Our World Today
Will Fracking free us from fuel famine forever?
September 1 2013
“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.”
President Barack Obama in his 2012 State of the Union speech
Costica Bradatan in a recent article in the New York Times starts his article as follows:
In her exploration of the Catholic religion, “Letter to a Priest,” written the year before her death in 1943, Simone Weil noticed at some point that “for any man a change of religion is as dangerous a thing as a change of language is for a writer. It may turn out a success, but it can also have disastrous consequences.” The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who was one such writer, talks of the change of language as a catastrophic event in any author’s biography. And rightly so.”
This definitely fits my profile. My writing in a language different than my original tongue has been a life-altering experience: it has changed my entire personality, my outlook, my way of life. I believe that this applies only when a person is an adult and is basically fully formed when making such a switch. At least in my mind this accounts for me being different from most others, and explains my inner urge, bordering on obsession perhaps, to broadcast my views with the zeal of a new convert. The article states that “This is why to abandon your native tongue and to adopt another is to dismantle yourself, piece by piece, and then to put yourself together again, in a different form.”
I do believe that all immigrants are affected by moving from one language to another. Many remain intellectually and spiritually at the level where they were when they emigrated: that is the safest way to cope with a new country and a new language.
With me it is different. I question all the time. In a sense nothing is sacred. By that I don’t mean that I hold nothing sacred: I do. I have become convinced that our planet is sacred, that loving God is best expressed by loving his creation and all it contains, just as we show our love for J. S. Bach by listening to his music.
I certainly question Obama’s boast that America has a 100 year supply of natural gas, if by gas he means the burnable stuff. Gas also means ‘empty talk’ and of that, indeed, politicians have an infinite supply. Obama bases his claim on the new/old method of ‘fracking’. There’s a new word for you. Just as ‘to fax’ comes from ‘to make a facsimile’, a copy, in the same way ‘fracking’ is derived from ‘hydraulic fracturing’. Hydraulic indicates that there is water involved, and, indeed, it needs lots of it. This fluid, laced with chemicals, is pumped into a well under high pressure in order to release the tight natural gas or shale oil. This process was well-known, but was not used before because it’s highly expensive, so it became ‘new’ again when $100 per barrel made it feasible.
A barrel of oil sells at a premium, while natural gas is cheap, so cheap that it is simply burned off on site. The reason is transport: oil can easily be shipped anywhere in the world. Natural gas takes a lot of volume, and, before it can make the trip overseas, it needs to be compressed into liquid form (LNG – Liquid Natural Gas) which is an expensive process. Then at the port of entry it needs decompressing, another money-intensive transaction. Thus natural gas, unless transported by pipeline- only possible overland- tends to stay close to home where there is an abundance of supply. Thus the supposed 100 year supply in Obama’s grand oratory is only valid when natural gas is high-priced.
The current saying is that ‘water is the new gold’. I recently noticed a news item, tucked away in the back pages, how in Texas, which has suffered from a 3 year long drought, entire villages are without water because ‘fracking’ nearby had sucked away whatever was left. I imagine that these people now use an adjective that sounds the same as ‘fracking’ but has a rather derogatory meaning. They will not be the only ones to use that description of ‘fracking.’
Criticizing ‘fracking’ is all the rage now. Richard Heinberg, an author of some 10 books on peak oil and related resource depletion topics, is one of them. The title of his book says it all: Snake Oil, with as subtitle “How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future”.
Fracking- frankly I hate the sound of the term – is simply an outcome of Peak Oil. Its real beneficiaries are the financial institutions who have sold this concept to gullible buyers, no different from the Mortgage Backed Bonds prior to 2008 which precipitated the money crisis then. Today money earns only 1-2% which has given rise to a lot of gambling. (A million bucks only earns $10,000 at 1 percent.) So people invest in Fracking. Oil companies basically are after oil. They know that production from the world’s existing oil fields is declining by 4-5 percent annually while demand is increasing by about a million barrels per day (b/d) each year. This simply means that the world will have to come up with 5 million barrels per day of new oil production each year for the foreseeable future no matter what the cost. We, you, I, are hooked on crude oil: we demand an infinite supply which each day comes at a higher price, both in climatic consequences and in hard dollars because it takes more and more energy to produce energy. It’s simple. The easy oil has long gone which has given birth to a new acronym: EOEI, which stands for Energy Obtained by Energy Invested. Fracking is high in EOEI, and its depletion rate is outrageous with per-well production decline rates of between 81 and 90 percent in the first 24 months, which means that new wells must be drilled constantly to keep production up. If environmental cost were counted, fracking would have long been abandoned. In spite of Obama’s pledge to develop this safely, the industry sees only one thing: oil at all cost, and that cost is enormous.
What is the cost? The oil and natural gas pumped out floats on the water pumped in, water that is totally polluted. Whatever poisonous substances are left in the ground tend to penetrate into neighboring wells. The unsettling of the underground structures, due to the unusual pressure exercised there, is causing minor earthquakes as well. Also a lot of much more potent methane escapes when the oil and gas surfaces.
Heinberg in his book Snake Oil makes four points.
First. He refutes the claims that fracking promises a new age of limitless cheap energy for Americans. They are based on a patchwork of unjustifiable assumptions and outright fabrications that wildly overstate potential production and tacitly ignore all the downsides of a far from flawless technology.
Second. Fracking piles up short term profits for a few by loading immense long term costs on local communities, natural systems, and future generations.
Third. A major portion of what Obama paints as a century supply has been fabricated by those same folks on Wall Street who brought us last decade’s housing bubble and bust, and the financial footwork that nearly torpedoed the global economy in 2008 and 2009.
Fourth. This fracking phenomenon prevents us from facing the real crisis of our time, that of saying good bye to our current dependence on fossil fuels. As Heinberg points out, there aren’t enough economically recoverable fossil fuels left in the planet’s crust to keep the world chugging ahead on a business-as-usual track of economic growth for much longer, but there’s more than enough to finish the job of destabilizing the Earth’s climate and pitching us face first into a very difficult future.
I found some revealing calculations of the true cost of fracking. Raoul Meijer of the Automatic Earth concluded the following: based on 840 new wells, which added 52,828 barrels per day, or an increase of 62.89 barrels per day per well ( 52,828: 840). Given a cost of $8 million per well, the capital cost works out to $127,205 per barrel/day. If their profit margin – just for the sake of argument – is $30/barrel, this suggests that it takes $11.6 of investment to make $1/year of return. No wonder big oil names Shell and BHP Billiton are writing down the value of their shale assets by billions of dollars.
Out in shale country reality is sinking in. The pace of drilling in the Fayetteville shale has dropped dramatically this year; in Texas, meanwhile, gas production from the Barnett Shale has dropped more than a billion cubic feet a day, to levels last seen in 2009; while in the Marcellus Shale country of Pennsylvania, insurance companies are starting to cancel homeowners insurance and home mortgages are becoming unavailable as the health and environmental toll of reckless shale development piles up.
Writes Meijer: “Still, you won’t hear that from the media, not until long after the boom has gone bust, the hardware has been sold to the Chinese for scrap, and the sole remaining legacy of the shale bubble consists of county-sized areas where the groundwater is too toxic to drink.”
To me there are no longer holy cows. Every institution is in the deceiving game, with banks, oil companies and governments leading the pack.
In the utterly cruel world we live in we better start realizing that the absurd abundance of energy and resources that we all enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century was nothing else but a flash in the pan, a brief period of abandonment of all common sense. Where in Europe cities were built with 2 legs in mind, an avalanche of cheap fuel caused America’s cities, suburbs and ex-urban developments to be founded on four wheels. Now the wheels are coming off the economy. Cheap fuel fueled extravagance and waste that will have to be unlearnt painfully as the last of the surplus fades away.
I am the old-fashioned type, reared on thrift and preservation, on make-do and economy, grown up on buying the best and wearing it out.
We are returning to war-time conditions, to depression-dominated days, so brush up on what that really means. Learn the trades of the forefathers: to make things by hand; to re-use and wear out or even do without. Become self-sufficient and a contrarian. The people in power will keep on lying about the future.
In Ontario where I live the year 2013 has been a fabulous growing year, in direct contrast with 2012 when nothing grew. Apples galore; raspberries aplenty; potatoes prodigious; glorious cabbages: I even made sauerkraut this year for the first time; carrots and red beets in abundance: we had to buy an extra freezer to accommodate our blessings. It makes me wonder whether this year encapsulated the ‘seven fat years’ all in one brief season. Who knows what next year will bring.
An era is coming to a close: the age of abundance is fading. This unprecedented period also saw the rise of antibiotics and the onset of the Green revolution, guaranteeing long life with plenty of food. Anti-biotic resistance is on the increase: too much of the drug has made it ineffective with dangerous implications, as a simple infection may become deadly. A growing world population, higher expectations, expanding deserts, too much rain or not enough is imperiling global food supply.
Will fracking free us of from fuel famine forever? No. Fracking is as cruel to the earth as crucifixion is to us. Fracking is fulfilling the Isaiah prophecy “The earth is defiled by the people; they have disobeyed my laws…therefore a curse consumes the earth.” (Is.24: 5-6).
However, it will speed up the coming of the Kingdom.
Next week:
The mess in the Middle East. Civilization started in the Middle East. Will it end there too?
In August my blog hielema.ca/blog had almost 7000 visitors: 6,988 to be exact.