Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future by Richard Heinberg
Authors: Richard Heinberg
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there could be fundamental barriers to the widespread application of fracking technology outside the United States. Let’s explore the factors at work and see whether they support an expectation of worldwide shale gas and tight oil abundance.
Some countries have banned, tightly regulated, or put off fracking for environmental reasons. Outright bans have been enacted in France, Luxembourg, and Bulgaria. In Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom, tight regulations constrain drillers. Throughout most of Europe there is strong public opposition to fracking on environmental grounds. Whether these are temporary or persisting impediments to industry development will depend on forthcoming revelations about the environmental safety of fracking, and on industry efforts to address the problems. As we’ll see in Chapter 4, the impacts to air quality, water quality, and climate from shale gas and tight oil production are hardly trivial.
In the United States, public opposition to fracking has been attenuated by the system of private ownership of mineral rights. Households that stand to gain thousands, perhaps even a few million dollars, from leasing drilling rights and from subsequent production royalties are often willing not just to overlook environmental problems, but to actively oppose other members of their communities who seek to enact drilling moratoria or bans. In most other nations, the government owns all mineral rights. Local environmental problems that ensue from fracking are therefore likely to provoke much more local opposition outside the United States.
While large shale gas and tight oil reserves numbers are often touted for other nations, those numbers are highly speculative. According to a 2011 US Energy Information Administration estimate, Poland has Europe’s largest recoverable reserves of shale gas—187 trillion cubic feet, a third more than those of the Marcellus shale. However, this is a fairly meaningless statistic: the Polish Geological Institute estimates the nation’s reserves at 27 trillion cubic feet, only about one-seventh the EIA figure. Until many wells have been drilled and are in production, both numbers are mere guesses. Currently, nearly 1,200 drilling rigs are busy perforating America’s shale beds; Poland so far deploys only half a dozen rigs.
Hence another problem with the worldwide deployment of fracking: the lack of technology. The oil and gas industry got its start in the United States, and America has always enjoyed a technological edge when it comes to drilling. Most of the world’s oil services companies, which pioneered nearly all of the important innovations in drilling during the past century and a half, are headquartered in Texas. The United States has half the world’s drilling rigs, and American colleges and universities still turn out the bulk of the world’s petroleum geologists and engineers. Other countries—China comes quickly to mind—could make the enormous investments required to develop the needed technology, build the rigs, and train the experts. But it would still take time.
Water can also be a limiting factor. Saudi Arabia has plenty of gas-bearing shales, but little of the water that would be necessary to hydrofracture them. As climate change brings more extreme periodic drought conditions to nations like Australia and China, high water demands may make hydrofracturing problematic-to-impossible in those countries as well. 17
Geology is a problem too. As we’ve seen, not all US shale plays are created equal, and even in the best of them only localized “core areas” are actually profitable to drill. The same principle holds for the rest of the world. China’s shale gas resources are purported to be the world’s largest, beating even those of the United States. But the Chinese formations are more complex than those in the United States, many having a high clay content, which makes them more pliable and less apt to fracture. Also, many Chinese shale plays
Some countries have banned, tightly regulated, or put off fracking for environmental reasons. Outright bans have been enacted in France, Luxembourg, and Bulgaria. In Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom, tight regulations constrain drillers. Throughout most of Europe there is strong public opposition to fracking on environmental grounds. Whether these are temporary or persisting impediments to industry development will depend on forthcoming revelations about the environmental safety of fracking, and on industry efforts to address the problems. As we’ll see in Chapter 4, the impacts to air quality, water quality, and climate from shale gas and tight oil production are hardly trivial.
In the United States, public opposition to fracking has been attenuated by the system of private ownership of mineral rights. Households that stand to gain thousands, perhaps even a few million dollars, from leasing drilling rights and from subsequent production royalties are often willing not just to overlook environmental problems, but to actively oppose other members of their communities who seek to enact drilling moratoria or bans. In most other nations, the government owns all mineral rights. Local environmental problems that ensue from fracking are therefore likely to provoke much more local opposition outside the United States.
While large shale gas and tight oil reserves numbers are often touted for other nations, those numbers are highly speculative. According to a 2011 US Energy Information Administration estimate, Poland has Europe’s largest recoverable reserves of shale gas—187 trillion cubic feet, a third more than those of the Marcellus shale. However, this is a fairly meaningless statistic: the Polish Geological Institute estimates the nation’s reserves at 27 trillion cubic feet, only about one-seventh the EIA figure. Until many wells have been drilled and are in production, both numbers are mere guesses. Currently, nearly 1,200 drilling rigs are busy perforating America’s shale beds; Poland so far deploys only half a dozen rigs.
Hence another problem with the worldwide deployment of fracking: the lack of technology. The oil and gas industry got its start in the United States, and America has always enjoyed a technological edge when it comes to drilling. Most of the world’s oil services companies, which pioneered nearly all of the important innovations in drilling during the past century and a half, are headquartered in Texas. The United States has half the world’s drilling rigs, and American colleges and universities still turn out the bulk of the world’s petroleum geologists and engineers. Other countries—China comes quickly to mind—could make the enormous investments required to develop the needed technology, build the rigs, and train the experts. But it would still take time.
Water can also be a limiting factor. Saudi Arabia has plenty of gas-bearing shales, but little of the water that would be necessary to hydrofracture them. As climate change brings more extreme periodic drought conditions to nations like Australia and China, high water demands may make hydrofracturing problematic-to-impossible in those countries as well. 17
Geology is a problem too. As we’ve seen, not all US shale plays are created equal, and even in the best of them only localized “core areas” are actually profitable to drill. The same principle holds for the rest of the world. China’s shale gas resources are purported to be the world’s largest, beating even those of the United States. But the Chinese formations are more complex than those in the United States, many having a high clay content, which makes them more pliable and less apt to fracture. Also, many Chinese shale plays
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