Dimock-Proud

Have you heard that fracking causes earthquakes and water contamination? If you're reading this blog, then chances are you have. Have you heard of Dimock? Possibly not, although you may have without realising it. Dimock is sometimes referred to as ground-zero of the fracking debate. Sometimes it's portrayed as being some kind of fracking-induced Chernobyl, a once verdant wasteland destroyed by man's folly: (a not-great example here: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-07/news/30600497_1_driller-epa-dimock-township but just google 'Dimock fracking' and see what comes up).

Inevitably, in such a media climate, this group have slipped under the radar: http://dimockproud.com/

If you're interested in fracking, and the true story of what's happening at Dimock, then their site is well worth reading. I wish they'd been picked up on more by the media. In short, they represent most of the rest of Dimock (apart from the 11 families suing the oil company) who resent seeing their town described as some sort of environmental wasteland when in fact they've seen little disruption caused by the fracking, and little evidence of any contamination.

They go on to accuse the 11 'Dimock families' of some pretty shady practices. For example:

Methane is a natural occurrence. Methane has been present in the water of Susquehanna County for hundreds of years. We have many lifelong rsesidents who are willing, and able, to attest to that. As a matter of fact, one of those lifelong residents actually grew up with one of the 11 litigants. He tells of the childhood escapades he and his litigant friend shared in. The two of them would go into the woods (as young children) to hide out and smoke. They would go down by the creek and light the creek water on fire. Mind you, this was over 50 years ago. Why doesn’t the litigant remember this? Who in the world would have thought to put a cigarette lighter next to their water faucet and light their water? In my opinion, only one who had prior knowledge that it was even possible.

Also, that

The litigants are collecting gas royalties. Enough said.

 And finally,

Their initial claim was that their water had been contaminated due to methane migration from natural gas wells drilled near their properties.

That claim has now blossomed into claims of contaminants in their water including, but not limited to, ethylbenzene, xylene, ethylene glycol (antifreeze) and propylene glycol (a naturally occurring by-product in the fermentation of some commercially packaged beers. Propylene glycol is rapidly degraded in all environmental media. These chemicals are not used in the hydro-fracturing process and, interestingly enough, these chemicals were not detected in 2008 pre-drill samples taken at more than a dozen water supplies along Carter Road. There was a toluene contaminant found this spring and summer by Scranton-based Farnham and Associates Inc. which was at levels 1,000 times higher than the toluene levels detected in two wells in 2008. The firm’s president, Daniel Farnham, said. “I’m not here to argue with the gas company,” he said. “My objective is just to illustrate that something’s going on here and it needs to be investigated.”

 Yes, I should say there needs to be an investigation. Chemicals miraculously appearing in water wells 3 years after drilling has stopped sounds suspicious to me.

For obvious reasons, I can't possibly comment on the truth of these claims. However, the thing I find most interesting is that the attention and coverage garnered by Josh Fox, Mark Ruffalo et al., swooping in for a quick publicity shot, completely dwarfs any mention of groups of local people like this.

Next time: I'm probably going to talk about CCS - according to Channel 4 news tonight it looks like things could be moving forward again in this respect. Stay tuned......

More negative public perception for shale gas

<inserts tongue int cheek>Hate to say I told you so, but even Dilbert associates fracking with earthquakes and water pollution: www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-03-02/ </removes tongue from cheek>. I must admit, during my teenage years I was a bit of a Dilbert fan (my brother had all of the books, which I used to borrow).

While I appreciate that a Dilbert cartoon is hardly something to get worked up about, a worrying trend is developing (as noted in my previous post about the UoT study) where shale gas becomes connected in the public sphere with earthquakes and pollution, and little else of benefit, with obvious consequences for the future development of this potentially valuable resource. This despite only one properly documented and evinced (albeit still hotly disputed) example of water contamination (Pavilion, Wy), and one incidence of the generation of a small earthquake (Blackpool, UK) amid the now millions of hydrofractured wells.

I'll stop here for an aside, which made me doubly chuckle when I saw the Dilbert cartoon. During my teenage years I was also a bit of a Clive Cussler fan (again, my brother had the books, I borrowed, etc etc etc......). One book, 'The Treasure of Khan' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_of_Khan) featured a Mongolia oil mogul as the baddie, who'd got his hands on a machine capable of creating earthquakes. If memory serves, apparently it worked in a manner not unlike fracking. Obviously, in this work of FICTION, Dirk Pitt battles through heroically to save the day. In reality, of all the fracking in the US and UK, only two fracks (at Cuadrilla's Blackpool site) have ever produced felt quakes. But it's good to see that Mr Cussler was well ahead of the curve on this one.......

Aside over - how big were the earthquakes produced at Blackpool? While I've not seen any raw data myself, I'll warrant that they wouldn't have been as significant as those produced by Rihanna et al during concerts in Hyde Park. I look forward to seeing all those anti-fracking activists spending as much time trying to get Rihanna banned from these shores as well (and if you want to talk about local contamination, I've seen the aftermath of the Reading festival, and it ain't pretty!).

Net benefits of a rock concert in Hyde Park: some people get to pay lots of money to an already wealthy artist to have a good time for a few hours. Net benefits of shale gas development in the UK - the potential for hundreds of new jobs created directly, billions for the exchequer to help pay off our deficit, economic stimulation provided by cheaper gas prices providing a stimulus to our manufacturing industries, and facilitating a switch from coal-fired to gas-fired power stations, reducing CO2 emissions. Yet if I tried to get Rihanna banned I'd be (rightly) considered a weirdo, and a massive kill-joy, but pushing for an outright ban on shale gas some people would consider me a hero.

Still, I do love a bit of Dilbert ;-)

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.

Post-script to my last post...

A small postscript to my last post, but interesting enough to be worth it's own post. I was chatting to someone familiar with the regulatory environments in the US the other day, and he raised an interesting point. US legislation is such that, once a drilling lease has been purchased (often at great expense), the operators must drill within 3 years or the lease is returned and made available for sale. What's happened in the US is that many companies have seen the potential of shale gas and bought up huge acreages. However, now they have to put wells in each leasehold to avoid forfeiting the lease. This is putting pressure on them to drill vast numbers of wells in double-quick time, which in turn has an inevitable impact on the quality of the wells, and subsequently for environmental contamination.

This is a classic example of bad legislation leading to an unfavourable results all round: the companies don't want to be drilling as fast as they are, as the resulting gas glut on the market is driving down prices and eating away their profits, while anyone interested in the environment would want companies to be putting proper care and effort into every well, rather than being forced by regulations to drill as fast as they can.

Luckily, as far as I'm aware the UK has a much more sensible regulatory environment in comparison to the US, so this sort of scenario can be avoided.

Fracking report from the University of Texas

An interesting report coming from the University of Texas on the environmental impacts of shale gas development:

Link

The full report is over 400 pages long, so I'm not going to claim I've read it cover-to-cover. In fact, I've only read the summary (which is still 50 pages long). However, based on what I've seen of it so far, and what the twitter-sphere is saying, there are a couple of points that I feel like talking about.

The principal conclusions are that there have been water contamination issues related to shale gas. However, there has been no evidence whatsoever that these issues have been caused by the hydraulic fracturing process in itself. We can track the formation of fractures and the migration of fluid during fracking (see the video I posted here), and on no occasion has there been evidence that fractures have migrated out of zone to impact on freshwater aquifers sited 1000s of feet above the fracturing zone, nor intersection with pre-existing natural faults/fractures that would permit upward fluid migration. Crucially, there has been no evidence of fracturing fluid additives being found in drinking water aquifers. If fluid has been migrating from fractures into freshwater aquifers, I'd expect to see fairly distinctive evidence of the chemical additives used in fracturing, and we haven't.

That's not to say that there haven't been problems, however. Once the well has been fracked, some of the fracturing fluid flows back up the well to the surface. This flow-back water must be collected and disposed of accordingly (either at treatment plants, reinjected into deep lying saline formations, or recycled for use in future frack stimulations. This is little different to many conventional oil and gas gas fields, where the produced hydrocarbon comes up the well mixed with a certain percentage of water. This water is usually saline, and may contain certain undesirable elements, such as arsenic or barium, and so must be disposed of appropriately. This is nothing new for the oil and gas industry.

Furthermore, once the flow-back fluid has been produced, the gas begins to flow. If the steel casing that lines the well is not cemented in properly, there may be gaps through which gas can flow up the side of the well, and then into overlying formations. Equally, if the casing is damaged, any holes with allow gas to flow out and into overlying formations. Again, this is a common problem in the oil and gas industry (as far as I'm aware, the Deepwater Horizon explosion was caused by so-called annular flow up a poorly cemented well).

It is in dealing with casing and cement to prevent blow-outs, casing damage and annular flow, and in treating and disposing of flow-back fluid properly, that the shale gas industry appears to have fallen short. It doesn't surprise me to hear that in some cases flowback water left in pits on the surface may have begun to leak, causing water contamination problems.

So the overlying moral to this story is that there's nothing inherently bad with hydraulic fracturing as a process. There are the usual issues common to all oil and gas extraction. We know how to deal with them, but to do so costs time and money. The key is that we put appropriate regulations in place that force operators to spend the time and the money. The underlying cause, I suspect, is that many of the shale gas developers are relatively new on the scene, and may not have the expertise of a BP, Shell, or Schlumberger, nor the man-power and finances to avoid the temptation to cut a corner or two. With the right regulation in this country, (and we have a good track record for this post Piper-Alpha), we can ensure that shale gas development in the UK does not experience the same problems we've seen
in the US.

Exisiting regulations sufficient for shale gas, claims EU

An EU Commission report into shale gas and hydraulic fracturing has concluded that current regulations are sufficient to protect ground-water from contamination during fracking:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/30/fracking-regulation-ec-report

Which is good news for fracking, I suppose. Now, I must admit right from the start that I'm a scientist, not a policy-maker, and my understanding of the nitty-gritty of pollution regulations isn't what it probably should be. I'm sure that, for good reasons, when you get down into it there'll be some pretty complex law-making going on. However, let me tell you why this report seems like good, albeit rather obvious news to me. And it has nothing to do with shale gas and fracking.

Presumably, regulations should already be in place that state pretty clearly - if you do anything to cause pollution and contamination of ground-water (which can eventually end up in rivers, lakes, the sea, sensitive wetlands, and our drinking water), whether it's hydraulic fracturing or whatever other engineering process, I want you to be punished severely for it!

If, tomorrow, I invent some new process (let's call it 'bogswaddling', for want of a better name) then from the moment I first invent it, it should be covered by pre-existing legislation which says 'DO NOT POLLUTE GROUNDWATER SUPPLIES', no matter what you're up to. I don't want to wait for the EU to come up with some new laws specially for the bogswaddling. Creating new laws specifically for bogswaddling would probably provide the perfect opportunity for lobbyists on behalf of the bogswaddling industry to come in, do some lobbying and get some sort of exceptions or loop-holes. Why not just have laws that say 'NO POLLUTING OR MASSIVE FINES', doesn't matter whether you're fracking, bogswaddling or anything else.

So I'm glad that it appears that we already have legislation in place to ensure that Cuadrilla et al. won't be allowed to create pollution. I'm surprised that it would be an issue in the first place.

Now I'll sit back and wait for someone with a better understanding of the legislative side of things to explain to me why I'm wrong.....

Academic Genealogy

After reading this AGU blog on academic genealogy, I couldn't resist weighing in with some genealogy of my own. You academic genealogy works something like a family tree, but rather than father-son relationships, it's all about who supervised who during the course of their PhDs.

So - my academic genealogy:

Firstly, a quick mention to Glenn Jones - my academic brother, now studying ice-quakes at Swansea University. We shared many a great time (and some not so great times) being supervised by Bristol big-wig Prof. Mike Kendall:

Mike, a Canadian, did his PhD at Queens University, Canada, under the supervision of Colin Thompson (now at Queens), a specialist in the nitty-gritty of modelling seismic waves. In turn, Colin did his PhD back in the UK, in my own alma mater of Cambridge, supervised by Dave Gubbins, now at Leeds:

It gets very Cambridge-centric from here on in: Gubbins also completed his PhD at Cambridge, under the supervision of one of the BIG names in geophysics, Edward Bullard:

Bullard was one of the key names during the discovery of plate tectonics. Pretty neat huh! He in turn was supervised by Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett. Blackett spent a fair bit of time with Ernest Rutherford, who first split the atom, and is considered one of the fathers of radioactivity, and won a Nobel prize for Chemistry:

 

Rutherford worked under JJ Thompson, he who discovered the electron! Thompson worked under John Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, who among many other things, gives his name to Rayleigh waves (a type of seismic wave that travels along the surface of the earth (rather than through it, like P and S waves).

I'm going to speed up a bit, because there's a few names I don't really know. I've found this information from the Mathematics Genealogy website, well worth a browse if you're an academic. Rayleigh was advised by Edward Routh, and, following the biblical style (only getting older rather than younger) Routh begat William Hopkins, who begat Adam Sedgwick. We'll pause for a moment on Sedgwick:

 

Considered to be one of the founding fathers of the modern science of geology, Sedgwick was, among others, the tutor of Charles Darwin. The student geology society at Cambridge is named after him, as is the Cambridge Natural History museum. Onwards with our genealogy, Sedgwick begat Thomas Jones, who begat Thomas Postlethwaite, who begat Stephen Whisson, who begat Walter Taylor, who begat Robert Smith, who begat Roger Cotes. And Cotes was supervised by none other than Isaac Newton himself:

So Isaac Newton is my academic great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. That's 17 greats. So, academic great^17 - grandfather. HOW COOL! I think that blows our AGU blogger friend out of the water!

It's interesting to note the progression - we move pretty quickly from geophysics into proper, hardcore physics. There's a brief outpost of geology in Adam Sedwick, and then back to the grandfather of all modern physics, Isaac Newton. I guess that pretty much describes in a nutshell the history of geophysics as a science. It's also interesting to note how quickly everything becomes very Cambridge-centric.

While it's tempting to be proud of such an illustrious academic lineage, it's actually rather depressing. While my forbears were: inventing calculus and discovering the principles of gravitation (Newton, amongst many other things obviously); cataloging and defining the geological time periods we still use today (Sedgwick); discovering electro-magnetic scattering and a type of seismic wave (Rayleigh); discovering the electron and inventing the mass spectrometer (JJ Thompson); splitting the atom (Rutherford); discovering plate tectonics (Bullard); or just being a very cool, laid-back Canadian who looks a lot like Bruce Willis (Kendall); the sum total of my career so far is to piddle about with some aspects of hydraulic fracturing in the hope of making some incremental improvements to how we monitor and model fracks. It seems so small and parochial compared with the fabulous achievements of my forbears (and, while I'm at it, the kind of discoveries we're seeing coming out of places like CERN).

However, from my stats page it seems like someone out there at least has been reading my blog. Either it's my mother (hello mum, I promise to call again soon) or people are interested in fracking, and want to be sure that if fracking goes ahead, we're capable of monitoring it to ensure it is done safely and with minimum risk. So I guess I won't throw in the towel just yet.

Shale gas and BGS blogs....

A quick post before the weekend. The BGS (British Geological Survey) are getting into shale gas, which is definitely a good thing - the more scientists around the better. However, this blog post by the Executive Director has me all wound up (probably more than it's worth):

http://britgeosurvey.blogspot.com/2011/12/british-geological-survey-shale-gas.html

Specifically, the line 'the gas is tightly bound to silt and sand grains and needs to be pushed out by injection in a process that is called fracking' has got me annoyed, because it appears that the BGS Executive Director doesn't know what fracking is.

Firstly, the gas is not tightly bound to the silt - that implies some sort of chemical bonding between the gas and the shale. While this might happen to some extent, the majority of the gas exists as a free phase within the pores of the shale. Despite a low permeability, shale can easily have a porosity of 10%. This means that the gas is there as a free phase, trapped in the spaces in the rock, but the low permeability stops it going anywhere.

This is where fracking comes in - by creating fractures in the rock, the gas can escape from its shale cage and flow down the fractures to the well, where it is produced. Yes, fracking requires injection, because the fractures are created by pumping in water at high pressure until the tensile strength of the rock is exceeded. However, this all takes place over an hour or so. After that, with the fractures created the gas flows out naturally along the fractures due to the pressure differential between the formation and the well (just like conventional gas and oil), and continues to do so for several years without further stimulation or fracking. The gas does not need to be 'pushed out by injection'.

The BGS blog implies that continuous injection and activity is needed to squeeze the gas out from the rock. This sort of impression will make shale gas seem far less attractive to the general public - continuous activity and injection for years of production, and some sort of weird chemical interaction. Rather than what actually happens: frack once (taking maybe a week or so to complete all the stages in a horizontal well), then leave the well to produce naturally for years.

However, in their defense, the web resource which the blog was advertising - the BGS's new shale gas web page, does look like a useful store of shale gas information.

H-Factors and Citation Metrics

Interesting article in the Guardian this week about h-indexes, and citation metrics in general. Not a fracking related post, but citation metrics are never far from the mind of any ambitious academic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/06/bad-science-h-index

Citation metrics are how academics, such as myself, are judged. There are a number of different systems, all of them broadly based on the number of citations you receive. So before I go any further I guess I should explain what a citation is:

Science never operates in a vacuum, we are always utilising, building on, confirming (or disproving) pre-existing theories. So when scientists write academic papers to be published in academic journals, they cite the work of previous scientists on whose work has relevance to the new paper. For instance, to quote from a paper I am writing at the moment: The magnitude of the fracture compliance is usually scaled to the number density and length of the fractures (e.g., Hudson, 1981). At the end of the paper there will be a full list of all the papers cited, giving the journal, volume, page number, etc of each cited paper.

If a paper is good, interesting, exciting, provides a good method that other scientists will use, then it will tend to attract a lot of citations. So in short, the more citations you have, the better scientist you are. Good papers get cited, crap ones get ignored. This is the way the scientific community as a whole pass judgement on the work of each scientist as an individual.

Obviously, this doesn't always go quite to plan - for example a paper may attract a lot of citations for being wrong, so people will cite it as an example of what not to do. You also tend to get so-called 'copycat' citations - lets say a big name author cites a particular paper. Now this paper may not be all that great, the big name author only cited it because he/she was in a bit of a rush and it kind of fitted the bill for something he/she was saying. However, when everyone reads the big name author's paper they see this citation and begin citing it as well, creating a lot of citations for a paper that wasn't actually all that worthy.

Nevertheless, despite these issues, I don't think I've seen a better way of objectively assessing a paper's quality than by counting the number of times it's cited.

The crudest citation metric is simply to count the number of citations you have for all your papers, or the average number of citations per paper. However, a more sophisticated method is the h-index. Your h-index is the number (h) of papers you have that have been cited at least h times. So, in my case, I have 14 publications at present (listed here. By listing them in order of the number of times they have been cited, we can compute my h-index.

Paper Number	Year	Number of Citations
1	2008	16
2	2009	9
3	2010	6
4	2010	5
5	2007	4
6	2009	4
7	2010	4
8	2011	2
9	2011	2
10	2011	2
11	2011	1
12	2011	0
13	2011	0
14	2011	0

So I have at least 4 papers that have been cited more than 4 times, meaning that my h-index is 4. I do not have 5 papers that have been cited 5 times. Once one of papers 5,6 or 7 get cited one more time, I'll have an h-index of 5 (yay!). My h-index is pretty low, for two reasons - firstly I'm a very young scientist, so most of my papers have only been published in the last couple of years - there hasn't been time for other scientists to read them, use them and then cite them (you'll notice that my most cited papers are pretty much the oldest ones). Secondly, I work in applied geophysics, which historically has a pretty poor citation rate. This is because a paper can have a big impact, and lots of people from BP, Shell, Exxon etc will use it to get oil and gas out of the ground. However, these people don't write papers saying how useful your paper was in helping them do this, they just laugh all the way to the bank. They might thank you in person at a conference, they might even sponsor your research, but they won't write a paper and cite you, meaning that a really significant applied geophysics paper my not be particularly well cited.

This variance between disciplines is often given as one of the major problems with citation metrics, but it doesn't bother me so much, as I'm unlikely to be competing with a biologist (who tend to cite each other a lot, so have much higher h-indexes) for a job any time soon. However, it is true that your h-index can be important when a potential employer is sifting through 50 applicants for one position. While a good h-index alone won't be enough to get you a job, a poor h-index can be enough to see you rejected.

I'll bring this rather rambling post to a close now. Some scientists really loathe citation metrics (have a look the comments section in the Guardian article). Personally, I don't really have a strong view. I can see the validity of the points made against it - there will certainly be individual cases where the h-index does a very poor job of representing ability. However, I think we must accept that there are now too many academics in the world for us all to be assessed as individuals - it would simply take too much time, and be too subjective. So as a general rule, I guess a citation metric provides a decent overview, although we must always be prepared to consider individual cases on their merits in certain situations.

P.S. This issue of subjectivity has inspired me to write a little more. Before citation metrics, the ability to negotiate the (often extremely petty, underhand and subjective) world of academic politics in order to ensure you got a shot at the best jobs and funding opportunities (i.e., that person gave my paper a bad review or slagged it off in their paper, so I'm going to slag off their funding application). While citation metrics aren't perfect, they do at least help guard against this sort of thing.....

Perspective

In writing my last post, I began thinking about how important perspective can be in our view of a given topic. Some instances:

• if you came from a planet that had never burned fossil fuels (or from our planet but 300 years ago) you'd probably find the whole notion of burning fossil fuels on the scale we do to be abhorrent, what with the pollution, oil spills, global warming etc. However, we are accustomed to it, so it doesn't bother (most of) us.
• If you're used to your hydrocarbons coming nice and easily from a Saudi field (where the method of extraction is pretty much stick a hole in the ground, let the light, sweet crude oil flow up with hardly any effort at all) then things like shale gas, hydrofracking and tar sands seem crazy.
• However, if someone is considering burning coal from underneath your feet (UCG, see my previous post), suddenly shale gas doesn't seem so bad after all.

During my PhD I worked on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). In this process, CO2 is captured from coal power plants and pumped to appropriate sedimentary basins where it is injected into deep lying saline aquifers, preventing CO2 emissions which cause global warming. Some people think this is a crazy idea - why don't we just not burn the coal in the first place, and use renewable energy instead? Here's Greenpeace on the matter.

However, a sense of perspective can be achieved by considering the work of some colleagues of mine who are working on a project called 'SPICE' - Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering. We are currently looking at the possibility of constructing a huge pipeline into the stratosphere, through which we can pump sulphate particles that will help absorb the sun's rays and reduce global warming to manageable levels. When you consider that plan B is a 25km space-pipe injecting sulphate into the stratosphere, wouldn't it be a better idea to start burying CO2 emitted from power plants now, rather than hoping that we will switch to renewable energy at some unspecified point in the future. Perspective people......