The shale gas revolution - infographic

Apologies for a little barren, non-blogging spell, I've been on holiday in Iceland. It's truly spectacular - a really beautiful country. I'd recommend it to anyone. Anyway, just a quick post before I write a longer post a little later - consider this the blogging equivalent of an amuse bouche. A friend found this natural gas infographic on mining.com - it really sums up nicely the affect that shale gas has had on the US energy industry. Update - blogger being a bit rubbish, I can't find a way to upload the image with the size and quality needed to see it, so link to the image here.

The Open Access Publishing Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fracking on trial: the verdict

Update: The judge has delivered sentences of 1 to 2 year conditional discharges and £750 fines: seems reasonable (being not-very-legally-minded, I'm not sure what the maximum and minimum sentences available were, but presumably this is towards the lenient end)

Update 2: Links to news coverage: here, here, here and here

Today sees the verdict of the trial of the 'fractivists' who stormed a drilling rig in Lancashire last year. The defendants have been found guilty of trespass and disrupting lawful activity. The defense was that they were preventing an unlawful activity from happening, which is a permissible reason do take an otherwise illegal action.

In the statement from the judge, he ruled that "It is clear to me that Cuadrilla is not committing an offence on the land". Clearly, Cuadrilla has undertaken every action required of it by local councils, and regulatory bodies. And bear in mind here that so far Cuadrilla have undertaken exploratory drilling and testing only. I'm sure that if Cuadrilla does find gas and decides to roll out production wells across Lancashire, then further planning permission and regulation will presumably be required. So the defense is perhaps misguided in arguing that action had to be taken to avoid the widespread despoilation of the Fylde peninsular, because Cuadrilla have not yet received permission to do so. They are currently testing the water, to see whether fracking is capable of releasing the reserves under Blackpool (it may be that they can't, in which case this would be a real much-ado-about-nothing).

What this case really highlights are questions over the fitness-for-purpose of the regulatory regime. Fracking has been used in many wells in the UK in the last 20 years. However, the scale of these fracks is much smaller than those envisaged for most shale gas applications. Clearly, the smaller scale fracks are covered by existing law (the law which renders Cuadrilla's activities lawful). However, do the existing regulations need amending to deal with the larger-scale fracking? I suspect that they do, and will be (we are already seeing this happen informally as Cuadrilla take on various obligations, such as the seismic monitoring of this and future sites, which, by current law at least, I'm not sure they are mandated to do).

Finally, a word on the fracktivists themselves, because what I've seen has surprised me. They have their own, very professional-looking website, where you can find out more. But the professionalism of the protestors is quite striking. I imagined the opposition to fracking to be a loose band of concerned locals (think of the people interviewed during the Gasland film, for example), the classic little guy fighting the big nasty corporations. However, among others the defense we able to call as witnesses an MP, a Cornell professor, environmental consultants, and scientists from the Tyndall Centre and more academics. Add on to this the fact that the protestors are not from Lancashire, but made the trip from Brighton specially, which kind-of devalues the protest a little - where are the people from around the affected area? Are they less upset about it than professional protestors making the trip from the other end of the country? This is certainly a common theme seen in the US, with Pennsylvania locals a lot more accepting of shale gas than New Yorkers coming through for a nice weekend before heading back to the big city.

Anyway, we are still awaiting sentencing at this point. I'd hope that the judge passes lenient sentences (I have absolutely no idea what the minimum and maximum proscribed sentences are), because any law that effects peaceful protest (even if it has a high nuisance value) does make me rather uncomfortable (even if I am in favour of well-regulated shale gas extraction in the UK).   

Fracking activists on trial

Today is the 3rd day of the trial for the fracking activists who stormed Cuardilla's drilling site in Lancashire, climbing the rig and dropping banners. They have been charged with trespass and assault, and are being tried in Preston Magistrates Court.

You can follow updates on twitter with #frackingontrial. Also, the trial appears to have its own website.

The defense for the case relies on the 'necessity of action to prevent damage to property'. This was the defense used by protesters who stormed the Kingsnorth coal-fired power station a few years back. The argument went that turning the power plant on would release large amounts of CO2, causing global warming that would damage property. The defense for this case is that allowing the fracking to go ahead would have caused damage, so performing an illegal activity (i.e. trespass) to stop it becomes legal.

I'm no legal-beagle, so the question for me is, where does the burden of proof lie? Do the protestors have to show beyond doubt that the activity they prevented would certainly have caused damage? Do they have to show a likelihood of damage based on the balance of probabilities? Because over a million wells have been fracked in the US, while contamination issues are limited to about 10 extremely localised sites, and it's only the Cuadrilla site in Blackpool that have experienced felt seismicity. So the balance of probabilities would suggest that fracking does not cause problems unless something (usually poor well cementing) goes wrong (10 in a million is a 1 in 100,000 chance).

Similarly, on the wider global warming issue, we are seeing US green-house gas emissions falling dramatically as a result of shale gas production. I know we all like to think of Americans as gas-guzzling climate-destroyers, but the USA has seen the largest CO2 emissions reductions of any country on the planet since 2006. The reason: electricity from coal generation is down from ~50% to ~30%, with shale gas filling most of that gap. Because gas produces half as much CO2 as coal when burned, making that switch reduces CO2 emissions a lot. It's getting to the point when coal companies are going out of business. Meanwhile, in the UK, coal-fired power is booming as gas prices keep rising, seeing our CO2 emissions. It's becoming clearer and clearer that boosting gas production, using shale gas, reduces gas prices and takes coal off the market, reducing CO2 emissions.

For those who like to talk of Howath's methane leakage rates, it's been taken apart again (for the umpteenth time). I'm aware that a statement from Howarth has been included in the case, I wonder if any of the rebuttals have?

Or is the level of evidence required lower than that? Is it a question of acting in good faith? I've no doubt that the fracktivists have a genuine belief that fracking is certain to cause damage. Is a genuine belief (regardless of evidence) sufficient to justify action? As I say, the whole legal edifice confuses and nauseates me in equal measure, so I've no idea what the requirements for this case will be. The verdict is due tomorrow I believe, so I guess we'll get to find out soon.

I'll finish by saying that, whatever the outcome of this particular trial, I am in general concerned by the gradual erosion of our civil liberties. I don't want to see any decisions taken that curtail a person's right to (non-violent) protest, regardless of the fact that I am in favour of (strongly-regulated) fracking in the UK, so I would like to see these guys acquitted.

Bit of an ooooppps!!!

Just quick post this time, but an incident I found worth sharing, mainly for it sheer hilarity. Or at least, it's the kind of thing that you'd find hilarious if it wasn't at the same time highlighting the sheer ineptitude or our political classes!

In this story from last week, a veto banning fracking in North Carolina was overturned after a democrat representative accidentally voted to overturn the veto, when she intended to vote to keep it. The overturning of the veto passed by one vote, so this poor woman's confusion was the deciding factor. You can kind of see how such a mistake could be made - it sound's like a bit of a double negative: do you want to vote to remove the ban on fracking? However, it's not surely that difficult really?

It begs the question - how are we expecting these people, who are apparently incapable of working out which button is for yes and which button is for no, to decide on an issue as complex as fracking?

However, I also think it's completely shitty (so therefore entirely in character) for the Republicans in the NC state legislature to prevent her from being allowed to change her vote. I'm all in favour of governments allowing fracking to go ahead (with appropriate regulation), and not being swayed by a vocal but poorly informed minority. However, I wouldn't want it to go ahead on a technicality. That only stores up trouble and anger further down the line.

As an aside: as far as I'm aware the fracking issue kind of divides along party lines in the US - the Republicans are all for it: drill baby drill! while the Democrats opinion is mixed - some pro and some against. Obama himself is in favour though.

My main concern is that my opinions on fracking seem to place me in agreement with the Republicans. Not a position I'm accustomed to, and it's something that worries me - I mean, what's next? Am I about to start thinking that Sarah Palin would make a capable and effective leader? Capable enough to push the right voting button?

Academia in the social media age

As an academic, how in tune should we be with the latest developments in technology? I find myself asking this question after reading this article in Times Higher Educational Supplement. I stumbled across it mainly because it was written by an old uni friend of mine, but I found that it raised some important questions. The article discusses a report by the British Library and JISC into the electronic habits of today's early career researchers. The report finds that, despite being technology savvy (Ahthankyouverymuch) early career researchers know little about the range of electronic research aids available, and fail to make use of the latest advancements in online networking (by using twitter, wikis, blogs and the like) to improve their research.

I would tend to say that I agree with the above assessment. Obviously I'm completely tech-savvy, I tweet, I blog, our group has a wiki, I would publish in open-access journals if (a) there were decent ones in my field and (b) my funding grant had money set aside to do so. However, I'm aware that the majority of my peers probably do not. They may tweet or have a blog, but if they do, they are rarely work-related. It would be presumptive for me to comment about how well my colleagues make use of online research resources, but for the sake of this post, lets assume that we could do better.

But this all gets me thinking - to what extent is it necessary, as a researcher, to be up-to-the-minute with every new online tool? Are we, as early career academics, missing a trick? What advantages have I gained from them?

I have a twitter account, and this blog. Obviously, as I'm sure you'll agree, they're amazing!!! But what have I, or the research community, or the general public, gained from my tweeting and blogging - have I been wasting my time? For me personally, I think I have gained something from doing this. It may be hard to believe, but I do usually put in some research before I post. At least 15 minutes sometimes. Writing this blog has forced me to think a lot about how the wider public might perceive the work I do. This has forced my to think in a new way about my work, which has been really useful, It also forces me to keep up to date with current affairs a little more. Shale gas and fracking is a really fast moving topic at the moment, with learned reports appearing from all corners at a rapid rate. It might be surprising, but I think without my blog and twitter feed, it'd be quite easy for me to miss them as I'm head down in the minutiae of fracture propagation mechanics. So I think I have benefited intellectually from blogging and tweeting, although it's not actually lead to any new scientific insights or publications or anything concrete, tangible or useful.

I don't know what other researcher (if there are any geophysicists out there reading this) have gained from my blog. Hopefully you might have had a similar experience to me, where you start thinking a little more about how your work fits in with the wider world. But I've not discussed technical stuff on this blog, so it's unlikely you've gained anything science-wise. According to my stats page, I have about 500 visitors a month. But I suspect many of those are wanderers of the internet who have got lost, stumbled in here and stumbled right out again. So I don't think this blog is having much influence on the general public (much as my ego might try to persuade me otherwise).

It would be nice if the geophysics community were able to build up a bit more of a community via social media such as twitter. There are plenty of geophysical tweeters and bloggers out there, but it all seems rather disparate, not well connected, and therefore of limited use. But again, the majority of the community is well connected by other means, conferences probably being the most important. I know the majority of the big names in my field because I've seen them talk at conferences. If I want to ask them a question, I can email them. Admittedly, what then develops is a conversation between two parties only, rather than a multi-party, round-table type discussion that might sometimes be more beneficial. But again, these tend to develop in the discussion sessions of conferences, so it's not completely clear that twitter would add to this (although it's something I'd like to see).

Our research group did set up a wiki - the idea was that we'd put up descriptions of all the code we had developed, so that we could do a better job of sharing, and avoid reinventing the wheel. Noone used it - turned out a quick email round the group was the best way of seeing if anyone had FORTRAN code for multi-variant interpolation (noone did, so if you do, please get in touch). So our wiki now sits forlorn and unused.

However, there are some other cool developments from publishers that I really like. My girlfriend (don't look so surprised - yes I have a girlfriend, I know it seems unlikely....) works for an open-access physics journal. Part of her job is in developing new social media approaches, and also things like video abstracts. I really admire the way they are trying to build a community around the journal, including twitter, and YouTube channel. I wish earth science journals would take note and do the same, but sometimes in Earth Sciences, well, things tend to happen on geological timescales (sorry, couldn't help myself).

I should also mention LinkedIn here. This may only be relevant for someone like myself who works in a very applied, industry-focused area. But in joining various LinkedIn groups you do tend to pick up on the latest industry chatter, which helps identify what they see as the most important topics (although it must be said that you do also tend to pick up on a fair few idiots there as well). I guess this most closely resembles the multi-party type discussion I referred to above.

However, now we come to the second issue - online research tools like RSS feeds, online databases and the like. The report in question comes from the British Library, and you can almost feel the anguish as the efforts they've gone to with various online gadgets, feeds, databases and the like, are ignored by young researchers. But the truth is, libraries are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the modern day scientist. The last time I went into the Bristol Earth Science Library, was during my induction day at the start of my PhD 7 years ago. I kid you not, and I know the majority of my colleagues would say the same. The only role that libraries have for me is that they pay subscription fees for all the non-open-access journals I need to access. Actually the two main journals I read and cite the most, Geophysics and Geophysical Prospecting, are not part of the University's bundle, and I get access to them by being a member of SEG and EAGE respectively. If my research grant provided me with my own money for journal subscriptions I'd have no need for the library at all. The only advantage I see is that the library, because it's dealing in bulk, is probably able to get some sort of discount (although judging by typical public sector records on procurement, I wouldn't bet on it).

This is because our researching habits have changed dramatically in the last 10 years, with the internet revolution. Libraries were once the repositories of all the information needed to pursue our research. Before the internet, we were unable to locate, store, index, inventory and generally deal with these resources for ourselves. So we had libraries to do this for us. The role of the library was to harvest, index and present information for us in a way we could easily use. This role is no longer necessary. I can search for and access any research I want online.  I don't need help with ejournals and e-repositories, or rss feeds. I know what the key journals in my field are, and once or twice a month I take an hour or two to search through their latest issues to see if they have any papers relevant to my work. If I need an older paper, it's right there for me on google scholar. I know who the key names and research groups are in my field, so in particular I will look for their papers. At worst, if I'm asleep at the wheel (it does happen) and miss some key development, by the time I'm at the next conference a couple of months down the line, I'll get to find out all about it. And I guess that's part of the issue here - research moves at a slightly slower pace. All these online gizmos are great for when you need to be right up to the minute - when yesterday's news is tomorrow's fish-and-chip wrapper. But in academic research, things don't work like that. Typically, I might publish 2 or 3 papers a year (and that's considered pretty good going by many of my peers). So that's one paper every 4 to 6 months. So whether I find out about some new development right now, or in a month's time, it doesn't really affect what I do.

Finally, I want to address the comment about the "striking dependence" of PhD students on secondary sources (other publications) rather than primary sources (raw data). As far as I'm concerned, this seems like a good thing to me. Going back and re-analysing someone else's data is generally only considered worthwhile science if (a) you suspect an error, (b) you have a new framework/theory/method to try out on an established dataset, or (c) you're just a little bit pedantic with a little too much time on your hands. If someone has already done a good job on a dataset, then great, take their conclusions and move on to the bit where you develop something new either with a new dataset that you've collected yourself, or using a new method or testing a new idea. If all a student has done during the 3 (or more) years of their PhD is re-analysed old datasets with no new insights, then they probably won't pass their viva.

I should add one caveat before I finish this post (where would science be without caveats?). I speak based on my experiences in Earth Sciences. The BL/JISC report covers (I believe) all areas. Perhaps people's experiences in other fields are different, in which case I look forward to your comments (please. pretty please. I got a few comments a while back, which was quite exciting. I've not had any for a while now. It helps me feel that I'm not just talking to a desolate emptiness......)

Update: Reading this back to myself, I realise I have written a very long and rambling post that doesn't even mention fracking. I blame the G&T. So I apologise, and if you've made it to the end, thank you and kudos. FRACKING!!! There, got it in!

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......)