It may be too late to stop or slow global warming

Click on Climate Change for a transcript.

Global warming may have attained such momentum that human action will not be able to reverse it or even slow it down by very much.

As glaciers and the Arctic ice cap melt, less sunlight is reflected back into space, and the warmer the planet gets.   As storms and drought devastate the land, forests and plant life are destroyed and less carbon dioxide is absorbed.  Some scientists think catastrophic global warming is irreversible.

Anyhow, the U.S. government’s economic strategy is based on fossil fuels—hydrofracking for natural gas and deep ocean drilling and Arctic drilling for natural gas.  The Russian Federation’s economic strategy is based on oil and gas exports, and China doesn’t appear to be ready to burn less coal.

A reversal of course isn’t politically feasible and, at this point, could come too late to do any good.

The battle for Seneca Lake

View of Seneca Lake from the south

Crestwood Midstream Partners, a Texas company, wants to store methane, propane and butane in salt caverns underneath upstate New York’s beautiful Seneca Lake.

The company wants to make Seneca Lake a hub for transportation and storage of natural gas products for the whole northeast United States.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has already approved the methane part of the plan.   The New York Department of Environmental Conservation is considering whether to approve storage of propane and butane—aka liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

Ellen Cantarow, writing for TomDispatch, explains what’s wrong with this idea.

Crestwood’s plan would mean the full-scale industrialization of the lake’s shores near Watkins Glen, including a 14-acre open pit for holding brine (water supersaturated with salt) removed from the caverns upon the injection of the gas; a 60-foot flare stack (a gas combustion device); a six-track rail site capable of loading and unloading 24 rail cars every 12 hours, each bearing 30,000 gallons of LPG; and a truck depot where four to five semi-trailers would be unloaded every hour.

As many as 32 rail cars at a time would cross a 75-year-old trestle that spans one of the country’s natural wonders, the Watkins Glen gorge, its shale sides forming steep columns down which waterfalls cascade.

The plan is riddled with accidents waiting to happen. Brine seepage, for example, could at some point make the lake water non-potable. (From 1964 to 1984, when propane was stored in two of the caverns, the lake’s salinity shot up.)

That’s only the first of many potential problems including tanker truck and train accidents, explosions, the emission of toxic and carcinogenic organic compounds from compressor stations and other parts of the industrial complex, air pollution, and impacts on local bird species and animal life due to deforestation and pollution.

Salt caverns 1,000 feet or more underground have been used for gas storage since the middle of the last century and have a checkered history.

A January 2015 analysis of Crestwood’s plan, based on documents by both independent scientists and an industry geologist, found 20 serious or extremely serious incidents in American salt cavern storage facilities between 1972 and 2012.

Ten of these involved large fires and explosions; six, loss of life or serious injury; eight, the evacuation of from 30 to 2,000 residents; and 13, extremely serious or catastrophic property loss.

via Dirty Energy vs. Clean Power: The Past Battles the Future at Seneca Lake by Ellen Cantarow for TomDispatch (via Unz Review).  An excellent article, well worth reading in its entirety.

Putin’s energy strategy for isolating Ukraine

Hat tip to Vineyard of the Saker.

President Putin has made an agreement with Germany, and offered an agreement to Turkey, that will enable Russia to serve its natural gas markets in western Europe while retaining the option to shut off Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states.

The Russian government plans to expand its North Stream pipeline across the Baltic Sea directly to Germany.   This would enable Russia to cut off natural gas to Ukraine and most of the rest of eastern Europe without interrupting its sales to western Europe.

Germany, which is now the financial hub of western Europe, would become the energy hub as well.

Russia has an alternate plan, the South Stream, a pipeline to cross the Black Sea to Bulgaria, but this has been canceled.  Instead Russia now hopes to build a Turkish Stream, which would connect directly with European Turkey.  Greece and other European countries would have the option of connecting to that pipeline.

The Turkish government also has the ambition of becoming an energy hub.  It is in a good position to do this because of its position as the crossroads between Europe and the Greater Middle East.  But, for political reasons, Turkey might have to give up plans for other pipelines to connect to Iran, Iraq and Azerbaijan if goes along with Russia’s Turkish Stream.

Not everything that is announced gets built, and in any case construction of these pipelines would take several years.   But Putin’s strategy could put Russia in a powerful position in regard to Ukraine and NATO’s eastern flank, and without firing a shot.

A plan to store natural gas under Seneca Lake

A plan is afoot to store natural gas in salt caverns beneath Seneca Lake, one of the world’s beauty spots, an important location for the New York wine industry and a source of fresh water for 100,000 people.

Although Gov. Andrew Cuoma has suspended hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in New York state, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has authority to allow fracked gas to be brought in for storage from Pennsylvania and other states.

Filmmaker Josh Fox and author and activist Sandra Steingraber report in the video above how the natural gas industry intends to make New York’s Finger Lakes a storage and transportation hub for gas throughout the Northeast.

They argue that this creates danger of not just of a gas explosion, but even of the collapse of the lake bottom.

LINKS

Video of the Week: We Are Seneca Lake – A Call to Action from Josh Fox and Sandra Steingraber from Josh Fox’s Gasland blog.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

We Are Seneca Lake: Josh Fox & Fracking Opponents Fight Natural Gas Storage Site in Upstate NY on Democracy Now! (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

Hillary Clinton promoted fracking to the world

My e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey in Baltimore sent me a link to a well-researched article in Mother Jones documenting how Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State promoted fracking in foreign countries.

Fracking—hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas—is a destructive process that, among other things, creates increased risk of earthquakes and contamination of ground water and uses up vital supplies of fresh water.

I’m opposed to fracking unless there is a more desperate need for fuel than there is now.

But however you look at it, promotion of fracking in foreign countries in no way benefits the American public, except for a few wealthy investors and corporate investors, such as Beau Biden, the Vice President’s son, who is on the board of directors of an energy company that hopes to do fracking in Ukraine.

There is a strong grass-roots opposition to fracking in many countries, and, to the extent that the American government is seen to be promoting fracking, this generates ill-will toward the U.S. government and Americans generally.

Unlike in the USA, most landowners do not own the mineral rights under their land. Those rights are owned by governments and can be sold, leased or given away even if the owner objects. So fracking decisions are not usually made by an individual landowner to get income, but by government officials.

Hillary Clinton did not decide to promote fracking on her own. This is President Obama’s policy.

I doubt Republicans in Congress have any objection to promoting fracking abroad. They object to the Obama administration presuming to regulate fracking on U.S. public lands.

LINK

How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World by Mariah Blake for Mother Jones.

The fracking boom is ending with a bust

Source: Business Insider.

Business booms are followed by busts—the interaction of overconfidence, oversupply and diminishing returns.

That’s not just a law of the free-market system, it’s a law of human nature.

As the chart above indicates, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is an industry entering the bust part of its cycle.

The glut of natural gas probably will continue for some time.   Gas companies would continue to pump gas even if they’re losing money.

They’ve already paid for the drilling equipment, and they’d lose less money by continuing to pump than by walking away from their sunk costs.

It’s good that New York state didn’t jump into fracking just now.   We’d have had all the problems associated with fracking and none of the benefits the come with getting in on the ground floor.

The wise thing to do just from a business point of view, aside from all environmental and climate considerations, is to keep natural gas in the ground as long as we can.  If there comes a time when we desperately need it, it will be there.

LINKS

Fracking has collapsed by Wolf Richter of Wolf Street for Business Insider.

Keystone XL, Cold War 2.0 and the GOP Vision for 2016 by Michael T. Klare for TomDispatch.  Fracking is a factor in geopolitics.

Update 2/28/15

As Bill Harvey pointed out in his comment, a decline in the number of rigs doesn’t mean a decline in production—that is, not right away.

Oil rigs and oil production in the United States

Russia turning down the gas on Europe

Russia cut natural gas shipments to Europe by 60 percent, and announced plans to eventually cut off shipments through Ukraine altogether.

The Urkainian route will be replaced with a new pipeline through Turkey, which will take a couple of years to build.  The European Union will need to build its own infrastructure to take the gas from the Greek border to the rest of Europe.

If the Europeans don’t get their new pipelines built in time, Russia will send its gas elsewhere, the head of Gazprom said.  Russia is working on gas deals not only with China, but with India.

Vladimir Putin is not a helpless victim of economic sanctions and falling oil prices.  He is willing and able to use Russia’s economic power to damage Ukraine and the European nations.

Nobody benefits from this cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation.  It’s an economic form of mutually assured destruction.

Russia Fires Ukraine as Natural Gas Transit for Europe by Michael Collins for Op-Ed News [added 1/16/2015]

The passing scene: Links & comments 11/18/14

Why US fracking companies are licking their lips over Ukraine by Naomi Klein for The Guardian (hat tip to Bill Harvey)

American oil and gas companies are using the Ukraine crisis to press for an increase on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and construction of LNG (liquified natural gas) terminals at U.S. seaports.

Supposedly this will enable the United States to export gas to Europe as a substitute for Russian gas cut off by sanctions.  The problem with this, as Naomi Klein pointed out, is that the Ukraine crisis probably will be long over by the time the LNG terminals are constructed.

This is an example of what Klein calls the “shock doctrine”—use of crises by special interests to manipulate people into agreeing to do things they don’t want to do.

The siege of Julian Assange is a farce by Australian journalist John Pilger.

Julian Assange has been living in a room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for two years to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questioning in a sexual misconduct case because he fears re-extradition to the United States for prosecution on his Wikileaks disclosures.

Pilger showed the case against Assange is bogus and his fears are well-founded.  Assange’s alleged victims haven’t accused him of any crime nor did the original investigators.  There is ample precedent for Swedish investigators to come to London to question Assange if they wish.  And the U.S. and Swedish governments have discussed his re-extradition.

Afghan Opium Production Hits All-Time High by Mike Whitney for Counterpunch.

The CIA would rather see Afghanistan dominated by drug lords than by the Taliban.

Can we do without nuclear power?

A lot of smart people think it is possible to eliminate or drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels while also eliminating nuclear power.  Maybe they’re right, but I don’t see it.

Presently New York’s electrical generating capacity is about one-third coal and oil, one-third natural gas, one-sixth nuclear power and most of the rest hydroelectric power.  Only about 3 percent is wind energy, and there is tiny plant powered by biomass.

The burning of coal and oil, especially coal, creates greenhouse gasses, so ideally we’d eliminate coal and minimize oil.

Natural gas, in contrast, burns cleanly, which is why it is promoted as a “transition” fuel.  But unburned natural gas (methane) is one of the worst greenhouse gasses, and fracking releases methane into the atmosphere.  Fracked natural gas doesn’t help the climate, but, without fracking, natural gas would be scarce and expensive.

All the good hydroelectric sites in New York are already used, so there’s little potential to increase hydro.  So you would have to step up production of wind energy by a factor of 25 or more.

I don’t see how it is possible do do without nuclear power and still maintain a dependable electricity supply.  I think nuclear power is a dangerous technology which nevertheless can be operated safely, provided the industry uses the best practices and the best technology.

This would mean phasing out existing U.S. nuclear power plants, most of which are past their scheduled decommissioning dates and some of which are located on earthquake fault zones, and building a new generation of nuclear power plants using the newest and best technology.

I will change my mind about this if Germany is able to stick to its moratorium on nuclear power without increasing its use of coal-fired and oil-fired power.  But as I see it, nuclear and coal are the only alternatives for increasing electric power generation.

The United States happens to have ample supplies of coal at current rates of use, as does China, but coal is the worst fuel in terms of effects on human health, the environment and climate change.  Maybe someday the USA and China can invent a way to burn coal cleanly, but otherwise I see no alternative to nuclear.

§§§

Can Europe keep the lights on this winter? by Mark Gilbert for Bloomberg View.  [added 10/30/14].  Another example of the problem of trying to do without both fossil fuels and nuclear power.

Blockadia: the climate fight’s new front

The fight against global warming consists of many local struggles that, at first glance, don’t have anything to do with climate change.

These struggles include resistance to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, to the Alberta tar sands industry and the Keystone XL pipeline, to deep ocean oil drilling and to other destructive practices by oil, gas and coal companies.

Such destructive practices are necessary to keep the fossil fuel companies in business because all the easy-to-get oil, gas and coal has been used up.  And greenhouse gas emissions will decrease only when oil and gas drilling and coal mining decrease.

Naomi Klein in her book, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: Capitalism vs The Climate, reported on how these scattered local resistance movements are coming to realize they are part of a common cause.

In just one chapter, she touched on protests in Greece, Rumania, Canada’s New Brunswick, England’s Sussex, Inner Mongolia, Australia, Texas, France, Ecuador, Nigeria, West Virginia, South Dakota, North America’s Pacific Northwest and Quebec—all related directly or indirectly to stopping fossil fuel operations that would produce greenhouse gasses.

She and others call this alliance “Blockadia”.   Unlike some of the big, established environmental organizations, the grass-roots protesters do not limit themselves to lawsuits and political lobbying.  They engage in nonviolent direct action, the kind of mass defiance that Gene Sharp advocated.   These movements, more than the lobbying and lawsuits of the Big Green environmental organizations, will determine the future climate, she wrote.

The interdependence of Russia and Europe

More Signs of Doubt in Europe About the Costs of Siding With Ukraine by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

The Beginning of an End of the Trans-Atlantic Alliance by Mark from Ireland for Ian Welsh.

Hat tip for the map to Vox.

Digging up our coal, oil and gas for export

I don’t think many Americans are aware of how much of our coal, oil and natural gas production is for export.  In particular, I don’t think Americans are as aware as we should be that the pipeline to carry bitumen from tar sands fields in Alberta to oil refineries in Texas is for the benefit of Canadian exporters, not (except very indirectly) American consumers.  The tar sands production is being piped south to Texas because other Canadian provinces are unwilling to take the environmental risk of having it piped east or west.

In and of itself, anything that reduces the U.S. trade deficit is a good thing, not a bad thing.  We need to import things from abroad, and we need to pay for them with exports.  Now we pay a price for this, which we did not have to pay for oil exports from Texas in the 1950s.

The easy-to-get coal, oil and natural gas has been pretty much used up, and so we need hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, mountaintop removal to dig for coal, deep water drilling for oil and the Alberta tar sands to get at what fossil fuels are left.

All these methods involve risks to human health and the natural environment, but that’s a price that can’t be avoided until alternatives are found and energy consumption is reduced.

An advanced nation should not depend on exports of raw materials, and imports of high-tech manufacturing goods, but that is the U.S. situation today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/business/energy-environment/an-oil-industry-awash-in-crude-argues-over-exporting.html?_r=0

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/24/coal-s-new-exporteconomyleavesacloudofdustoverlouisiana.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/03/140320-north-american-natural-gas-seeks-markets-overseas/

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text

As the old saying goes, you can’t have your cake, and eat it too.

A nation can’t have reserves of fossil fuels, and burn them up or sell them all for export, too.

Hat tip to Bill Elwell for the cartoon.

Methane hydrate and the future of fossil fuels

The word may be on the brink of a new era of cheap natural gas, made possible by hydraulic fracturing and development of a new fuel methane hydrate, according to Charles C. Mann in this month’s issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  Methane hydrate is a product of organic decay trapped in ice crystals, and is found in potentially enormous quantities in the ocean’s depths.  View the video for a better explanation.  Click on What If We Never Run Out of Oil? to read Mann’s article, which I highly recommend.

What Mann reported is interesting and significant, and his prediction may be correct.  But then again, maybe not.

“Never run out” means something different to economists from what it means to me and probably to you.  In a free-market, capitalistic economy, you never run out of anything.  What happens is that the scarce resource becomes increasingly more expensive, people use less of it, and eventually a substitute is found.   The question is just what that substitute is—an equivalent resource, a more expensive resource or acceptance of doing without.

I long thought that the rising price of fossil fuels would result in a transition to solar, wind and other renewable sources of energy.   Over time, I reasoned, the cost of nonrenewable resources are goes up, while the cost of technology goes down.  Sooner or later, I believed, these two lines must cross.

I still believe that this will happen someday. but in the short run, just the opposite is happening.  The petroleum industry has found ways to extract fossil fuels that never were dreamed of when King Hubbert made his predictions about peak oil.   Methane hydrate may or may not emerge as an important energy source.   I wouldn’t bet against it.  But even if it doesn’t, hydraulic fracturing has already transformed the world market for natural gas.  Melting of the polar ice cap will open the Arctic to oil exploration and development.   Someday these sources, too, may peak but not anytime soon.

The question about hydraulic fracturing is how low it will last.  Oil wells in Texas and Saudi Arabia produced oil for decades.  How long will the hydrofracking wells produce?  My guess is that their usefulness will be relatively short-lived, while leaving behind a long-term mess for local communities to clean up.

Experts quoted by Mann say that methane hydrate could provide fuel to keep our industrial civilization going for centuries and perhaps indefinitely.   These predictions usually come with a footnote, which says “at current rates of use.”  No matter how abundant a resource is, it will be quickly exhausted if you use it up at a steadily increasing rate.  I don’t see energy use stabilizing until the world’s population stabilizes, and a majority of the world’s population are not in poverty.   What is poverty?  At a minimum, it is having enough to sustain life and health and, beyond that, it is whatever people think it is.

Then there is the question of global climate change.   Natural gas (methane) is a clean-burning fuel, but in its natural state is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  In theory, natural gas can be extracted in such a way that it is not released into the atmosphere.  In practice, it might not be.

The more fossil fuels we burn up, the more fragile our civilization becomes.  We depend on increasingly complex systems that are increasingly vulnerable to failure.   I realize this every time there is a severe ice storm that causes electric power failures here in Rochester.  As I sit in the dark, I wonder what I would do if the failure were universal rather than local, and lasted indefinitely rather than a few days or weeks.

Back in 1954, Harrison S. Brown wrote in The Challenge of Man’s Future about how our industrialization was made possible by the availability of coal and oil, and of metal ores that were easy to process.   If for some reason industrial civilization should collapse, it would not be possible to rebuild it using the methods by which the original industrial civilization was created.  The resources would not be there.   That is still true, and the more nonrenewable resources we use up, the more true it becomes.

Hydrofracking: toxic costs for a clean, cheap fuel

Double click to enlarge

This chart from a New York Times article last year shows one of the costs of hydraulic fracturing, a technique for extracting natural gas tightly locked in shale strata by means of fracturing the shale and forcing out the gas with a mixture of water, chemicals and sand.   Even when this is done properly, there remains the problem of disposing of the waste water, which contains not only the hydrofracking chemicals but sometimes underground toxic metals and radioactive elements.

Some benefits of hydrofracking are shown in the charts below.  The technique increases the supply of natural gas, which drives down the price, and the increased use of clean-burning natural gas lessens greenhouse gas emissions.  Hydrofracking isn’t the sole reason for either lower prices or lower carbon emissions, but it is a big contributor.

Natural gas prices in inflation-adjusted dollars are the lowest since 1976.  Carbon dioxide emissions are the lowest since 1994.  But before we in upstate New York join in the hydrofracking boom, we should ask ourselves—which will be more permanent, the benefits or the costs?   It seems to me that we will still be dealing with the costs long after the boom is over.

Click on Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers for the New York Times article.

Click on Why US natural gas prices are so low for analysis of the economics of natural gas.

Click on U.S. Carbon Emissions Fall to Lowest Levels Since 1994 for more about the benefits of clean-burning natural gas.

Click on The record is clear: Obama delivers on clean energy for comment on President Obama’s support for hydrofracking.

Click on A Mysterious Patch of Light Shows Up in the North Dakota Dark for a report on North Dakota’s natural gas boom.

Click on Future Bakken Production and Hydrofracking for a report on the temporary nature of North Dakota’s boom.

Hydrofracking and the world balance of power

Two countries without shale gas reserves: Russia and Iran

All my life I’ve held that if you have a finite resource, such as oil or natural gas, and you use it at an ever-increasing rate, someday you will run out.   As a matter of logic, this is an irrefutable truth.  But all my life, the oil and gas industry has been rendering this truth irrelevant, by discovering new sources of oil and gas and new ways to get at it.

The latest discovery is the hydraulic fracturing technique for extracting natural gas, which, together with oil drilling in the warming Arctic, is creating a new energy era.

Because of hydrofracking, Americans are burning less coal and oil, and more clean-burning natural gas.  Carbon emissions are at their lowest level in nearly 20 years.   Increased use of renewable energy and better conservation methods contribute to the improvement, but hydrofracking is a key factor.

Because of hydrofracking, the world balance of power is changing in favor of the United States.   The world has less need to import oil from the Persian Gulf.  Europe has less need to import gas from the Russian Federation.   Here’s how Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, sees things.

The future of the American energy supply was looking grim until recently. With its own resources waning, the United States was dependent on Arab oil sheiks and erratic dictators. Rising energy costs were hitting a vital nerve in the country’s industrial sector.

But the situation has fundamentally changed since American drilling experts began using a method called “fracking,” with which oil and gas molecules can be extracted from dense shale rock formations.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the United States will replace Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas in only two years.  The Americans could also become the world’s top petroleum producers by 2017.

Low natural gas prices — the price of natural gas in the United States is only a quarter of what it was in 2008 — could fuel a comeback of American industry. *** ***  

The outlines of a changed world order are already emerging in the simulations of geo-strategists.  They show that the United States will benefit the most from the development of shale gas and oil resources.  A study by Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, concludes that Washington’s discretionary power in foreign and security policy will increase substantially as a result of the country’s new energy riches.

According to the BND study, the political threat potential of oil producers like Iran will decline. Optimists assume that, in about 15 years, the United States will no longer have to send any aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to guarantee that oil tankers can pass unhindered through the Strait of Hormuz, still the most important energy bottleneck in the world.

The Russians could be on the losing end of the stick.   The power of President Vladimir Putin is based primarily on oil and gas revenues.  If energy prices decline in the long term, bringing down Russian revenues from the energy sector, Putin’s grip on power could begin to falter.  The Americans’ sudden oil and gas riches are also not very good news for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

I’m of course glad that natural gas prices are falling, and that I am paying less to heat my house than I did a few years ago.  I acknowledge that hydrofracking has contributed to my well-being.  I don’t think it would benefit anyone if I were to switch to fuel oil, or if it would be possible to return to the coal furnaces of my boyhood.

My friend Michael thinks cheap gas from hydrofracking will tide us over during the transition to renewable energy.  I doubt it will work this way.  So long as the price of the supposed transitional energy supply is falling, there will be little economic incentive to make the transition.  That will have to wait until the price of fossil fuels starts to rise again.

I know that I can’t predict the future.  I won’t try to predict how long the hydrofracking boom will last.  I would be happy of the supply of cheap gas lasts my lifetime.  Since I’m 76, it just might.  But I don’t think it will last the lifetime of my niece and nephew, or of their infants and toddlers.  I read a report on The Oil Drum site that hydrofracked gas wells are being depleted more quickly than expected, and I link to that report at the end of this post.

I still think the smart thing for we upstate New Yorkers to do is to hold back on hydrofracking until the price of natural gas starts going up again.   The question is not whether hydrofracking is a good thing overall or not, but rather whether adding our little increment to the world supply will be worth the cost.

Click on Full Throttle Ahead: US Tips Global Power Scales With Fracking for the full Der Spiegel article.

Click on Future Bakken Production and Hydrofracking for the full article on The Oil Drum.

Click on U.S. Carbon Emissions Fall to Lowest Level Since 1994 for a report on the benefit of clean-burning natural gas.

Click on Gazprom Gas Giant Is Running Into Trouble and Stepping on the Gas: New Drilling Technologies Shake Up Global Market for more from Der Spiegel on natural gas and world power.

Why New York should hold off on hydrofracking

This new documentary by Josh Fox makes a case against hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in New York and rebuts arguments against his earlier documentary, Gasland.

My previous view of the hydraulic fracturing process was that it could be done safely if industry adopted best practices, but the actually drilling would be so scattered there would be no way regulators could make sure everything was done correctly.  Fox cited internal documents of the gas industry indicating that the process was inherently dangerous.  The concrete casings that supposedly prevent contamination of ground water are in fact porous.

Now, I depend on natural gas to heat my home, and I appreciate the human effort and ingenuity that are necessary to bring the gas to my house.  But there are substitutes for gas, and there are no substitutes for clean fresh water.

Maybe there are valid answers to Fox’s arguments.  If so, it will do no harm, except to the financial interests of the gas industry, to hold up on hydrofracking until these answers can be weighed.  The natural gas isn’t going to go away just because there is a delay in drilling for it.

Click on New Anti-Fracking Film by Gasland’s Josh Fox Targets Cuomo: ‘Governor, What Color Will the Sky Be Over New York? for background on Fox’s new documentary from Rolling Stone magazine.  Hat tip for the link to Bill Elwell.

Click on Gasland Director Josh Fox on His New Film, Gas Industry Lies and Government Collusion for more.  [Added 7/4/12]

Click on Shale Gas: The View From Russia for a sidelight from Dimitry Orlov’s ClubOrlov web log.

Click on Reflections on the Natural Gas Revolution That’s Already Begun for musings by Conor Friedersdorf on The Atlantic Monthly. [Added 7/4/12]

Natural gas: the fuel of the future?

When I reported on the electric utility industry 25 or 30 years ago for the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, natural gas was regarded as a premium fuel—an ideal fuel in that it burned cleanly, without emitting pollutants, but costing much more than any of the alternatives.

Nuclear power was the cheapest fuel, followed by coal and then oil.  But nuclear power plants were the most expensive to build, followed by coal-fired plants, then by oil-fired plants with natural gas plants the cheapest to build.  So the logic was that you would want nuclear power for your base-load generation—the power you would want turned on all the time, year in and year out.  And you would want natural gas for your peaking power, the power you would turn on to meet peak demands, such as for air conditioning on the hottest day of summer and electric heat on the coldest day of winter.

I’m now reading energy expert Daniel Yergin’s new book, The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World, and Yergin says all that is out of date.  Natural gas is now cheap and abundant and, in his view, the fuel of the future for the electric power industry and much else.

Yergin wrote:

Natural gas is the fuel of the future.  World consumption has tripled over the last thirty years, and demand could grow another 50 percent over the next two decades.  Its share of the total energy market is also growing.  World consumption on an energy-equivalent basis was only 45 percent that of oil; today it is about 70 percent.

The reasons are clear:  It is a relatively low-carbon resource.  It is also a flexible fuel that could play a larger role in electric power, both for its own features and as an effective—and indeed necessary—complement to greater reliance on renewable generation.  And technology is making it more and more available, whether in terms of advances in conventional drilling, the ability to move it over long-distance pipelines, the expansion of LNG onto much larger scale, or, most recently, the revolution in unconventional natural gas.

Back when I was reporting on the industry, natural gas was transmitted in pipelines.  That’s why the Reagan administration objected to Russia’s Gasprom exporting natural gas to Western Europe; officials feared the Soviet government would be in a position to cut off supplies.

Click to enlarge.

There was an emerging trade back then in liquified natural gas, or LNG, but this was in its infancy.  LNG involves cooling natural gas down to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, at which it turns into a liquid with 1/600th the volume of the gas.   Yergin described how availability of LNG has created a world market in natural gas, led by Qatar, which shares access with Iran to the world’s richest natural gas field, right in the middle of the Persian Gulf.  Other LNG exporters include Oman, Abu Dhabi, Algeria, Libya, Egypt,  Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, Australia, Russian Sakhalin, Alaska, Trinidad and Peru.

The necessity to keep LNG at such incredibly low temperatures makes it seem like an unforgiving and dangerous technology.  Yergin didn’t address safety issues, but the Wikipedia article on LNG indicated a good safety record to date.

What Yergin calls “unconventional” natural gas is extraction of natural gas tightly locked into strata of shale by means of a technology known as hydraulic fracturing—a technology which, some of us here in upstate New York believe, creates a danger of water pollution, minor and not-so-minor earthquakes and destruction of the rural countryside.  Yergin did not deal with these objections.  I imagine he would say that this is no worse than coal mining, oil drilling or any other type of fossil fuel extraction.

Coal is the most undesirable source of energy.  The mining of deep coal is one of the most dangerous occupations.  Coal miners have a high death rate in mining accidents and black lung disease.  Surface mining is destructive to the environment.  Coal is the worst source of pollution.  Coal emissions cause respiratory disease and acid rain.  And coal is a major contributor to global warming.

Yet coal is what the United States may have to fall back on if all else fails.  Yergin pointed out that the United States has a quarter of the world’s known reserves of coal, about the same as Saudi Arabia’s known reserves of oil.  The United States together with China, another coal-rich nation, are working on technologies to burn coal cleanly.  One such technology is carbon capture, which would remove carbon from the smoke as it goes up the stack, and make it useful, or easily disposable.

I always thought of nuclear energy as a dangerous technology that is possible to operate safely.  The Chernobyl disaster showed the cost to human life when a nuclear power plant was operated without proper precautions.  Yet the excellent safety record of the U.S. and French nuclear power industries convinced me that, with proper safeguards, these dangers could be averted.   And, as Yergin noted, the increasing efficiency of nuclear power plants has been the equivalent of a whole new source of energy in itself.  I agreed with President Obama’s plan to bring about a rebirth of nuclear energy in the United States.

The Fukushima catastrophe in Japan called my assumptions into question.  The catchphrase, “Nobody could have predicted…”, is a common excuse for negligence and failure.  But I do not think the Japanese were negligent.  As far as I know, they did everything a reasonable person could have done to ensure safety and reliability.  Nobody could have predicted an undersea earthquake would create a tsunami that would inundate the plant and destroy all its backup systems.

So this leaves natural gas.   I still think it would be best to put off hydraulic fracturing for natural gas as long as possible, in hope that more benign technologies will appear.  If not, the gas is not going to go away.  It will be more valuable in the future than it is now.  If there is no choice but to go ahead, New York and other states should enact a severance tax, similar to what Texas, Alaska and other states have for oil.  If we are going to put the countryside at risk, we should be getting something back in return.

Click on Daniel Yergin | Official Website for Yergin’s home page.

Click on Daniel Yergin Examines America’s ‘Quest’ for Energy for a link to a National Public Radio interview with Daniel Yergin on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.  [Added 3/24/12]

Click on Hydrofracking and  carbon caps for an earlier post of mine.

Click on Liquified natural gas wiki for a Wikipedia article on LNG.

Click on Qatar Economy | Economy Watch for more about Qatar’s natural gas industry and the source of the map below, which shows world exports and imports of LNG and pipeline nature gas.

What’s the hurry on hydrofracking?

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation, with the approval of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has set up a fast-track approval process for hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the state.  Public comments are being sought on the process itself and on the DEC’s proposed rules for the process at the same time, rather the one first and then the other if approved.  The comment period ends Dec. 12, and the DEC will then consider the comments and make its decision.

What’s the hurry?  The natural gas has been under the ground for hundreds of millions of years.   It won’t go away if the state government takes a slow and careful approach to studying hydraulic fracturing.  The natural gas will only become more valuable over time.  And – who knows? – maybe new technologies will be discovered that answer or mitigate current objections.

I can understand why natural gas companies are eager to drill.  If a natural resource is available, a business will want to exploit it before a competing business gets access to it.  But this is not necessarily in the public interest, and the DEC ought to take a longer-range view.

Hydraulic fracturing – “hydrofracking” for short – is a process for extracting hard-to-get natural gas from shale formations.  A casing is sunk deep into the shale formation, then horizontally.  The shale is fractured, and water mixed with detergent is forced into the fractures at high pressure, forcing out the natural gas.

Josh Fox, producer of the documentary movie Gasland, who is shown in the video above, says hydrofracking posts dangers to the environment and to public health.  The detergents contain toxic chemicals which potentially could contaminate underground water.  Natural gas (methane) burns cleanly, but in its raw state is a greenhouse gas with 25 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide.  The process of hydrofracking creates wear and tear on the land, and on local roads and bridges.

But hydrofracking creates jobs in regions of New York state where unemployment is high.  Natural gas drillers say the shale formations are so far beneath the watershed that contamination is impossible.  The DEC says that hydrofracking, if done right, should not have an unacceptable environmental impact.

At present we need fossil fuels and nuclear power to maintain our industrial civilization.  The easy-to-get fossil fuels are being used up, and, unless alternatives are developed, it will be necessary to authorize hydrofracking for natural gas, mountaintop removal for coal and deep ocean drilling for oil, or revert to a primitive existence.  But we need not be in a hurry to take irrevocable actions.  The natural gas, coal and oil will not go away.  They still be there if and when we decide we need them.

Fracking the French

Toreador Resources Corp. shale oil exploration sites

The French government is considering allowing hydraulic fracturing for shale oil in a geological formation called the Paris Basin, an 87,000-square-mile agricultural region east of the city of Paris.  Environmental groups in France as just as opposed to hydrofracking as environmental groups here in upstate New York.  A report by the French government is due out in mid-April.

Click on Why oil firms eye bucolic France for an article by Anita Elash in the Christian Science Monitor.

Click on Hunting French sale oil for an update by Reuters.

Click on Hydrofracking and carbon caps for my earlier post on the hydrofracking controversy in upstate New York, which includes charts and videos explaining what hydraulic fracturing is and how it works.

Click on Hydraulic fracturing wiki for Wikipedia’s explanation and background information.

Hydrofracking and carbon caps

Like almost everybody else I know, I oppose the environmentally destructive practice of hydrofracking – horizontal drilling for shale gas using hydraulic fracturing.  But without the development of large-scale and practical alternatives to natural gas and other fossil fuels, we will have no alternative in the end.

New York state is on top of the northern edge of the Marcellus Shale, a large mostly-underground shale formation extending below West Virginia and parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania.  There are large quanities of natural gas in the pores and cracks of the shale, and conventional technologies are incapable of extracting it.

Hydrofracking involves fracturing underground shale formations by means of shaped explosive charges, and then forcing out natural gas by injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals at high pressure.  This requires millions of gallons of water per well.

Part of the water stays in the ground and, opponents say, could work its way into the ground water.

My default position is that we should refrain from hydrofracking, and, for that matter, from surface mining for coal or deep ocean drilling for oil as long as we possibly can.  The natural gas, coal and oil have been underground for millions of years.  They won’t go away if we wait another 10, 20, 50 or 100 years to dig them up.  Maybe in the meantime affordable substitutes for fossil fuel will become available.  Maybe better methods of extraction will be developed.  Maybe there will be some sort of breakthrough which I can’t even imagine.

But hope is not a plan. Easy-to-get natural gas, coal and oil have been used up.  I heat my own house with natural gas, and I know it has to come from somewhere.

Demand for natural gas is increasing at a rapid rate because of the likelihood of caps on emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gasses that is heating up our planet.  Caps on carbon dioxide mean less use of coal and oil and, in the absence of a commercially-available alternative, more use of natural gas and nuclear energy.  Natural gas is clean burning, and nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gasses at all.

One irony is that release of natural gas (methane) into the atmosphere is one of the problems associated with hydrofracking. While natural gas is clean burning, raw natural gas is one of the most potent greenhouse gasses – much more powerful than carbon dioxide.  So it is possible that the increased use of natural gas, whose purpose is to slow down global warming, may help make the problem worse.