There is a global rush to
embrace a new technique to extract hydrocarbons from the Earth. From
Germany to Poland and France, from China and above all in the USA where
the technique of hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks is most developed,
governments and major oil companies are producing huge volumes of shale
gas.
A number of energy importing countries around the world are planning
a major investment in extracting natural gas from their shale rock formations.
The most ambitious plans are coming from China and from Poland in the
EU. Germany is also heatedly debating the technique.
The US Government’s Department of Energy together with a Washington
energy consultancy has just released a mammoth global report estimating
resources of shale gas. Significantly, the report estimates that the
largest untapped shale gas reserves worldwide lie in China. The study
puts Poland and France at the top of the shale gas list in the EU. The
rest of Europe they estimate has significant shale gas formations as
well, though in smaller volumes where shale rock is present.
Even in Germany some states and private oil companies are seriously
looking at shale gas. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company is
planning major projects in the densely-populated North-Rhein Westphalia
region. The company’s head for Central Europe, Gernot Kalkoffen, stated
in a recent interview, "Germany is most definitely an interesting market.
We cannot achieve the energy strategy shift without gas." ExxonMobil
estimates shale gas is potentially available in six of Germany's 16
states.
The US Energy Department estimates that Germany could have some 8 trillion
cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas, three years’ total
consumption. Citizen protest groups and Parliamentary skepticism about
health and safety of shale gas so far is braking a German shale gas
bonanza. Not only ExxonMobil but also BASF's Wintershall, Gaz de France,
BNK Petroleum from the US and a daughter of Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell
are salivating over German shale gas prospects.
The Polish government is in a state of near euphoria over the prospects
of exploiting its shale gas resources. Prime Minister Donald Tusk calls
shale gas Poland’s "great chance," because it could cut its dependence
on Russian gas, create tens of thousands of jobs (highly unlikely as
gas is a capital-intensive not labor-intensive industry-w.e.) and fill
state coffers. In tests at one well in northern Poland done last August,
the Polish Geological Institute claimed that Hydraulic fracturing didn't
affect the quality or quantity of surface and ground water and didn't
cause tremors that would pose a threat to buildings or other infrastructure.
The US oilfield services giant Schlumberger did the fracking.
Of course one test in one well is hardly conclusive, though the Tusk
government doesn’t seem to care, as they push Brussels to back a major
Polish shale gas exploitation program.
In China, shale gas looks about to take off as a major new focus for
addressing the country’s enormous energy requirements. The governing
State Council has recently approved shale gas as an “independent mineral
resource,” and the Ministry of Land and Resources will conduct an appraisal
of shale gas resources this year to expedite discovery and development
of China shale deposits. Until now China’s rough mountainous terrain
and lack of shale gas fracking know-how has kept it out of the shale
gas game, with coal far the major source of electric power. The French
oil giant, Total, has just signed a deal with China’s Sinopec to produce
shale gas in China. China has around 31 trillion cubic meters of natural
gas trapped in shale, some 50% greater than the United States according
to the US Department of Energy estimate. These are volumes to make the
head of any respectable state official spin.
In the US, oil industry people have quickly forgotten the recent scare
about oil and gas depletion, popularly known as the Peak Oil theory,
in their new euphoria over huge new volumes of gas and also oil obtained
by fracking of shale and coal beds. Now even the Obama Administration
is talking about a renaissance in domestic oil production. The reason
is the dramatic rise in domestic extraction of gas from hydraulic fracking
of shale, using new fracking techniques first developed by Halliburton,
expensive techniques made financially attractive with the advent of
$100 a barrel oil and record high gas prices since 2008.
Myth and reality: The Halliburton Loophole
Fracking techniques have been around since the end of World War II.
Why then suddenly is the world going gaga over shale gas hydraulic
fracking? One answer is that the record high oil and gas prices of the
recent few years have made inefficient processes such as extracting
oil from Canada’s tar sands or the costly fracking profitable. The second
reason is the advance of various horizontal underground drilling techniques
that allow companies like Schlumberger to enter a large shale rock formation
and inject substances to “free” the trapped gas.
But the real reason for the recent explosion of fracking in the country
where it has most been applied, the United States, is the passage of
legislation in 2005 by the US Congress that exempts the oil industry’s
hydraulic fracking activity from regulatory supervision by the US Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The oil and
gas industry is the only industry in America that is allowed by EPA
to inject known hazardous materials -- unchecked -- directly into or
adjacent to underground drinking water supplies.
The law is known as the “Halliburton Loophole.” That’s because it was
introduced with lobbying pressure from the company that produces the
lion’s share of chemical hydraulic fracking fluids—Dick Cheney’s old
company, Halliburton. When he became Vice President under George W.
Bush in early 2001, Bush immediately gave Cheney responsibility for
a major Energy Task Force to make a comprehensive national energy strategy.
Aside from looking at Iraq oil potentials as documents later revealed,
Cheney’s task force used Cheney’s considerable political muscle and
industry lobbying money to win exemption from the Safe Drinking Water
Act.
During Cheney’s term as vice president he moved to make sure the Government’s
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would give a green light to a
major expansion of shale gas drilling in the US. In 2004 the EPA issued
a study of the environmental effects of fracking. That study has been
called "scientifically unsound" by EPA whistleblower Weston Wilson.
In March of 2005, EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley found enough evidence
of potential mishandling of the EPA hydraulic fracturing study to justify
a review of Wilson's complaints. The Oil and Gas Accountability Project
conducted a review of the EPA study which found that EPA removed information
from earlier drafts that suggested unregulated fracturing poses a threat
to human health, and that the Agency did not include information that
suggests “fracturing fluids may pose a threat to drinking water long
after drilling operations are completed.” These warnings all were simply
ignored by the EPA and White House.
The Halliburton Loophole is no minor affair. The process of hydraulic
fracking to extract gas involves staggering volumes of water and of
some of the most toxic chemicals known. During the uproar over the BP
Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Obama Administration
and the Energy Department formed an advisory commission on Shale Gas.
Their report was released in November 2011. It was what could only be
called a “whitewash” of the dangers of shale gas.
The commission was headed by former CIA director John Deutch. Deutch
sits on the board of Citigroup, one of the world’s most active energy
industry banks, tied to the Rockefeller family. He also sits on the
board of Schlumberger which, along with Halliburton, is one of the major
companies doing hydraulic fracking. In fact, of the seven panel members,
six had ties to the energy industry. Little surprise that the Deutch
report called shale gas, "the best piece of news about energy
in the last 50 years." Deutch added, "Over the long term it has the
potential to displace liquid fuels in the United States."
Attempts by citizen organizations and individual litigants to force
oil services company disclosure of the composition of chemicals used
in hydraulic fracking have met a stone wall of silence. The companies
argue that the chemicals are proprietary secrets and that disclosing
them would hurt their competitiveness. They also insist the process
is “basically safe and that regulating it would deter domestic production.”
This legal sleight of hand lets the fracking lobby have their cake and
eat it too. They claim it is safe, refuse to say what chemicals are
used and insist it be free from the Environmental Protection Administration
rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act. If they are right about how
safe their chemical fracking fluids are why are they afraid of regulation
like other chemical companies?
Poisoned water
In a typical shale gas fracturing operation, a company drills a hole
several thousand meters below surface; then they drill a horizontal
branch perhaps one kilometer in length. As one expert described the
fracking, once the horizontal drilling into the shale formation is done,
“you send down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of
ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives. The package is detonated,
and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations
in the pipe. They then pump up to 7 million gallons of a substance known
as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas. It blasts
through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force—more
than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—that it shatters
the shale for a few yards on either side of the pipe, allowing the gas
embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape.”
The shale rock in which the gas is trapped is so tight that it has to
be broken in order for the gas to escape. Therein come the problems.
A combination of sand and water laced with chemicals — including benzene
— is pumped into the well bore at high pressure, shattering the rock
and opening millions of tiny fissures, enabling the shale gas to seep
into the pipeline.
Not only does it liberate gas or in the case of Bakken in North Dakota,
oil. It also floods the shale formation with millions of gallons of
toxic fluids. A study conducted by Theo Colburn, director of the Endocrine
Disruption Exchange in Paonia, Colorado, identified 65 chemicals that
are probable components of the fracking fluids used by shale gas drillers.
These chemicals included benzene, glycol-ethers, toluene, 2-(2-methoxyethoxy)
ethanol, and nonylphenols. All of those chemicals have been linked to
health disorders when human exposure is too high.
Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, D. C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell
University, who has researched fracture mechanics for more than 30 years,
has said that drilling and hydraulic fracturing “can liberate biogenic
natural gas into a fresh water aquifer.” In other words the chemicals
and gas can pollute water aquifers.
A new study authorized by two New York State organizations, Catskill
Mountainkeeper and the Park Foundation, of the effects of fracking in
the Marcellus Shale in New York and Pennsylvania puts the lie to the
gas industry claims fracking is harmless to ground water. The study,
just published in the journal Ground Water, concludes, “More than 5,000
wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010…Operators
inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds
of pressure, to drill and frack each well.” To date, little sampling
has been done to analyze where fracking fluids go after being injected
underground.
Contrary to the industry assertion that fracking takes place in rocks
(shale) that are impermeable thereby preventing leaking of toxins into
ground water, the scientists concluded, in a peer-reviewed article,
that natural faults and fractures in the Marcellus, exacerbated by the
effects of fracking itself, could allow chemicals to reach the surface
in as little as "just a few years." Tom Myers, the study head who is
an independent hydrologist whose clients include the US Government and
environmental groups, states, "Simply put, [the rock layers] are not
impermeable. The Marcellus shale is being fracked into a very high permeability.
Fluids could move from most any injection process."
Inducing Earthquakes
Not only possible poisoning of the fresh water underground aquifers,
hydraulic fracking is done with such force that it has been also known
to cause earthquakes. In the UK, Cuadrilla was doing shale gas drilling
in Lancashire. They suspended their shale gas test drilling in June
2011, following two earthquakes—one tremor of magnitude 2.3 hit the
Fylde coast on 1 April, followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 on 27
May. A UK Government study of the earthquakes, released this April
concluded that the fracking drilling operations had caused the quakes.
Earthquake activity in fracking regions across the US have also been
reported.
Alarmingly, in the case of exploiting shale gas in China, the largest
shale formation lies in Sechuan Province in China’s east, one of the
most active earthquake zones in Asia. Additionally, given the documented
dangers to ground water from extensive fracking, China’s chronic water
shortages are threatened as well.
The new technique of hydraulic fracking was first used successfully
in the late 1990s in the Barnett Shale in Texas, and is now being used
to liberate oil from beneath the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. But the
largest shale gas fracking activity in the US has been a literal gas
bonanza drilling boom in the Marcellus Shale that runs from West Virginia
into upstate New York, estimated estimated to hold as much gas as the
whole United States consumes in a century. More recent estimates put
the figure at half that or lower, suggesting the energy industry is
using hype to promote its methods.
Good news… bad news
Good news is shale gas shows how wrong the peak oil lobby is about depletion
of global hydrocarbons. Gas like coal and oil are according to their
definition all “fossil fuels.” While we leave aside whether in fact
they are from dinosaur detritus or fossilized algae, clearly the Earth
is far from peaking in its hydrocarbon resources. Bad news is that the
frenzy over shale gas and oil extraction is a highly dangerous and destructive
method that is diverting valuable resources from finding abundant conventional
gas or oil using advanced new methods to locate natural gas and oil
in abundance. That will be the theme of a series of future articles
in this space.
Endnotes:
Vello Kuuskraa, et al, World Shale Gas Resources: An Initial Assessment
of 14 Regions Outside the United States,
Advanced Resources International, Inc. prepared for U. S. Energy Information
Administration, Office of Energy Analysis, U.S. Department of Energy,
Washington, DC, April 2011.
Reuters, ExxonMobil to press on with German shale gas, January
26, 2012, accessed in http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/germany-shale-exxon-idUSL5E8CR0U520120127.
Stefan Nicola, Public slows Exxon's German shale gas bid,
UPI, April 13, 2011, accessed in
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2011/04/13/Public-slows-Exxons-German-shale-gas-bid/UPI-70281302709161/#ixzz1tW3fuwt7
Dow Jones Newswires, Poland: Hydraulic Fracking Found Not To
Affect
Environment, March 02, 2012, accessed in
http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2012/03/02/poland-hydraulic-fracking-found-not-to-affect-environment/print#ixzz1tRR0YpTj
Forbes, China Closer To Joining Shale Gas Fracking Craze, February
13, 2012, accessed in
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/02/13/china-closer-to-joining-shale-gas-fracking-craze/
Earthworks, Halliburton loophole, accessed in http://www.earthworksaction.org/halliburton.cfm.
Ibid.
Lisa Sumi, Our Drinking Water at Risk: What EPA and the Oil and
Gas Industry Don't Want Us to Know About Hydraulic Fracturing, April
7, 2005, accessed in http://www.earthworksaction.org/library/detail/our_drinking_water_at_risk/
John Deuss, quoted in Shale Gas Has Challenges But Study Group
Holds Out Hope, November 18, 2012, accessed in http://globalresourcesnews.com/getp.php?needle=deutchshale
Ibid.
Bill Mckibben, Why Not Frack?, The New York Review of Books, March
8, 2012, accessed in
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/why-not-frack/?pagination=false&printpage=true.
Cited in, Water Contamination from Shale Gas Drilling, accessed
in =http://www.water-contamination-from-shale.com/
Cited in, Gasland, Wikipedia, accessed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GASLAND
Abrahm Lustgarten, New Study Predicts Frack Fluids Can Migrate
to Aquifers Within Years, May 2, 2012, accessed in http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/02-3.
Ibid.
BBC News, Fracking water pollution in Lancashire ‘extremely unlikely,'
accessed in
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-16494766.
John Daly, UK Govt Seismic Fracking Report Certain to Sharpen
Debate, 20 April 2012,
://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/UK-Govt.-Seismic-Fracking-Report-Certain-to-Sharpen-Debate.html |
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