"The Real Cost of Fracking", Beacon Press, Boston (2014)

Seven (7) books on “fracking” (horizontal drilling with slick-water high-pressure hydraulic fracturing using silica sand)

From an Article by Katharine Whittemore, Boston Globe,  May 23, 2015

Blame — or thank — the volcanoes. Out here in Western Massachusetts, we sit on a geological shelf called the Hartford Basin, which runs from Vermont to the Connecticut shore, and its shale is pretty lacking, for fracking, because ancient volcanic activity heated up the trapped natural gas so much, it likely cooked it off. That’s why fracking companies, in search of natural gas, don’t much care for New England; in the Northeast, they love Pennsylvania, and its baked-just-right geology. In fact, the Marcellus Shale, named for a town in New York and stretching west to Ohio and south to Tennessee, is the nation’s biggest natural-gas producing region. How big? It holds 84 trillion cubic feet of the stuff. But the Hartford Basin? Only 3.5 billion. We aren’t worth the candle.

Massachusetts may not do fracking, with all the environmental concerns it stirs up, but the practice affects us nonetheless. Over the weeks I read these books, I spotted lots of “Say No to the Pipeline” lawn signs, courtesy of nofrackedgasinmass.org; the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. wants to funnel their Marcellus loot through New England, as far as Dracut. Pipeline yes or no, one fourth of US energy use now comes from natural gas. Amazing, since its been “as inaccessible as the sword in the stone from Arthurian legend,” writes Russell Gold, until innovations in hydraulic fracturing changed the game forever.

Gold is the senior energy reporter for the Wall Street Journal and author of “The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World” (Simon and Schuster, 2014). He issues a smart overview of the history, the process, and the players, with a charged personal twist; his parents debate whether to let Chesapeake Energy frack their Pennsylvania farmland. We think of fracking as a new technology, but there’s a long comet trail of trial and error here. Just after the Civil War, an oilman named Edward Roberts invented the “Roberts torpedo,” cylinders filled with gunpowder that were lowered into water wells, in order to jet new seams in nearby oil-rich rock. After World War II, oilman Bob Fast added surplus napalm to the water, but this, and many like efforts after, produced too little return.

Gold also covers our modern pioneers, George Mitchell of Mitchell Energy and Aubrey McClendon of Chesapeake Energy. The turning point comes when hydraulic fracturing (shooting “slick-water,” full of chemicals and abrading sand) gets married to horizontal drilling, in that a long vertical drill (think the letter I) bends perpendicular far underground (now it’s an L). The water mixture is pumped in under high pressure, prying cracks open in the rock, and freeing gas trapped within. Gold is no fracking apologist here. But he does emphasize the benefits, namely that natural gas is the least carbon-intensive fossil fuel (its footprint is 60 percent lower than coal’s, the most carbon-intensive). It’s a bridge fuel, buying us time to perfect how to power the earth on sun and wind: “Until then, natural gas is the best available option available for reducing carbon emissions, without grinding the wheels of modern economies to a halt.”

In “Groundswell: The Case for Fracking” (Signal, 2014), Ezra Levant comes out swinging. He calls the opposition “hysterical” and “environmental extremists.” He also says the EPA has “found no proven cases of fracking-related contamination. Exactly zero. Not a single one, anywhere, ever.” It’s true that it’s hard to prove whether contaminants come from the fracking process, though rebuttals thrive in my other books. His more compelling point is that fracking is not just “about the cash,” it’s “about freedom.” Indeed, natural gas means that America is no longer beholden to those OPEC nations, or any other oil producers, that violate human rights. The choice is between “western shale gas versus Russian Gazprom gas, Iranian ayatollah gas, or Qatari sharia gas.” He adds: “It’s the choice between ethical energy and conflict energy.”

Richard Heinberg disdains the other side, too, though he’s got a better sense of humor about it in “Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future” (Post Carbon Institute, 2013). “[L]et the metaphor begin!” he says, and rolls out two teams, the first dubbed the “Cornucopians,” who think the natural gas supply could last up to a hundred years, like a horn of plenty. Their philosophy? “There’s nothing to worry about, folks. Just keep driving.” The Cornucopians are selling you snake oil, says Heinberg, thus his book title. But the Peakists (Heinberg’s team) can prove the downward slide is already here; he crunches the stats (or maybe gives the frackonomics?), stressing that the extraction rate stopped growing in 2005, so the peak has passed. All in all, it’s “downright dumb” to keep relying on fossil fuels.

Words like dumb or hysterical never appear in this next, refreshingly dispassionate, entry. In “Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University, 2013), Alex Prud’homme says fracking “is neither all good nor all bad,” though he admits that his case-against-it chapter is longer than the case-for-it one. Still, natural gas has been called “the fuel of no choice” because it’s better than oil and coal (because of those lower carbon emissions) and nuclear (because it releases no radioactivity). I was alarmed, however, to learn that companies are not required, by law, to reveal which chemicals slick their water; veteran fracking states like Pennsylvania have now passed disclosure laws, but new ones to the game (like Kansas) haven’t. In 2011, a congressional report said that of the 2,500 chemicals used in the fracking process, 650 contain “known or possible human carcinogens.” Meanwhile New Jersey and Vermont have banned fracking, and New York is holding off, until environmental impact studies are done.

“Shale Gas: The Promise and the Peril” (RTI, 2012) tries to be even-handed, too, but it certainly cants toward promise over peril: Author Vikram Rao was the former chief technology officer of Halliburton, and currently directs North Carolina’s Research Triangle Energy Consortium. Rao is astute at presenting science-for-regular-people and clear-eyed that the boom market for natural gas, the second-chance fossil fuel, has slowed the onset of the renewables age. Thus “[p]olicy mechanisms are needed to level the playing field.” As such, Rao points to Alberta, Canada, where they tax oil from the Tar Sands, siphoning the revenue toward fixing eco-problems linked to oil and gas.

My last two books may not be carbon-neutral, but they are jargon-neutral, since they’re well-written, well-reported, and very human. “Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale” (Cornell University, 2012) is by Tom Wilber, a former newspaper reporter in upstate New York, and because an academic press published it, the book was peer reviewed. And indeed, it opens with a field trip with a professor of geosciences (Terry Engelder of Penn State), the renowned (and controversial) authority on the Marcellus Shale. But Wilber also gives us many residents of Dimock, Pa., like the dairy farmer, the plumber’s widow, and more, who wrestle with the Faustian bargain of selling drilling rights to their land.

Finally, to my most marvelous title, “The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone” (Random House, 2011). Author Seamus McGraw is both meticulous and moody in this memoir/long-form journalism combo, kind of John McPhee meets Karl Ove Knausgaard. In 2007, when the writer’s mom calls from their Pennsylvania farm to say a fracking company had approached her — to the tune of $250,000, with perhaps millions in royalties later — McGraw admits he didn’t know the “difference between Marcellus Shale and Cassius Clay.” But, having grown up here, he does know the abundance underground: “Even in the dead of winter, if you reach down and touch the ground, it’s hot. It’s like hell is buried one shovelful down.”

He goes on to describe the material and psychological disturbances of living in Frackistan. The sounds of blasting, construction, the endless trucks carting in water. But more than that, it’s the fraying of community. “[P]eople who had always stoically shared the hardships of rural life seemed no longer willing to share anything at all,” McGraw writes. It was, as one woman put it, “the end of country.” Thanks to once active volcanoes, and current volcanic activists, the Bay State has kept that, at least, at bay.

Katharine Whittemore is a freelance writer based in Northampton, MA. Another book that could (should) be considered is: The Real Cost of Fracking, Beacon Press, Boston, 2014. Also of prime importance is “climate change” as discussed for example in: This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein, Simon & Schuster, 2014.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Pipeline services by Access Midstream of the Industrial Park at Jane Lew

Perspectives on Fracking in Central West Virginia

Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

By luck of the draw, I happen to be in a good spot to observe activity in the Southern Marcellus area. The farm I have lived on for over 50 years is about two miles from the Lewis County Industrial Park, one of the largest concentrations of drilling industry in the Marcellus. The Park has numerous companies with familiar names and smaller outfits are situated in and around it. Being on I-79, these have access to work as far north as Washington, Pennsylvania and all the way to the edge of the region south. The main truck stop between Fairmont and Flatwoods is at the intersection of Jesse Run, the road by my farm and I-79. It does a huge amount of business with fracking industry trucks.

All of us living now are fortunate that we have the Internet to communicate. The democratization of information which we have contrasts with former times when communication depended on newspapers, letters and personal contact. (Incidentally, democratization of information, that is, having information readily available to all, is being threatened by attempts to change the present rules by certain corporate interests.)

Now, to what I observe. Last summer, when Consol Energy bought the right to drill in Dominion’s Lost Creek Storage Field, it looked as though activity would pick up soon. Thumper Trucks went up and down the roads, finding the depth and slant of the Marcellus and there were specific locations of “the first three wells to be drilled in this area (right around Jane Lew)” in the wind. The spacings given were rational from what I knew about drilling patterns, and rights of way were specified for more locations. It looked as if the onslaught was coming.

Oil prices began to drop and voices in the wind just tapered off through the fall. I subscribe to SkyTruth Alerts, which reports new drilling permits. About the time oil hit $80 they began to drop off.

You have to understand the huge capital expenditure involved in drilling. Acquisition of land, acquisition of data (such as the information gained by thumper trucks) and location of the wells are expensive as well as the cost of the drilling rig itself, and the pipes, water and chemicals are very costly. For the drilling companies this money must be borrowed or obtained from stock sales, which in turn cost dividends instead of interest. Time is hugely important because of the cost of use of money.

Remember the old adage “fools rush in where angels fear to tread?” Shale drilling is very much an enterprise where you might come out looking brilliant (if you win), but very much the other if you lose. By this time ($46 a barrel) new permits have trickled to very few.

SkyTruth posts the coordinates of new wells permitted. This allows you to go to Google Earth and look where they would be drilled. You can fly around over the area and find well pads and pipelines in existence when the satellite pictures on which Google Earth is based were taken, a few months previously.

The permits coming out now are almost entirely on existing well pads. This means that the expense of acquisition and land preparation has been completed so the only cost is drilling the well itself. Even most of the cost of connecting the completed well is avoided, because no new long pipelines must be constructed.

The truck stop is still busy. Water trucks are rare – one assumes they are hauling away flowback water, which continues as long as the well produces. Sand trucks are still to be seen. I saw 18 in the truck stop one day around Christmas, but they seem to be thinning down two weeks later. Hauling in the sand is evidence of the actual fracking itself. Water is stockpiled, but sand must come in “just in time” as they say.

The big effort by the drilling industry now is to get the large diameter long distance pipelines built. This is an act of faith. If the price of oil stays down they are in trouble. The oversupply of gas and consequent low U. S. price of natural gas is something the frackers have done to themselves by their over-exuberance.

The excess gas supply has caused many electrical generating companies to substitute gas for coal. A few new power stations are under construction. But, existing power plants can use natural gas. They were designed to use coal by grinding it to a fine powder, which is blown into the combustion furnace. This can be turned up and down like it was gas. These plants are also equipped with gas entry into the combustion space, originally intended for temporary overload capacity (and heatup on start up). What the electricity producers have done is turn down the coal and turn up the gas. That can be done quickly.

If it can reasonably be expected, the cost of gas will stay down and new plants will be built using technology that takes gas as the primary fuel. If they use a combined cycle design it is actually more efficient (gets more electricity from the same gas) than the old coal burners, so coal is OUT FOREVER. The claims for gas to cause less global warming than coal when heat alone is used, are demonstrated false by Anthony Ingraffia, but the myth is very strong, and coal does put out contaminates in addition to carbon dioxide.

It appears the frackers are desperate to install the large diameter long distance pipelines and lock in a need for their gas. The natives are in an uproar, however. Nobody with a view reaching to the end of the pipe’s service life wants it on their property because the incendiary effects of an explosion of a 42 inch high pressure gas line are like having 2000 pound “blockbusters” dropped. And nobody wants the environmental effects of putting it in and maintaining it. I have heard that in the High Appalachian mountains it must be left exposed to the elements, rather than buried, because of the very hard rock and (relatively, don’t laugh Westerners) high altitude.

Once these pipelines are in, the electric utilities will be encouraged to build new electric generating plants dedicated to the use of gas, and the only place it can come from in volume is the Marcellus shale. Never mind the fact that when the drillers get out of the hot spots the gas will become more and more expensive, and the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) will drop well below 10, where it is now.

EROEI was over 50 in the past, and EROEI of 1 means you are putting in as much useful energy as you are taking out. The practical limit is somewhere above 5.

In effect, if the pipelines are built, all those people south of us are going to be paying for gas when they buy electricity no matter how high it gets. The only way out then is to substitute some non-conventional source, such as solar or fusion.

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See also:  www.Appalmad.org and www.WVMatters.org