Advertising Complaints in Australia

A few months ago I blogged about Frack Free Somerset (FFS)'s decision not to challenge a complaint about their promotional material made to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA). Their leaflet contained numerous errors and misleading statements. Because FFS agreed to remove their material and cease using it, rather than to attempt to offer a rebuttal, the ASA never carried out an investigation.

There are obvious parallels to the complaint made to the ASA over Cuadrilla's publicity material, and over an advert placed by the self-styled "Frack-Master" Chris Faulkner.

We in the UK are not the only country to provide an advertising regulator, and in this post I will report on a decision reached by the Publishing Advertisers Bureau in Australia.

Before I do so, however, I want to comment on the situation we now find ourselves in, where advertising standards agencies are finding themselves having to make judgements on what are, in some cases, quite complicated and technical issues, with very little understanding of the subject matter. I very much doubt that anyone at the ASA has any familiarity with oil and gas operations and/or regulation.

While I am sure that the ASA are used to dealing with complaints in subject areas they are not familiar with, I would suggest that this debate is very different to determining whether or not a new brand of shampoo really makes your hair feel 10 times silkier. Yet as an authoritative body it is inevitable that their pronouncements are taken very seriously indeed, when the more I think about it, the less reason I see to do so. Frack-Master Chris Faulkner summed the situation up: "the ASA has been both judge and jury in this case. They appear to have become unqualified experts in fracking and interpreting the complex issues surrounding fracking in the UK".

However, today's blog is about a decision in Australia. The opposition group Frack Free Geraldton (FFG), with support of the Conservation Council of Western Australia (CCWA), published an advert in the local rag, the Geraldton Guardian. The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) submitted a compliant regarding the advert, which appears to have been upheld. In each case, the statements made by FFG and CCWA were found to be misleading and deceptive.

The statements, and the reasons for the findings, are discussed below.

"Shale fracking, the process of extracting gas by using toxic chemicals to crack deep rocks, can turn our water into a dangerous chemical cocktail"

It was found that this statement gives a misleading impression of the fracturing process, because it gives the impression that most of the fracking fluid is composed of toxic chemicals. It was found that "The statement that 'toxic chemicals' are used to crack deep rocks creates the impression that toxic chemicals 'alone', certainly not in such small percentage quantities are used to frack", which is not the case: frack fluid is 99% water, with only a small amount of additive, most or all of which is not toxic.

The statement finds that "to an ordinary reasonable reader the words of the advertisement and the accompanying illustration together create the impression that the amount of 'toxic chemical' used is a much greater concentration that is in fact the case", which is a misleading and deceptive exaggeration.

With regards to turning water into "a dangerous chemical cocktail", it was found that while there are risks posed by hydraulic fracturing, "the consensus of scientific data suggests that there have been no cases internationally of hydraulic shale gas fracturing inadvertently breaching a water source and thereby causing contamination", and that "a combination of research from around the world shows us that the risks are low".

Moreover, in their response to the complaint, CCWA "have not produced any evidence that hydraulic fracking fluid has in the course of any hydraulic shale gas fracking process permeated a fresh water aquifer. Its contentions are against the scientific literature".

"Research in the US has found that 6% of fracking wells leak into ground water in the first year"

Anyone who is familiar with this blog will already know why this statement is misleading. It is a topic I have discussed extensively. The 6% statistics refer to the number of wells that have some kind of casing or cement issue in one of the casing strings. However, wells have several casing strings to separate the production zone from any sensitive groundwater supplies. This means that a well with an issue in one casing string will not be spewing hydrocarbons into the environment. It's a belt-and-braces type approach.

A paper by King and King in 2013 (SPE) is instructive in this regard:

For US wells, while individual barrier failures (containment maintained and no pollution indicated) in a specific well group may range from very low to several percent (depending on geographical area, operator, era, well type and maintenance quality), actual well integrity failures are very rare. Well integrity failure is where all barriers fail and a leak is possible. True well integrity failure rates are two to three orders of magnitude lower than single barrier failure rates.

In their response, the CCWA admit that their statement "is not materially correct", and it is therefore found to be "misleading and deceptive".

This is a point I've been making for some time, so it's good to see that even environmental bodies know that it is not correct to say that 6% (or 30% or 50% or whatever) of wells are leaking, even if they do still insist on claiming this in their promotional material.

"Once our water is contaminated, it will be forever" 

This statement ignores the abundant evidence that while any contamination incident is bad, the damage is rarely permanent: wells that do leak can be repaired, spills can be remediated. For example, Considine et al. (2013) examine the environmental impacts from drilling in Pennsylvania, and find 25 incidents that they deem to be "serious". However, they find that in all but 6 cases the impacts had already been remediated satisfactorily. The APPEA provided similar examples of remediation in their supporting evidence for their complaint.

In contrast, "the contentions put forward by CCWA in support of this statement in its submission dated 22 August 2014 are without any independent scientific support. They are unsupported assertions." 

As a result, it was found that "the statement that once contaminated water will forever be contaminated is not supported by contemporary scientific views and is misleading and deceptive." 


For anyone interested in the original complaint, the CCWA rebuttal and the final decision, the documents are available below.

The original APPEA complaint is here.
The CCWA response is here.
Further APPEA comments are here.
The final decision is here.

New study shows leaky wells, not fracking, is causing methane leakage

This week's most newsworthy study examines methane contamination in wells in Pennsylvania and Texas, linking them with drilling activities. It is authored by the same Duke group who have published on this topic a number of times now.

In the new study, the authors analyse the geochemistry of methane and groundwater around shale gas wells. As well as measuring the geochemistry of the methane, they measure other geochemical variables such as noble gas isotope ratios and salinities, in order to get a better handle of what might be leading to the elevated methane levels.

They find that in some cases the evidence points to a deep source of methane that has migrated relatively rapidly, with little contact with the rock layers that lie in between shallow aquifers and the deep layers in which fracking is conducted. The most obvious conclusion to make is that methane is not getting into shallow layers through cracks and fractures in the rock, but that methane migration through faulty well bores to the surface is a possibility.

The study has, for obvious reasons, garnered a lot of publicity. However, the more I thought about it, the less newsworthy the study becomes. In actual fact, I think it tells us little that we didn't already know.

We already know that faulty cement and/or casing can allow methane migration from depth. We already know that in a handful of cases in Pennsylvania, poor working practice from certain operators has lead to cement/casing problems - these companies have been prosecuted and fined by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. So it's hardly surprising that the authors of the study were able to find cases where the geochemical evidence pointed to this issue.

ReFINED well integrity

This week's big news was the release of the latest paper from Durham University's ReFINE Group (Research on Fracking IN Europe - academics love a dodgy acronym!). In it, they compile statistics on well integrity from a range of sources, as well as looking at well abandonment and orphaned wells (where the company owning a well goes bust, leaving a well with no-one to look after it).

This follows ReFINE papers on induced seismicity, and on hydraulic fracture height growth. Their approach in each of these cases is to use as much data as they can possibly get their hands on, with little thought for quality control, or on whether they are comparing apples with apples. In their own words:

This paper draws on a variety of datasets, mostly published, but in some instances sourced from online repositories or national databases, and follows the approach of Davies et al. (2013). In that study, the risk of induced seismicity due to hydraulic fracturing was reviewed, and intentionally included all datasets in the public domain that were considered to be reliable, rather than de-selecting any data (Davies et al., 2013). This inclusive approach has a drawback because well barrier and well integrity failure frequencies are probably specific to the geology, age of wells, and era of well construction (King and King, 2013). A wide range of failure statistics is therefore reported, and although they are presented on a single graph to show the spread of results, this is not intended to imply that direct comparisons between very different datasets (i.e. size, age of wells, geology) can be made.

This means that data from recent drilling in the Marcellus (which is probably relevant) is presented alongside less relevant data from offshore wells (drilling offshore is always a more challenging prospect, with hundreds of meters of water between your platform and the well-head), from China, or even from the 1920s in California.