore (although we are targeting such aquifers offshore in the North Sea for CCS). Again, one is left wondering whether the film makers know this and are lying, or simply do not understand the science that is being done in this area?

There is only one case in the US where fracking has triggered seismicity - in the Eola field, Oklahoma, which occurred in January 2011, 3 months before Preese Hall event, but was not reported as such until August 2011, after Preese Hall, and one case in Canada (British Columbia), where events occurred between 2009 and 2012, although they were not reported until August 2012, a long time after Preese Hall. So Preese Hall was the first reported incident of induced seismicity triggered by hydraulic stimulation for shale gas.

With respect to reporting of the earthquake and resulting casing deformation to the Energy Minister, there was no regulatory requirement to report casing deformation to him - this is the role of the HSE. Moreover, I think the actions taken were entirely appropriate - they ceased operations to allow a 6-month scientific study to be conducted, after which the results were reported for DECC, HSE and the rest of the world to read. While we're on the point, all of the casing deformation was within the production casing string, within the target zone of production - it was actually below the depths of the frack stages that triggered the seismicity. It poses no risk whatsoever to the integrity of the well. The figure below shows the well design - the deformation is the little yellow bar right at the bottom.

I think that's it in terms of my contribution to this piece of work. I'll comment briefly on the accusation of "mission-creep" in terms of chemical use - every chemical used in the UK must be permitted by the Environment Agency, and fully disclosed to the public.

One final point in closing: the go-to 'expert' for this film appears to be Ian R. Crane, an ex-oilfield-executive, who gets the final word as far as this film is concerned. I don't usually like to stoop to ad-hom arguments, but as Mr Crane seems to appear on an increasing number of anti-fracking pieces, it'll be worth your time having a look at his profile on RationalWiki, a website dedicated to uncovering cranks, conspiracy theorists, and pseudoscience. If this is the best figure-head that the anti-fracking movement can come up with, I would suggest they need to try a little harder.

UPDATE: I checked out the FrackFreeSomerset website to look for more information. According them, the film is not just "facilitated" by FFS, but in fact "produced" by them.

UPDATE (21/11/2013): The film maker himself has left a comment for me. He is correct to point out that I failed to address my comments of water use. In the film, I describe how much water is used for a single stimulation. Of course, the issue is cumulative effects over time if many wells need to be stimulated. The water use for an individual well (~10,000 - 50,000 cubic metres) sounds like a lot, but it must be placed in context. Between the 3 largest water utilities (Severn Trent, United and Thames), 1.7 billion liters of water are lost to leaks PER DAY. If water companies were able to improve on this by just 1%, we would have available an extra 17,000 cubic metres of water, that's enough water to frack a well every day. If water consumption is your concern, don't blame frackers, get the water utilities to fix their leaks (or at least 1% of their leaks).

My visit to Glastonbury: Part II - The reaction

I discussed in my previous post my visit to the councillors of Glastonbury to talk to them about unconventional gas extraction, and the potential impact it could have on the area. In that post I gave a summary of what I said in my talk. In this post, I'd like to talk about the reaction.

It should be noted that I didn't go there with the intention of changing anyone's mind. Given that the council had already voted to ban fracking, I hardly thought a 45 minute presentation by a gravitas-lacking 29 year old (even if he does have a good number of letters after his name) would be enough to change their minds (I was more worried about getting out of there without being tarred-and-feathered to be honest).

However, the councilman who had asked me to come give the talk sent me a very kind email afterwards, saying he saw the evening as a total success, at that some members 'had come to confessions and said the presentation had changed their minds'. I wasn't aware that councillors had 'confessions', but I'm very glad that I appear to have had some small effect at least.

Furthermore, there was a reporter from the local paper in attendance, who placed a story on my talk in the Somerset Gazette, which has granted me my first experience of being completely misrepresented by the media (I guess we all get to experience this eventually.

It ran under the headline: 'Expert warns fracking leaks are the result of cutting corners'. Which is true. What is completely missing is the context - the fact that leaks from fracking are not inevitable side effects of the process, but that they can be prevented by a stronger regulatory regime. Also, missing is the context that the majority of companies are not cutting corners, which is why the percentage rate of leakage instances remains very very low.

In my view (perhaps unfairly, I'd love to hear your comments), you could be mistaken for thinking that I am opposed to fracking, based on that article. For instance, the line:

I am here to tell you how the process works and the effects that science has shown that it has on the people nearby and the surrounding areas,

placed without context, suggests that I am saying that science has shown lots of impacts. In fact, in my talk I went on to point out, for example with the Texas and Pennsylvania air quality surveys, that scientific evidence for negative impacts of fracking on water and/or air quality have been remarkably hard to come by, bar a small number of documented surface spill and well integrity cases.  

The final and most important item left out in the story is that I summarised my talk by stating that, while it is not my decision to take, I believe that unconventional gas extraction can be done safely in the South West, and that it will have a beneficial impact on the area. It would have been nice if that could have been reported as well.

 

My visit to Glastonbury

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting Glastonbury, a small town in Somerset best known for its tor and its music festival. Glastonbury Town Council has preemptively declared itself to be 'frack-free'. Much like Frome's similar decision last year, this is more a symbolic gesture, because (a) it's not clear that there is any unconventional gas to be had from around Glastonbury, and (b) if there were, it is unlikely to be developed for many years.

The decision was not a unanimous one. Some councillors felt that the decision had been rushed, having heard only of the negative sides from Frack Free Somerset. Jim Barron, one of the dissenting councilmen, pleaded in the local paper for a more evidence based discussion before any decisions be taken.

As a result, I was asked to come down to Glastonbury one evening after work to give a presentation to the council. You can download the presentation that I ended up giving from here. You might as well read it in full, but here's a potted summary.

I began by explaining what shale gas is, why it is different to conventional gas, and why hydraulic fracturing is necessary. I followed this by explaining the process, including a time-lapse video of a well being drilled and fracked, and an animation showing how microseismic events are used to image where the stimulated fracture is going. I gave a short overview of existing UK onshore oil/gas operations, including the fact that fracking has been done over 200 times in the UK since the 1970s.

I then outlined what I see as the potential issues relating to unconventional gas extraction: water usage, earthquakes, water contamination, air pollution, and surface impacts. The first, water usage, can be quickly shown to be a red herring: the water lost by SouthWest Water through leakage every day would be enough to frack more than 30 wells. I talked about the Blackpool earthquake, discussing how event magnitudes work (and that the event in Blackpool is so small that most of my real-earthquake-studying colleagues wouldn't get out of bed for something 10 times the size), and looking at evidence for fracking-induced earthquakes elsewhere (of which there are a handful in Canada, but none in the US).

Water contamination is perhaps the major issue for fracking. It is clear that there have been some cases of methane contamination through wells, and of chemical spills at the surface. I listed some of the key incidents taken from this report. However, it is important to point out that where methane leakage has occurred, it is inevitably due to shoddy practice from the drillers: poor or incomplete casing and/or missing cement. Equally, it should be fairly easy not to spill chemicals on pads at the surface, while open tailings ponds (often the most common source of surface contamination) are not allowed in the UK. It is most important to consider the context of these incidents: for example, the Groundwater Protection Council estimate that less than 0.1% of wells have seen a problem.   

With respect to air pollution, I showed a number of studies from both Pennsylvania and Texas, which do not show increases in benzene, ozone or volatile organic compounds (VOCs) before and after drilling. I then looked at a study of employee health statistics for the oil and gas industry in comparison to other sectors. If drill pads are unhealthy places to be, with dangerous chemicals being pumped into the air, then surely the employees should be getting the sickest, given that they might be on site 6 days a week for months on end. In fact, sickness rate in the gas industry is pretty consistent with national average rates, and a lot lower than many other industries.

To demonstrate the surface impacts of shale gas extraction, I showed some photos of what the rigs look like during drilling (on site for a month or two), and what the pads look like once the well is completed, and talked about pad spacing (minimum 2 - 6km as an approximation), as well as pointing out other impacts like new pipelines, and the truck journeys to and from the pads.

I then talked about the public debate around fracking in the US, pointing out that it has become highly polarised, with protest groups, but then anti-protest groups who protest the protest groups. I also showed the data from a Pittsburgh public opinion survey that showed that generally fracking does have more support than opposition (although perhaps the opposition is more vociferous).

Finally, as I like to do, I compared the risks from fracking to the risks from conventional gas extraction. To me at least, if you are opposed to fracking, you should be opposed to all hydrocarbon extraction, so I posed the question to Glastonbury's councilmen: take the scary boogey-word 'fracking' out of the question, and ask what would you do if there was a large conventional gas field discovered under Glastonbury. What would you do?

Coal bed methane in Falkirk

There's been a fair bit of activity down in the SW over UK Methane's plans for coal bed methane extraction around Keynsham. Coal bed methane, like shale gas, uses fracking to extract gas, only from deep coal seams rather than shale beds.

Coal bed methane has already been in operation in Scotland for several years (I wasn't aware of this, and am indebted to Frack-Off for pointing this out).

So, how has CBM extraction affected Falkirk? Has it become an environmental wasteland? Here's the local MP (Eric Joyce) on the issue, writing in the Guardian:

My constituency of Falkirk is home to one of the UK's most advanced coalbed methane extraction projects. As Lord Browne says, the extraction of coalbed methane is a low carbon bridge to future technologies, is unobtrusive and is environmentally safe. I have received a handful of local objections to the project, all from the same campaign group and all reminiscent of the disastrous anti-science, anti-GM lobby of a decade ago. On the other hand, I have received many messages of support from constituents who accept the potentially valuable contribution unconventional gas extraction has to make to the UK's energy mix.

It surprises me how much these onshore unconventional gas developments seem to have slipped under that radar, on both sides of the argument. Councillors and locals with worries about CBM developments in Somerset should be making a bee-line to find out more about how it has impacted Falkirk? Surely that might help improve the quality of the debate somewhat.

As an aside, it is interesting that Eric Joyce draws parallels with the anti-scientific approach of those who oppose unconventional gas with those who opposed GM food a decade ago. He's not the first to make this comparison (nor the second)...

 

The hornet's nest keeps on giving

Ragamala has been good enough to respond once again in our conversation in the comments section of my letter to the Somerset Standard.

He comments:

You have a penchant for facts, Dr Verdon. Can you please say what percentage of the Wytch Field oil reservoirs tapped is onshore? Yes it is called an onshore resource. For the reason that it suits the pro-fracking argument to call it that, and this misrepresentation should be continually challenged as it used, erroneously, to imply support for onshore fracking.
Regarding fugitive methane emissions I stand by my statement that there is no certainty whatsoever about the levels of methane fugitive emissions from shale gas fracking. In the EU report you refer to we have indeed some tables of figures produced, but these are estimate drawn from various widely varying US sources, some now dated, rather than hard fact. And the report makes it clear that the European experience will not necessarily be the same as the US. In other words, there is NO reliable estimate of methane emissions. I am grateful to Dr Vedon for conceding that CO2 emission is a very different thing from greenhouse gas emission or CO2 equivalent emissions, this is a factor which is hidden by much pro-fracking propaganda.
Regarding Cuadrilla's wilful breach of their planning permnission your statement is demonstrably wrong.And the Guardian article you refer to makes no reference to migration at all. What it does say is that Cuadrilla wanted to exceed their planning deadline FOR THEIR OWN REASONS, and decided to go ahead WITHOUT CONSULTING LCC because they had the nod from an employed consultant. This was wilful breach of planning which had no link with migration patterns at all, and I would ask you for a retraction on that.

Frankly I can not see how if Cuadrilla mislead about economic benefit this is any better whatsoever than them being misleading about geological "data". This would only be true from your blinkered perspective. The people of the Fylde are being encouraged to accept fracking turning their land into an industrial area by use of misleading figures on economic benefit. Earlier Cuadrilla issued figures on the likely shale gas available which were wild guesses and even their Australian part parent company is sceptical about these and the resulting viability of Cuadrilla's operation.

Regarding shale gas estimates, can we agree to wait until the new BGS report - expected shortly - is out?

I've never been accused of having a penchant for facts before. My sarcasm detector is off the chart. In science, having a penchant for facts is usually considered a good thing. Anyway, my response as follows:

I guess I should take the backhanded compliment of having "a penchant for facts". Better at least than being accused of "overlooking" or even "blissfully ignoring" facts, as your other comments have alleged. Similarly, this conversation began with me apparently 'totally ignoring' the EU Committee reports, but now you yourself want to argue that the information in the report should be discounted. I can only assume that you've had this change of heart because the data in the report does not support the story you want to tell.

Of course they can only be estimates, but they are made with the best evidence available, so they shouldn't be discounted just because you don't like them. If anything given the more stringent EU regulations, estimated based on the US are likely to be an overestimate. Several different reports and papers have come to similar conclusions, the only one that hasn't, by Howarth and Ingraffea, has been widely criticised even by their colleagues at Cornell as using out of date data and poor assumptions.

Unfortunately, one fact I do not have is the proportion of Wytch Farm that is under Poole Harbour, and what under land. However, this is irrelevant to the issue: For drillers, once the drill is under the ground the process is the same, whether on land or under water. When working at 2km depth, the presence or absence of 10m of water really doesn't matter. What does matter is whether the drill has to be sited on land, or on a rig, and therefore whether it will have to go through the water before drilling into rock. In fact, drilling offshore is far harder than onshore. From all technical perspectives, however, drilling at Wytch Farm, where wells start on land but bend out through rocks that are under the coast at depth, is absolutely no different to drilling on land anywhere else. This isn't some invention for pro-shale-gas opportunism, this is how fields are always defined, and with good reason. I'm not sure why you feel that the fact that part of Wytch Farm is under Poole Harbour means that the safety record there can be discounted - if they'd polluted Poole Harbour that would be a major incident!

Regardless of this, I wasn't aware that Wytch Farm was being used for propaganda purposes. If you really don't like this particular example, which of the other 30 or so onshore UK oil fields (that have produced a combined 66 millions tonnes of oil since 1975) would you prefer to use as an example? I think Wytch Farm is mainly talked about because it is the largest and most well known. I grew up 5 minutes down the road from the Humbly Grove Field (Hampshire), but wasn't even aware of it until I studied to become a geologist. You can see where they all are via this map:

http://tinyurl.com/d4speh8

The planning permission time limit breached by Cuadrilla was there because to protect bird life. Apologies for stating migrating, when I should have said over-wintering, birds aren't a strong point of mine. And I've already stated that from a public relations perspective it was a very silly thing to do, and if I were LCC I'd want to know it wouldn't happen again. But to jump from that to banning all shale gas anywhere forever is quite a leap to make.

I've not seen any data on the economic benefits of the geophys survey - either those claimed by Cuadrilla or actually measured (I'm not an economist, so I wouldn't know how you'd go about measuring that). Typically these things cost several million at least, though obviously much of that would go to the specialist companies involved rather than local people. It will indeed be interesting to see the latest numbers from the BGS. The current number being bandied about is in the region of £1.5 trillion, although until that's made official we shall, of course, have to wait.

I really should stop feeding the trolls and get back to my day job.......

I may have stirred up a hornet's nest in Frome. Part II

My letter to the Somerset Standard got such a response that I thought I'd better break it up into two more manageable sized chunks. My original letter is here, you can see some of the comments it received directly here, and a finally a whole new letters page was devoted to it here. Part I of my response is here, and now I shall continue with Part II, my response to the letters by Helen Moore and John Boxall.

Firstly, here is Helen Moore's response to my letter:

How disappointing that Dr James Verdon, a geophysicist at Bristol University, has to resort to labelling those who oppose fracking as disseminating "biased propaganda", when his own credentials and research interests surely make him seriously biased in favour of hydraulic fracturing (fracking)?

Having completed an internship for Shell, he was clearly influenced in the direction of drilling for and burning hydrocarbons at an early stage in his career. He now describes his principal research interests as lying "in imaging and modelling fractured rocks… monitoring hydro-fracture stimulations for tight and shale gas, and understanding the geomechanical response of producing oil reservoirs".

As a so-called "Earth scientist", Dr Verdon would do well to read the work of Dr Stephan Harding, author of Animate Earth, who points to the ways in which much of modern science and technology is based on the vision of our planet as "a vast dead machine full of 'resources' that have value only when they are converted into money", a world view which is causing untold damage to ecosystems and people around the globe.

Dr Verdon's own response to the perspective that our Earth is alive and animate, a self-regulating super-organism currently reacting to the vast amounts of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere (ie melting polar caps, increased global temperatures, increased rates of hurricanes, droughts and flooding etc) might then prove his own prejudices.

At a time when any sane person should be rejecting the use of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil), a UK-wide "dash for gas" makes no sense whatsoever. Moreover, Dr Verdon's argument "that in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, locally produced shale gas has no worse a climate change impact than liquefied natural gas imported from Russia or the Middle East" seems utterly spurious.

And the evidence is clear – if we want energy security in the UK, so that we're no longer reliant on foreign regimes with appalling human rights records, we don't need to put up with a technology that creates water contamination levels, even if "below acceptable minima" in places. Instead we could adopt the Centre for Alternative Technology's impressive framework for a Zero Carbon Britain by 2030, which includes substantial job creation for British workers.

But due to his own biases, Dr Verdon is unlikely to be interested in this. Instead he will probably be backing the activities of our supposedly "greenest Government ever", where all kinds of vested interests in oil and gas companies have recently been exposed – visit frack-off.org. uk/gas-mafia-infilitrates- greenest-government-ever/

I, however, am proud to live in a town where our Independent councillors have sufficient vision to recognise and to reject the wildly inappropriate technology that is "fracking".

While John Boxall said:   

Unlike Dr James Verdon ("Energy firms will not be selling shale gas to customers cheaply", November 1) my last brush with the academic world was a Department of Transport Basic Sea Survival Course so I could serve as a relief stoker in the Merchant Navy. I have, however, devoted a lot of time to the study of the blindingly obvious.

In my copy of Modern Engines and Power Generators – published in 1905 – the author, Professor Kennedy, expresses concern that the UK would run out of coal. Well, that is basically what has happened to natural gas supplies in the USA and Canada, and is happening to our own reserves.
Unlike the UK, however, North America does not have access to imported supplies, which resulted in a significant rise in gas prices and a drive to find alternative sources – hence fracking. As their market is insulated from world gas prices, unlike the UK, fracking has resulted in a drop in prices.

Now, where I do agree with Dr Verdon is that we are increasingly likely to have to import gas from nations that are "unstable" or have unpleasant governments, however firstly it is estimated that at best fracking will provide about 25 per cent of UK gas requirements and secondly what happens when the frack gas – and the rest of our supplies – run out?

A report by National Grid suggested that gas produced from waste and sewage could provide about 18 per cent of the UK's gas requirements – or about 48 per cent of our domestic consumption by 2020 – something coincidentally Nick Cater from Somerset Waste Partnership talked about in his article also on November 1, "Burping bacteria ready to enjoy an electrifying feast". More importantly, unlike frack gas, it's not a resource we will run out of.

Secondly, a lot of our gas is wasted in inefficient appliances and buildings, while I do not have a figure for the savings from more efficient use of gas, given that the figure for potential electricity savings is about 70 per cent – and about 40 per cent of our electricity is generated from gas, clearly we can significantly reduce consumption while keeping our homes warm and lights on. Again, once we install the efficiency measures they stay in place, unlike frack gas.
Unlike the UK and the USA, most other industrialised nations have not had abundant domestic energy supplies, so have had to use energy much more wisely, best summed up by the situation in Germany where energy prices are higher, but bills are lower.

There may be a case for keeping fracking as a reserve technology should we ever find ourselves in serious difficulty, there is however no reason why we should be using it when 35 per cent of UK lofts and 32 per cent of cavity walls are still not insulated. Sadly, however, it seems unlikely that Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat politicians will not take the security of our energy supplies seriously until it is too late. 

Again, I couldn't resist leaving a comment or two, so I initially went for this:

Despite having completed an internship at Shell, my views on shale gas are not a result of ignoring global warming, but because of it. We currently generate 30% of our electricity from coal, which produces twice as much CO2 as from gas. I agree with John Boxall that we should be doing everything we can to improve energy efficiency, and I also agree that bio-gas from waste seems like a no-brainer to me. However, we've known all this for years, yet we've made little headway: are we really likely to see sudden efficiency changes in the next 10-20 years? I'd like it to be so, but knowing human nature I'm not getting my hopes up. With that in mind, shale gas production perhaps holds the key to quickly reducing the CO2 content of our electricity generation mix.

That domestic shale gas has a lower CO2 footprint than imported LNG is not spurious, it was the finding of a recent EU Commission report into the matter (which also came to the conclusion that, with appropriate regulatory regimes in place, shale gas production should be considered).

More importantly, however, is to consider the global context. We could become the greenest country in the world, but it wouldn't matter in the slightest to global warming if China continue to burn coal at the rate they are doing. China has huge shale gas potential: if they can access this gas readily and cheaply, and switch coal for gas in their power stations, this would be the fastest and most dramatic manner of reducing CO2 emissions. The experience from the US is telling in this regard where, as cheap gas has replaced coal in electricity generation, CO2 emissions have plummeted far faster than in Europe, despite our focus on increasing renewable energy (which, incidentally I am also in favour of).

Followed by this:

In reply to Helen Moore, I should add that as a "so-called Earth Scientist", I am familiar with the various dynamic systems that affect earth system processes. While most scientists recoil at the description of the earth as a living being, and the more esoterical and spiritual aspects of his ideas, many of the scientific principles regarding feedback loops in dynamic systems that underpin James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis are widely accepted in the scientific community. 
However, if Helen Moore is so keen on Gaia theory, she should perhaps give due consideration to the recent comments of its original protagonist James Lovelock (with whom Dr Harding has collaborated with extensively), who in a recent Guardian interview came out strongly in favour of shale gas development because of the potential rapid benefits in CO2 emissions reductions they could confer in replacing coal-fired generation. The link is below: 

http://tinyurl.com/775fjdc 

Again, as per my last post, I'd love to have feedback as to whether I'm coming across as reasoned and relatively impartial, or a crazed planet-destroyer? Or whether Helen Moore sounds reasonable, or a crazy eco-loon? Feel free to hide behind internet anonymity and be as mean as you'd like.

I find these responses saddening because they represent an increasing separation between science and the environmental or 'green' movement. Once upon a time science and green movements were pretty close bedfellows. After all, it was science that first identified the risks presented by the shrinking ozone layer. Science that first identified that our CO2 emissions were causing the planet to warm. The green movement has taken that information and made it their own. Which is fine. However, they didn't stop there. They have now taken things much further, and to place where science cannot follow. We see this in a range of issues, from nuclear to GM crops, where scientists and greens are increasingly found on opposite sides of the debate.

I think it's particularly ironic that Helen Moore outlines what I would call 'Lovelock-ian' (i.e. Gaia hypothesis) worldview while making her accusations. In a recent Guardian interview, Lovelock described how the Green movement is becoming closer and closer to a religion or cult:

One thing being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope you get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it. It's just the way the humans go 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.

And of course, when something becomes a religion, anyone with dissenting views must be cast out as heretic. I think that's what just happened to me. In the culture that is being created, dissent becomes intolerable, and anyone expressing a different view must immediately be discredited as a stooge for big oil/big nuclear/big agro.

Compare Helen Moore's letter with John Boxall. I'd describe John's letter as that of a sensible, considered environmentalist. Prepared to consider alternatives, aware of the situation in which we find ourselves. John's letter is the basis for the start of a debate.

Helen only wants to shut debate down. She knows that she is right, she has her solution, and if science disagrees, then science must be wrong. As the green movement goes down this route, all they do is shut down the debate whilst providing ammunition for the Clarksons and Delingpoles of this world to dismiss them as irrelevant hippies. This will be damaging because we need a strong, science based environmental movement to protect our planet. Science shows very clearly that the biggest, quickest and most effective thing we can do to reduce global warming is to get the Chinese to burn gas instead of coal, and China has huge shale gas reserves.

I'll end with a sad but illuminating fact: in the UK recent increases in coal-fired generation (switched from gas) have outweighed all of the savings made from all of the wind farms in the UK.

I may have stirred up a hornet's nest in Frome. Part I

I've had some responses to my letter to the Somerset Standard criticising the manner in which Frome Council took the decision to declare themselves 'Frack Free'. My original letter is here. These letters are also available on the This is Somerset webpage. First of all, my initial letter received a few comments:

From 'ragamala':

Frankly, I am amazed that someone parading his qualifications (Dr Verdon) should pitch into the debate committing the crimes he accuses "environmentalists" of committing. He stresses the need for "rational, evidence-driven debate" yet in his opposition to buying foreign gas he dredges up the emotive question of human rights records. Where is the rationality of that? He totally ignores all the reports emerging, for example the three reports for the EU environment Committee in September, which consider that in the UK and Europe shale gas is not a solution to perceived energy problems and is unlikely ever to provide cheap gas. At least Verdon concedes that there have been instances in the US of water contamination, unlike some or the pro-frackers. Regarding Cuadrilla, I suggest Dr Verdon checks his statements about openness. Has Cuadrilla released any details of its geological survey work this year? No. Did they breach their planning conditions and continue working for two months beyond their planning permission time? Yes. Did they broadcast the fact they were using radioactive sources in wirline testing? No. Have they been honest about the benefit to the local Fylde economy of their geo survey work? No. Did they manipulate data? Yes. I'm sorry, Dr Vernon, but it seems from my perspective that you are the one polarising debate and overlooking facts.

And from 'GreyWolf':

And if you read Cuadrilla's applications you will see they indicate that will not use any radioactive sources on site, although if you ask the they will tell you that they will. Not that that should worry local residents of course, should it?  

As to Dr Verdon's arguments, he seems to a victim of Hume's problem of induction. Suggesting that the UK economic and environmental experience of fracking will mirror what has happened in the USA when local economic, physical and demographic environments are so different is either incredibly naive or deliberately misleading. 

He really should know and do better. 

Obviously, I couldn't let this go unchallenged, so my response was:

Ragamala has a point, the reference to 'the emotive question of human rights records' is indeed irrelevant to the debate, so I'm happy to apologise for that. What's less open to question is the economic benefit of domestic gas production over importing LNG.

I am indeed aware of the EU Commission reports, which come to the conclusion that, with appropriate regulatory regimes in place, shale gas extraction should be considered, in addition to the fact that the CO2 footprint of domestic shale gas can be lower than imported LNG. It's true that the likely market benefits of shale gas are less well understood and difficult to predict (and I'll admit that as a geologist, this is not my strong point). However, it's clear that the companies involved believe there is significant economic potential there. If they are wrong then they are free to lose money and go out of business.

As for the US experience - my comments on this were motivated by Frome Council's statement that their decision to go 'frack-free' was based on the US experience. So am I a victim of Hume's induction, or is Frome Council? I agree that experiences on either side of the Atlantic may be different. That doesn't mean we shouldn't take the evidence we have and extrapolate the best we can. For instance, it's worth bearing in mind that drilling and environmental regs in this country are significantly tighter (and rightly so) than those in the US.

As for Cuadrilla, it is true that they exceeded the length of their planning regs, which was a silly thing to do from a PR perspective. Those regs were there mainly due to issues with a bird migratory route. They did at least hire a bird-expert to assess the risks posed by their operations, but I agree, not a great start.

I'm not sure what details you would like about their geological survey? As far as I'm aware, local residents were informed in advance, although as I am not a resident in the area, I am happy to stand corrected. It's a fairly common procedure though, you can see on the following website a history of all such onshore surveys conducted in the UK (where the Cuadrilla survey will eventually end up):

http://tinyurl.com/ce4j5e9

If you have other evidence that they have manipulated data of some kind then I would be very interested to see it. My experience was that all of the tremor data was immediately released to the BGS, where it has been available for study by the UK academic community. At the same time, they were very fast to take responsibility for the tremors, and to take actions to reduce the probability of them happening again.

It is interesting that much of the opposition to shale gas is not based on the methods unique to shale gas production (the high-volume hydraulic fracturing), but often talks mainly about methods common to all oil extraction - as above, where the topics are well logging, geophysical surveys, and more generally with issues about well completion integrity. It must come as a surprise to learn that the UK produces something like 10,000 barrels a day from onshore wells. Wytch Farm is the largest onshore field in the EU, and it sits below an area of significant environmental importance (Poole Harbour) and some of the highest house prices in the land. Rarely (if ever) do we see any problems from such onshore fields, yet those opposed to shale gas appear sometimes to have greater issue with the techniques used at all these fields than the specific techniques needed for shale gas. This is why I feel that the environmental movement is missing something with respect to the way it has approached the issues surrounding shale gas.

Which garnered the following response from 'ragamala':

I am amazed that Dr Verdon can at the same time claim that the Wytch Farm is exploitation of an "onshore" field and admit that it is actually an offshore resource. This ignorance and spin characterised a recent House of Commons statement by a minister - Hayes - who expected us to be "surprised" but has some lessons to learn himself. It is even worse when Verdon himself knows that the three main fields exploited by the Wytch Farm are actually offshore under Poole Harbour and Poole Bay. The field consists of three separate reservoirs known as Bridport, Sherwood and Frome. Dr Verdon will also, no doubt, be very aware that there have been problems with Wytch Farm involving cessation of activities because of leaks and pipe corrosion. Dr Verdon should be aware that as far as I know Europe's largest onshore oilfield is actually in Albania. 

The issues with shale gas extraction are not restricted to "CO2 footprint" but involve unavoidable and unquantified by the industry releases of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas in the short and medium term. Regarding Cuadrilla's abuse of their planning permission this did not cover just a breach of their conditions regarding protection of an important natural resource, but by a second and separate breach exceeded their time limits. To suggest this was caused by "issues with a bird migratory route" is not only wrong but laughable. 

Regarding Cuadrilla's geo survey they in some instances indeed failed to inform residents, they caused significant concern and some damage, and if Dr Verdon wishes to query this he can take it up with Fylde MP Mark Menzies, who felt the need to intervene. Regarding data manipulation, I would rather say that Cuadrilla have rather been totally misleading. They have, in particular, issued figures for local economic benefit to the Fylde of their geo survey which have been shown to be totally deceptive. Sorry, Dr Verdon, we expect more from someone who claims to be a scientist relying on facts, and moreover educates our young. If this pro-fracking propaganda, blissfully ignoring facts, is an example of what they are taught in Bristol I really fear for the future. 

But if, at the end of the day, as Dr Verdon suggests the industry itself is not confident of shale gas's potential, why on earth should he expect local communities to abandon the precautionary principle? 

Again, I couldn't resist sticking my oar in with:

Dear ragamala,From a technical point of view, Wytch Farm is considered to be an onshore field because all of the drilling is conducted from the land - there is no offshore rig. Yes, parts of the field are below the sea, and parts below the land, but is this really basis enough for your scorn? Since you seem to be in the mood for cheap point scoring, I should mention that I described Wytch Farm as the largest in the EU, which Albania is not. It is true that production was stopped for about 2 months in 2011 as corrosion issues were dealt with. Production is now continuing, no oil leaked from the site. Is this example of a company identifying a problem and promptly acting on it really sufficient reason for a blanket ban on shale gas?  

You mention 'unavoidable and unquantified' methane emissions, having already criticised me for being unaware of recent EU Commission reports. Yet this EU report in fact does quantify methane leakage rates, factors them into the calculations regarding global warming, and finds that domestic shale gas still comes out with less of an impact than imported LNG. When referring to CO2 I was of course referring to CO2 equivalent, apologies for any confusion there. 

Cuadrilla's planning permission issue was in fact entirely related to issues of migrating birds. This has been widely reported by the national press. Laughable perhaps, but apparently true: 

http://tinyurl.com/cq4j6rr

If Cuadrilla were less than diligent in informing local residents about their survey then that is indeed unfortunate. Your comments on data manipulation could easily be read as an accusation of manipulation of geological data rather than an over-egging of possible local economic benefits, which would be a far more serious accusation. But these surveys are a common procedure for many geological applications. Indeed our undergraduates are lucky enough to perform one across the Bristol Downs and in South Wales every year (albeit on a far smaller scale of course). You can see from my previous link the sheer number that have been conducted across the UK. The technique is exactly the same for each. Why is it that it is only the one related to shale gas that has attracted problems? 

I'm not sure I suggested that industry itself is not confident of success. The industry is, I believe, extremely confident, as are the British Geological Survey, about the amounts of shale gas that might be extracted both in the UK and around the world.

I'm not sure how I feel about this really. I know that I'm never going to change ragamala's mind, but I think it's important that anyone else reading this knows that there are two sides to every argument (one of which has a lot more facts available to it, while one is much more emotive). I hope I haven't appeared too reactionary. If there's anyone out there in the mood for commenting (unlikely I know) I'd love to know how this discussion comes across. Do I seem like an impartial professional making sensible, considered points, or do I appear to be a raging drill-baby-drill crazy-person in hock to Exxon? Equally, do ragamala's points seem like someone engaging in sensible debate or the rantings of an eco-loon? The comment ratings have me on +1 and +1, while ragamala is on -1 and -2, but I'd love some more detailed feedback. You are welcome to hide behind online anonymity and be as mean as you like......

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 shorter letter to the Somerset Standard

It would appear that I'm a rather long winded waffler! If you read my blog regularly then I'm sure you already knew this, but the Somerset Standard asked me to shorten my piece so that it could fit into their paper, so here it is in it's abridged form:


Dear Editor,


I am writing to express my concern at the actions of Frome Council in declaring a "frack-free" zone, which appears to be based on biased propaganda rather than any consideration of the facts that relate to the debate surrounding shale gas extraction and hydraulic fracturing.

Shale gas extraction should not be described as a form of "extreme energy", using "a lot of energy in order to get just a bit more energy back". In fact, fracking a well takes only a few hours. A recent life-cycle emissions analysis by the European Commission has indicated locally-produced shale gas has no worse a climate change impact than LNG imported the Middle East (with the additional emissions associated with transport), not to mention the economic and geo-political impacts of producing our own gas, rather than buying from foreign regimes with dubious human-rights records.

The biggest objection raised against fracking is the issue of groundwater contamination, usually spurred by the dramatic images of flaming taps available on Youtube, where water loaded with methane can be set on fire. However, these videos usually fail to mention that methane contamination is in fact a common and natural occurrence in many parts of the US, and was so long before shale gas extraction came into the picture.

In fact, the US Environmental Protection Agency has documented only two proven incidences where shale gas extraction has caused water contamination: at Dimock, Pennsylvania, and Pavillion, Wyoming. At Dimock, the faulty well was identified, remedied, and contamination levels have now returned below acceptable minima. At Pavillion, the cause of the contamination is still uncertain, as different US agencies have attributed different causes, so investigations are still ongoing. The US Groundwater Protection Council has examined water contamination incidence rates due to onshore oil and gas wells, finding an incident rate less than 0.01%.

The council's view is, apparently, that "the American experience points towards relatively small gains in energy at huge long and short term environmental cost". In fact, the experience in the USA has provided significant gains on both the local and national level.

On the local scale, once moribund rural areas are booming: the influx of workers has seen hotels fully booked for months in advance, restaurants and bars full every evening, and every other service industry experiencing a similar boost. On a national scale, gas prices have tumbled by as much of 75%, providing benefits not just for the average domestic heating bill, but also for the many industries that use natural gas as a feedstock. Meanwhile cheap gas prices have lead power companies to switch from coal fired to gas fired power stations, resulting in a reduction in CO2 emissions to their lowest levels in 20 years.

It is commonly implied that oil and gas companies are devious, unreliable, and bad neighbours to have. However, in this case, companies proposing hydraulic fracturing have been remarkably open: all of the pertinent data from tests conducted by Cuadrilla in Blackpool are available on the Department for Energy and Climate Change website, as is the fracking fluid composition (of which, 99% is H2O). In contrast, the opposition to shale gas has based its arguments on falsehoods, manipulated data and scary Youtube videos. There is a need for a rational, evidence-driven debate about shale gas extraction in the South-West. However, by polarising the debate in this manner, environmentalists are preventing this from happening.
 
Yours Sincerely, etc etc etc

I think maybe it looses something in going from 1000 to 500 words, but never mind....

A letter to Frome Council (and the Somerset Standard)

My thoughts as sent to the council of Frome, who have declared themselves a frack-free zone (and to the editors of the Somerset Standard as well.....)


Dear Editor/Council-members,

I am writing to express my concern at the actions of Frome Council in declaring a "frack-free" zone. My concern lies primarily in the manner that the decision has been made, rather than the decision itself, which, as the council acknowledges, is largely symbolic.

The basis for the council's decision, as set out in the agenda available on the council website, appears to be based on biased propaganda rather than any consideration of the facts that relate to the debate surrounding shale gas extraction and hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking").

Shale gas extraction is indeed an unconventional resource. However, it can in no way be described as a form of "extreme energy", using "a lot of energy in order to get just a bit more energy back". In fact, to frack a well requires a few hours of pumping at high pressure, creating a well that may produce natural gas for years.

With respect to the energy needed for fracking, a recent life-cycle emissions analysis by the European Commission has in fact shown that in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, locally-produced shale gas has no worse a climate change impact than LNG imported from Russia or the Middle East (with the additional emissions associated with transport), not to mention the economic and geo-political impacts of producing our own gas, rather than handing money to regimes with dubious human-rights records.

The biggest objection raised against shale gas is the issue of groundwater contamination, usually spurred by the dramatic images of flaming faucets easily available on Youtube, where water loaded with methane can be set on fire. However, these videos usually fail to mention that methane contamination is in fact a common and natural occurrence in many parts of the US, and was so long before shale gas extraction came into the picture.

In fact, the US Environmental Protection Agency has documented only two proven incidences where shale gas extraction has caused water contamination: at Dimock, Pennsylvania, and Pavillion, Wyoming. At Dimock, the faulty well was identified, remedied, and contamination levels have now returned below acceptable minima. At Pavillion, the cause of the contamination is still uncertain, as different US agencies have attributed different causes, so investigations are still ongoing.

To put this in context, something like 40,000 shale gas wells have been drilled in the US, meaning that the rate of well-related incidences is something like 0.005%. Similarly, the US Groundwater Protection Council has examined water contamination incidence rates due to onshore oil and gas wells (in this case all wells, rather than solely shale gas), finding an incident rate less than 0.01%. Of course, the far tighter oil and gas regulations that we already have in the UK (in comparison to the US) would likely lead to an even lower incident rate.

The council's view is, apparently, that "the American experience points towards relatively small gains in energy at huge long and short term environmental cost". In fact, the experience in the USA has provided significant gains on both the local and national level.

On the local scale, once moribund rural areas are booming: shale gas extraction has created jobs both for specialists and for the more general labour market, while the influx of workers has seen hotels fully booked for months in advance, restaurants and bars full every evening, and every other service industry experiencing a similar boost. On a national scale, gas prices have tumbled by as much of 75%, providing benefits not just for the average domestic heating bill, but also for the many industries that use natural gas as a feedstock, significantly reducing their costs and therefore increasing their competitiveness.

With respect to the environment, the cheap gas price has lead power companies to switch from coal fired to gas fired power stations, leading to a reduction in CO2 emissions to their lowest levels in 20 years. When considered in a global context, it is worth bearing in mind that China is currently considering shale gas extraction. Given that China emits more CO2 than any other nation, the possibility that they might replace many of their thousands of dirty coal fired power plants with cleaner natural gas ones, represents the easiest and fastest way that global anthropogenic CO2 emissions could be reduced.

It is commonly implied that oil and gas companies are devious, unreliable, and bad neighbours to have (and given past events, this isn't an unreasonable view to hold). However, in this case, companies proposing hydraulic fracturing have in fact been remarkably open and transparent: All of the pertinent data from fracking tests conducted by Cuadrilla in Blackpool are available on the DECC (Department for Energy and Climate Change) website, as is the composition of the fracking fluids used (of which, 99% is H2O). In contrast, the opposition to shale gas has based its arguments on falsehoods, manipulated data and scary Youtube videos. There is a need for a rational, evidence-driven debate about shale gas extraction in the South-West. However, by polarising the debate in this manner, environmentalists are preventing this from happening.

As the council acknowledges, there may well be no shale gas under Frome. Even if there were, it's likely to be years before any operator considers any plans to extract it. As such, the decision by the council is largely a symbolic one. Does the council not have better uses for its time, and its rate-payer's money, than this misguided publicity stunt based on a highly biased representation of the facts surrounding shale gas extraction?

Yours Sincerely etc etc etc,