Shale gas in the movies (Pt III)

This week, shale gas has hit the movies once again. I really need to get on with hiring my own director. Josh Fox, of Gasland fame, has released another short anti-shale-gas film. It's embedded here for your enjoyment:




As usual, a little balance is needed, so we'll swing to the opposite side of the political compass with a comment by EID.

The thing that struck me immediately watching this short was the apparent lack of any kind of geologist or drilling expert. The film shows papers from the standard literature that we work with everyday, but apparently he couldn't get comments from anyone? I find that surprisingly lazy if anything, because given enough beer you can usually get a geologist to come up with some kind of contrarian opinion about something. So why couldn't Josh get any geologists on film?

The other really noticeable thing is that the line of attack has completely shifted from fracking to well completion activities. I can only assume that this is a tactical retreat, a tacit acceptance that the fractures created during fracking are demonstrably too small and too deep to have any kind of influence of shallow aquifers.

And if fracking is not the problem, then the only other source of leakage must be from the well bores. Josh is right that well bores can fail. But this is a problem that we know lots about, because it's a problem in conventional gas drilling as much as it is for shale gas. So the question changes, from are you ok with having fracking going on in your back yard (and fracking sounds scary, new, dangerous) to are you ok with any gas well (conventional or shale gas) in your back yard? Which generally elicits a quite different response, because conventional gas is something people have more faith in, simply because it's been around for ages without causing many problems. For instance, Western Europe's largest onshore oil and gas field, Wytch Farm, is sited under some of the most prized and expensive real estate in the country, and noone seems bothered by it.

The failure rates cherry picked from the literature seem absurd to me:

Casing failure and leakage rates at almost 50%? Seriously? I think if we had problems in conventional gas fields on this scale, we'd really know about it? We've drilled millions of gas wells across the planet - if 50% of them had failed, we'd have contamination everywhere, most of the time. The problem stems from cherry-picking - there are plenty of reports out there that show well failure rates at 0.01%. Because the debate over shale gas has become so polarised, these numbers don't get a look in here. But it'd have been nice for Josh to at least to have gotten some geological expertise onto film to help him go through the figures.

Finally, even if failure rates were below 1%, doesn't that still sound pretty risky? Well, if well failure was a done deal "that's it, nothing we can do now" type thing, then maybe. But well casing failure is easy to detect - before you being production you run a tool down the well that detects failure. If there is failure, you do a workover to correct the damaged section. All you need to have is regulation that requires companies to do this. It'll cost them more money, and so they'll probably have a moan, but that's the kind of thing we mean when we talk about having a strong regulatory regime for shale gas extraction in the UK. Sorry Mr Company person, get that cement log running before you even think about producing from that well!

James Lovelock on shale gas

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

Summary here and fuller transcript here

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

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

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

and:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance, I still regularly come across the claim:

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

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

Shale gas in the movies (Pt II)

Despite being behind the curve in not having a shale gas film of my own, it seems I've been strangely prescient in talking about shale gas in the movies yesterday. Mere hours after my post, another shale gas movie has been announced: Truthland. Right from the font and style used in the title, you can see that this is intended to be a direct rebuttal to Gasland. In similar fashion, a folksy, homespun Pennsylvania dairy farmer takes a journey around America, talking to experts, visiting drilling sites, to find out that shale gas drilling is in fact completely fine and ok. Given that the film was funded by Energy in Depth, which in turn draws its funding from gas companies, you'd kind of expect that, but anyway, here's the trailer:

Coming to a cinema near you.....

With naught but a humble weblog to my name, it appears that I'm well behind the curve when it comes to talking about fracking. This year, if you want to talk about fracking, you have to do a movie.

Even Matt Damon is getting involved, with 'The Promised Land', which is a fictional story about businessmen and drilling rights in Pennslyvania. I must be careful here to not mess with Matt Damon, who in general I agree with about most things. (Aside - quality NSFW video here). But I don't have much hope that that shale gas, fracking and the people involved in the business, will come out of this well. The 'plucky-little-guy-versus-big-nasty-corporation' storyline is just too good for Hollywood to pass up.

Truth be told, I think the 'little-guy-versus-nasty-coporation' meme is so powerful in our culture that we pretty much immediately distrust anything we here from any establishment body or corporation, with little assessment of the evidence. I'm not saying that's right or wrong - there's plenty of bad stuff that's happened to warrant such mistrust - but I do wonder whether this mistrust has always been there, and whether by consistently being 'good', corporations can ever be trusted again.

Anyway, as well as the Matt Damon film, we can also look forward to Gasland II, the sequel to the much discussed Gasland movie by Josh Fox. Gasland was shredded by a few organisations, let's see what happens with the sequel.

Finally, and most interestingly, there's Fracknation. Fracknation is a crowdsourced film, meaning that the money to make it was raised from many small, individual donations. A total of 3,300 people donated an average of $60 to fund the film. The purpose of fracknation was to rebut Gasland, and show the views of the majority of people in fracking areas who support the industry for the economic boost (much like Dimock Proud). Going back to the 'little-guy-v-nasty-corporation' meme, it's interesting that these are the little guys speaking (and putting money into a film). Clearly, it's a bit more complicated than that.

I'll leave you with another video (while I go start filming my movie......)

Shale Gas, Climate Change and Energy Bills

Many readers will remember my post outlining why shale gas is a good thing when it comes to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The reason I say many is that, according to my blogger stats page, this is by far my most popular post. So I thought I'd provide some more background to that previous post. Much of this information is lifter directly from John Hanger's excellent blog (I'd recommend it highly to anyone interested in US energy policy).

Looking at the latest numbers for US electricity generation, coal is at 37%, while gas is at 28%. This is the lowest share for coal in 35 years! Coal is down 21%, while gas is up 30%. Clearly, as you'd expect when the large quantities of shale gas being produced have pushed US gas hub prices below $2, power generation companies prefer to burn gas because it's cheap.

If you don't believe the EIA, why not look at figures from the Sierra Club, a noted environmental
organisation (no industry shills here). They keep a record of the amount of CO2 emissions that have
been avoided by coal plant closures and cancellations. Since 2000, the share of coal in US electricity
generation has dropped from 52% to 37%. 10% of that gap has been taken up by gas. And, unless you're Howarth or Ingraffea, burning gas produces significantly less CO2 than coal, so we can reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions. The Sierra Club estimate that the net CO2 abatement from this switch from coal to gas has prevented 225 million tons of CO2 per year. This is not small beer we're talking about here!

And what about the influence on renewable energy - surely low gas prices have scuppered investment in the renewable energy we ultimately need? Well, during this shale gas glut, from 2008 to present, wind energy production has doubled and solar power increased 8-fold. Renewable energy is dependent mainly on government subsidies and supportive policies, so as long as these remain available, renewables are relatively protected from the kind of market forces that have seen the switch from coal to gas. If renewables were exposed to market forces, they'd soon struggle regardless of whether gas is $2 or $6.

So what are we doing in the UK? Well, we've announced our new energy policy this week. I don't pretend to be an expert in these more complex legislative things, but the general consensus is that this bill is supportive of nuclear power and wind power. One good thing is that under the proposals it's difficult to see any new coal power being built without carbon capture and storage. However, it seems that the government has significantly underplayed the potential for shale gas in a future energy mix.

Perhaps the most notable example of this was the noises emerging after a weekend meeting between Downing Street and a selection of industry experts, which suggested that shale gas in the UK won't really amount to much. What's really interesting about this meeting is who was there, and more importantly, who wasn't. Who was there? Representatives from Shell and Centrica.

Shell have barely any shale gas interest, but plenty of large conventional gas fields in the Southern North Sea. High gas prices are good for them. Centrica (i.e. British Gas as was) sell us gas to heat our homes. High gas prices are good for them. Meanwhile neither Cuadrilla, Igas, Coastal or Dart Energy were involved. These are the 4 companies buying licenses and looking to drill for shale gas in the UK. Cuadrilla are the only company to have sunk a well into the Bowland shale, which will probably be the most productive UK shale deposit.

So, if you invite 'experts' from two companies with a vested interest in maintaining high gas prices, while ignoring the companies that are actually making assessments on the ground, it's hardly surprising that you'll end up with a rather negative view of the potential for shale gas in the UK. Cuardilla's latest estimates for shale gas are as much as 5.6 trillion cubic meters. Comparing the figures between the Bowland shale and the Barnett, which is the one of the largest producing shale bodies in the US reveals many similarities, which suggests that there may well be a lot more gas under Blackpool than the likes of Shell and Centrica would like. These figures seem extremely positive to me.

Parameter	Bowland	Barnett	Why important
Thickness	1000m	300m	The thicker the shale, the more there is
TOC (organic content)	1-5%	1-6%	High organic content means more gas can be created
Fractured carbonate bands	Yes	Yes	Pre-fractured bands help the gas to flow to the well-head economically
Vitrinite reflectance	1-1.6	1-1.4	Vitrinite tracks burial depth. The rocks must be buried and heated to turn organic matter into oil/gas

The Day Job.....

With the quality of writing on offer, many of you might helpfully suggest that I don't give up the day job. Don't worry, I don't intend to. Instead I thought my blog this week would be a good chance to give you a flavour of what my day job actually entails.

My motivation for doing so: I've just had a paper accepted (well almost, a few minor corrections to do) to Geophysical Prospecting, one of the major international applied geophysics journals. Link to the paper here, in its almost finished form (it'll be copy-edited and re-formatted by GeoProsp before they publish). It's also a good opportunity for me to practice explaining my research to a more general (although still highly intelligent, and rather good-looking, I've no doubt ;-) ) readership.

In this paper, I develop a method to improve our ability to image the fractures formed during hydraulic fracturing for shale gas. This is important for both the operators, who want to know as much about the fractures as possible to maximise production, and for regulators, who want to make sure the fractures create will not provide a pathway for fluid contamination. So how does my method work?

You'll remember in this post I talked about how geophysicists deploy geophones in boreholes to listen out for the popping and crackling of the rock as it fractures, and we use the recorded data to identify where the fractures are going. This is pretty standard, the bread-and-butter for many service companies who offer variants on this technology.

The new bit, where my colleagues at Bristol and I come in, is to realise that as the seismic waves travel from the source (the fracture) to the geophone, they will be travelling through previously fractured rock. Therefore, polarisations and arrival times of the recorded waves will be controlled by the properties of not only the rock, but also of the fractures. In particular, we measure splitting of shear waves. When the S-waves move through fractured rock, they become split into faster and slower waves with a 90 degree polarisation difference. We measure the fast wave polarisation, and the delay between fast and slow waves. These measurements can tell us about the properties of the fractures.

In particular, in this latest paper we show that the S-wave splitting measurements can tell us about the ratio of normal to tangential compliance of the fractures. In layman's terms, that is the ratio of how easy it is to squeeze the fractures versus how easy it is to slide the fractures. Lab experiments have seemed to show that the presence of proppant (the sand particles injected to 'prop' the fractures open) will increase the normal to tangential ratio, so if we can see changes through time, this can tell us where the proppant has gone, allowing us to predict where the greatest flow will come from during production (the better 'propped' a fracture is, the better it will flow).      

The key results picture is below:

This shows the frack-job through time. The bottom panel shows the fluid injection rate (blue), the proppant concentration (green) and the resulting microseismicity (black) through time. The frack-job is conducted with 4 phases - 3 initial injections to create fractures, and a final phase where proppant in introduced. The upper panels show the results of our S-wave splitting measurements. Of most note is the 2nd panel, for Zn/Zt - the normal to tangential compliance ratio. You can see it is low during the initial fracture stages, but after 13:00, when proppant is injected, it increases to values almost as high as 2.

Like all good scientists, we are cautious in our conclusions. We think that this increase is most likely showing the proppant entering fractures. However, further work is needed to verify our findings, and to see if this method can work on other frack-job datasets. However, the initial findings are promising. If this method takes off, it'll allow operators to gain a better understanding of the fractures they create during fracking operations.

Anyway, I hope you've stayed with me up until this point, dear reader. Any questions - do pop them in the comments below. Talking about one's actual research to a general audience can be quite tough, but I hope I've been able to convey what my day-job entails. I promise to talk about something more exciting next time.

5 minutes of fame in the local papers......

Those of you with longer memories will remember my 'disgusted from Tunbridge-Wells' style outburst about reports in the local papers (the Bath Chronicle and also the Wells Journal). I wrote to the papers, but after a brief acknowledgement, I heard no more from them, and assumed that my contribution had been assigned to the dustbin.

However, I was recently chatting to a friend who, apparently, must be an avid reader of the local papers, because it turns out that my letter did indeed make it into the Bath Chronicle and the Wells Journal. It seems I also went one better and made it into the Somerset Guardian. Heady times indeed. What's even more exciting is that people must have read my letter, because this person wrote a response to it, and this op-ed piece seems to 'borrow' a lot from it.

Steve Sparks, one of the world's leading volcanology experts (so famous he actually has a Wikipedia page), also wrote a similar letter, also published by the Bath Chronicle.

Anyway, it seems I had my 5 minutes of fame and yet was completely unaware at the time. Still, glad I had the chance to put my opinion out there.

My response to the Guardian letters page

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right, next letter:

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

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

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

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

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

Next!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shale Gas - Good or Bad for Global Warming?

Update (24/04/12): In case anyone wasn't sure about how widely the Howarth paper is now cited by those opposed to fracking, without any recognition of how controversial, and how widely criticised it has been from the scientific community, check out how often it gets a mention on the Guardian letters page (link).

As promised to those of you who follow my twitter feed (@TheFracDoctor) for those who weren't aware, a blog about the Cornell/Howarth paper, does shale gas emit cause more global warming than coal?

The reason we're talking about this is because of a study by Howarth and Ingraffea, from Cornell, examining the likely greenhouse-gas footprint from shale development. Link to paper here. We all know that burning gas produces about 1/2 as much CO2 as coal, so swapping coal for gas should be a good thing for global warming, right? However, during shale gas production, a proportion of the methane gas is vented from the well-head. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas (about 20x more so than CO2). So, Howarth et al came up with some numbers for methane emissions, and found that shale gas could contribute significantly more to global warming than, for example, using coal for electricity generation.

This paper is now regularly cited by anyone who doesn't like shale gas. Examples here (otherwise a sensible, well balanced article in my opinion), and here, it features prominently on the shale gas wikipedia entry (here) and if I wasn't so lazy (just got back from a long day in London cheering my better half round 26.2 miles of London's streets) I could find plenty more examples. But how accurate is the study?

The Howarth et al paper has received a tonne of criticism. You can find a summary of criticisms here. Indeed, even Howarth's peers at Cornell have come out in criticism of the paper (here and here). The criticisms can be divided into several parts:

1. Overestimates of fugitive emissions. Howarth et al use an estimate of fugitive emissions of ~7% - i.e. for every 100 MSCF of gas produced, 7 will be leaked to the air. This is a very high number (most estimates would go for 1-2%). Simply from a commercial point of view, it's difficult to imagine a company allowing 7% of it's saleable resource go drifting into the atmosphere. Reduce the fugitive emissions from 7% to 2% and you go a long way towards showing that total global warming from shale gas is significantly less than from coal.

2. 20 year vs 100 year forcing. When comparing the global warming effect from methane with respect to CO2, Howarth et al use the 20 year forcing value. Basically, methane is a much more potent global warming gas than CO2, but it has a much smaller residence time. so methane emitted soon oxidises. Therefore, while it is potent over the first 20 years or so, over 100 years methane is much less significant for global warming. Common practice in these things is to use the 100 year forcings, yet Howarth et al chose to use the 20 year forcings. Had they used the 100 year forcings, the effect of the fugitive emissions becomes a lot less than the CO2 emitted by coal power plants.

There were a couple of smaller points related to whether we should consider emissions for electricity generation versus domestic heating (gas domestic heating is less efficient than electricity generation, but hardly a fair comparison given that noone uses coal to heat their houses any more) and ignoring methane emissions from coal mining, but this post is already getting pretty long. In short, in my opinion, this paper should be used with extreme caution, and I think whenever it's used by mainstream news outlets it needs to come with a large disclaimer.

Anyway, to finish off, is shale gas good for us with respect to global warming? Well, that very much depends on how it fits into our energy production landscape. If shale gas is used to push renewables off the grid, then no, it's not a good thing for global warming. However, if the cheap gas prices enabled by shale gas makes coal-fired power a less attractive option, then it can only be a good thing. The world has far too many coal-fired power-plants, both in the West and especially in China. The key is for governments to stay strong and ensure that backing and subsidies for renewables remain in place, gradually allowing renewables to increase their market share, while allowing the market to dictate a replacement of coal power plants by gas turbines.

In this blog, the Secretary of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (or somesuch), the cheap price of shale gas has lead to the retirement of 106 coal-fired power stations, and the cancellation of 168 planned (future) such plants. These numbers seem a little high to me, and I have no way of confirming them. However, the general trend of gas replacing coal is almost certainly true, If that trend can be replicated when China starts producing shale gas in significant volumes, then there's a lot of Chinese coal-fired power plants that need to be shut down.

Fracking: the GM food of the 2010s

I want to post about a fantastic article posted on the BBC website in the aftermath of Tuesday's shale gas announcements. Link to it here. In it the author (Richard Black, the BBC's Environment Correspondent) compares the development and public opposition to shale gas to that experienced by GM foods in the mid 90s.

When GM foods first appeared in Europe, there was a huge negative public backlash. Scare stories about Frankenstein-foods that would give us all cancer and genetic diseases while wiping out all non-GM flora abounded. This, despite all the scientific evidence that showed there was (a) nothing dangerous about GM food, and (b) that there were huge potential advantages in making food cheaper for us at home, and in improving food production rates (in a developing world still full of very hungry people). However, the scare stories and the publicity stunts carried out by anti-GM activists were sufficient to see GM foods essentially scrapped across the whole of Europe.

10 years down the line, we can see how silly all the anti-GM propaganda was. GM foods are now commonplace around the world - they haven't made anyone sick and they haven't taken over the world by wiping out all non-GM fauna. The Day of the Triffids has not come to pass.

We are now seeing a very similar story developing with shale gas and fracking. With the promise of fracking coming to Europe, scare stories of destroyed landscapes, polluted water supplies, crust-ripping earthquakes, and even volcanos are making their way around the media, based on little scientific evidence. Anti-fracking groups are now widespread, with little understanding of the science behind fracking, and little desire to understand it, preferring to promote their scare-story propaganda rather than sit down and have a rational debate about genuine fracking-related issues. And their publicity stunts may well be effective enough to see that Europe becomes a no-fracking zone, much as it is already a no-GM zone.

Anyway, I thought it was a really insightful article. Well done BBC.