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Fractured fairy tales

Source: SPPI

by Paul Driessen

Greens hate natural gas and fracking, but costly, parasitic wind energy
can’t live without it

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have boosted shale gas
production from zero a few years ago to 10% of all US energy supplies in 2012,
observes energy analyst Daniel
Yergin. Fracking has also increased US oil production 25% since 2008 –
almost all on state and private lands, and in the face of more federal land and
resource
withdrawals, permitting delays and declining
public land production.

In the process, the fracking revolution created 1.7 million jobs in oil
fields, equipment manufacturing, legal and information technology services, and
other sectors. It will generate over $60 billion this year in state and federal
tax and royalty revenues, reduce America’s oil import bill by $75 billion, and
save us $100 billion in imported liquefied natural gas, concludes a new IMF
Global Insight analysis.

A resurgent American petroleum industry could add “as many as 3.6 million
jobs by 2020, and increase the US gross domestic product by as much as 3
percent,” says Citigroup’s “Energy 2020” report. Fracking is bringing new jobs
and revenues to states underlain by shale deposits, and could give our nation
over a century of hydrocarbon energy that will keep prices low for fuel and
petrochemical feed stocks.

That means more manufacturing and other jobs for millions of graduates and
unemployed workers, and new prosperity for the “Rust Belt” and other areas.
“Plunging natural gas prices have turned the US into one of the most profitable
places in the world to make chemicals and fertilizer,” says the Wall
Street Journal. It’s also “slashed costs for makers of energy-intensive
products such as aluminum, steel and glass.”

It could make North America energy independent and even a net exporter of
natural gas. In fact, this amazing new technology could turn the United States
into the world’s
#1 oil producer within just a few more years.

For people still concerned about “catastrophic manmade global warming”
(despite 16 years of stable global temperatures), unconventional gas also
provides a way to cut carbon dioxide emissions by up to 40% using
clean-burning fuel that costs a third less than oil on a per BTU basis, notes
Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg. The USA’s CO2 emissions are now at their lowest
levels in 20 years, because of natural gas, a sluggish economy, and the
retirement of 100-200 coal-fired power plants due to an EPA regulatory
onslaught that is based heavily on agenda-driven, slipshod and even fraudulent
and illegal science.

Logic and common sense would engender unprecedented public, political and
even environmentalist support for hydraulic fracturing and expanded oil and gas
production. Indeed, that is Governor Romney’s perspective and policy.
Unfortunately, Team Obama remains largely opposed to domestic drilling, fixated
on “renewable” energy, despite having already wasted
some $97 billion on wind, solar and algae projects – and poised to unleash a
boxcar of new EPA and BLM rules designed to usurp state control and restrict or
hyper-regulate fracking on federal, state and private lands alike, win or lose
on November 6.

Team Obama justifies its stance by citing public anxiety over fracking. It
fails to mention that this anxiety has been nurtured and orchestrated by a host
of environmental pressure groups whose existence, monetary sustenance and
political power depend on a steady stream of new eco-hobgoblins. Their fractured
fairy tales about this game-changing energy technology would be as funny as the
Rocky and Bullwinkle tales, if the economic, employment, national security and
environmental consequences weren’t so serious.

Hydraulic fracturing devastates
their mantra that we are running out of oil and gas. It annihilates their
incessant assertions that hydrocarbons are the energy of the past, and renewables
are the future. In reality, wind and solar cannot live with cheap natural
gas (because they cannot possibly compete with it) and cannot live without it
(because they only work 20% of the time and need gas as constant backup
power).

Consequently, the anti-fracking factions have concocted a hodgepodge of
eco-scares, each one more absurd and indefensible than the last.

Burning tap water. Yes, you can ignite methane at your
kitchen faucet, if your well was drilled through gas-bearing rock
formations and was not properly cemented and sealed to keep gas out. (Eternal
Flame Falls in New York’s Chestnut Ridge Park is one example of natural
methane leakage.) But fracturing zones are thousands of feet below groundwater
supplies; production wells use cement and steel casing that extends hundreds of
feet below the surface; and sensitive instruments monitor downhole activity, to
ensure that valuable gas does not escape into near-surface formations or the
atmosphere.

Groundwater contamination. Fracking fluids are 99.5% water
and sand. The other 0.5% is chemicals that fight bacterial growth, keep sand
particles suspended in the liquid and improve production. The vast majority
today are found in household items that Americans use safely every day –
including cheese, beer, canned fish, dairy desserts, shampoo and cosmetic
products. New fluids like those developed by FamilyJoule and Halliburton represent the new
kinds of entirely nontoxic and biodegradable chemicals that almost all drillers
are now using.

Steadily improving technologies, techniques and regulations minimize risks
even further. For instance, heavy plastic liners are now commonplace under
drilling rigs, storage tanks and containment pits. Along with modern drilling
and well casing methods, they help make the likelihood of chemical or salt
contamination of groundwater a minuscule fraction of what is posed by winter
salting of icy roads.

Wastewater and water depletion. In addition to changing
the composition of fracking fluids (and making that information readily
available online), to address concerns about water use and wastewater
disposal, drilling companies increasingly recycle the water they use. Devon and
other companies have recycled hundreds of millions of gallons, and some 90% of
water produced in the Marcellus shale region of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and
West Virginia is now reused. Moreover, the amount of water used in fracking is
far less than what is required to grow corn and process it into ethanol.

Earthquakes. Fracturing rocks does cause cracking that can
be measured with ultra-sensitive equipment. But these micro-seismic events
measure around 0.8 on the Richter Scale, about what is caused by a car passing
by. Even loaded dump trucks register only a 3 (the minimum that can be felt
by humans), and property damage does not begin until level 5. Deep
injection of water for geothermal energy development or enhanced oil
recovery operations (or to dispose of petroleum, municipal or industrial
wastewater) has caused detectable seismic activity; however, of more than
800,000 injection wells nationwide, only about 40 were actually felt at the
surface. Rules and practices increasingly address these injection well
issues.

Fracking regulations. State and local regulation and
cooperation with industry, constant refinements and improvements in rules and
practices, and accommodation to public concerns about water, drilling and
fracking fluids, road congestion, community impacts and other issues have been
ongoing for decades. That is part of the reason that 2.5 million instances of
fracking worldwide (over 1 million in the USA) since 1949 have not caused any
serious harm. That’s a safety record any industry would envy.

Unfortunately, environmentalist fractured fairy tales cost us energy, jobs,
revenue and prosperity – for no ecological benefit. The ultimate
irony is Europe, where Big Green opposition to fracking and nuclear power is
ushering in a coal-burning
renaissance. Germany and other central EU countries will be building 10,600
megawatts of new coal-fired electrical power plants during the next four
years!

Meanwhile, green power mandates have already pushed Germany’s electricity
prices to the second highest in Europe (32 cents per kWh, compared to an average
of 10 cents in the USA) – and the average
German household faces another big rate hike over the next year. Countless
jobs are also at risk.

America has the world’s largest reserves of oil, gas and coal. We need access
to these deposits, under rational regulations that reflect reality, instead of
eco fairy tales. We need people in the White House, Congress and government
bureaucracies who can distinguish between fact and fiction, understand how to
produce real energy, jobs and revenues, and don’t have an agenda to
“fundamentally transform” our nation.

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Tags: energy war, fracking, Paul Driessen

This entry was posted on Friday, November
2nd, 2012 at 2:10 pm and is filed under News. You can
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