What the Frack? Scraping the Bottom of the Oil Barrel is Not Good to the Last Drop

- by Mark Robi­nowitz, PeakChoice.org

The tox­ic impacts of hydraulic frac­tur­ing for oil and gas have been sub­ject to pub­lic debates, protests, and law­suits, among oth­er tac­tics to stop these dan­gers. But the oth­er half of the frack­ing sto­ry, which has had much less atten­tion, is the exag­ger­a­tion of recov­er­able reserves.

The frack­ing indus­try claims shale gas will fuel 100 years worth of USA con­sump­tion of “nat­ur­al” gas. Mas­sive amounts of drilling in the past sev­er­al years have increased gas pro­duc­tion above the 1973 nat­ur­al gas peak. Gas has sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased its share of the elec­tric pow­er grids, low­er­ing coal com­bus­tion and help­ing damper plans for new nuclear reactors. 

One of fracking’s dirty secrets is fracked wells decline far faster than con­ven­tion­al wells. Frack­ing a well also requires more mon­ey, tech­ni­cal tal­ent and resources than con­ven­tion­al wells.  

Two of the three top gas frack­ing regions in the USA have peaked. Bar­nett Shale near Fort Worth, Texas has peaked and plateaued. Hay­nesville in Louisiana and Arkansas has peaked and declined sharply. The largest frack­ing region — Mar­cel­lus in Penn­syl­va­nia — has not yet peaked and pro­vides near­ly a fifth of all USA nat­ur­al gas. Nation­al­ly, about forty per­cent of nat­ur­al gas is from frack­ing.  

Frack­ing for oil has reversed the decline of USA oil extrac­tion since the 1970 peak. The Bakken shale in North Dako­ta has fueled wild claims of alleged ener­gy inde­pen­dence and even pro­pos­als to export oil to Asia. How­ev­er, Bakken has not even off­set the decline of the Alas­ka Pipeline, which has dropped three fourths from its 1988 peak and is approach­ing “low flow” shut­down. Frack­ing in south Texas has also raised Tex­an oil pro­duc­tion but the state’s peak was still back in 1972 — a rea­son huge efforts have been made for off­shore drilling in the Gulf of Mex­i­co.

Post Car­bon Insti­tute has pub­lished reports doc­u­ment­ing how frack­ing esti­mates have been exag­ger­at­ed. They were vin­di­cat­ed in May of this year when the Depart­ment of Ener­gy admit­ted plans for oil frack­ing in the Mon­terey Shale in Cal­i­for­nia had been exag­ger­at­ed and down­sized the esti­mat­ed resource by nine­ty-six per­cent (96%). Post Carbon’s montereyoil.org web­site has details.  

We are in a para­dox at this time of Peak Every­thing and Cli­mate Chaos. If we keep burn­ing fos­sil fuels we will con­tin­ue to wreck the bios­phere, but if we sud­den­ly stopped that would wreck civ­i­liza­tion, which could accel­er­ate eco­log­i­cal destruc­tion (how many forests would be burned for elec­tric­i­ty, for exam­ple). Fos­sil fuels allowed our pop­u­la­tion to zoom from under a bil­lion to over sev­en bil­lion today.

Frack­ing, deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mex­i­co and tar sands extrac­tion in Cana­da have delayed gaso­line rationing. We are in the eye of the ener­gy cri­sis hur­ri­cane, per­haps for a few more years.

The Lim­its to Growth study in 1972 pre­dict­ed peak resources around the turn of the cen­tu­ry, fol­lowed by peak pol­lu­tion as dirt­i­er resources were used as high­er qual­i­ty resources were deplet­ed. Frack­ing, tar sands, moun­tain­top removal and oth­er des­per­ate destruc­tions seek to main­tain the expo­nen­tial growth econ­o­my now that the eas­i­er to extract fos­sil fuels are in decline.  

Using solar ener­gy for two decades taught me that renew­able ener­gy could only run a small­er, steady state econ­o­my. Our expo­nen­tial growth econ­o­my requires ever increas­ing con­sump­tion of con­cen­trat­ed resources (fos­sil fuels are more ener­gy dense than renew­ables). A solar ener­gy soci­ety would require mov­ing beyond growth-and-debt based mon­ey.

After fos­sil fuel we will only have solar pow­er, but that won’t replace what we use now. We need to aban­don the myth of end­less growth on a round, and there­fore, finite plan­et to have a plan­et on which to live.

Human­i­ty does not face the ques­tion of whether to use less fos­sil fuels to reduce green­house gas­es, since we have reached the lim­its to ener­gy growth due to geo­log­i­cal fac­tors. How we use the remain­ing fos­sil fuels as they deplete deter­mines how future gen­er­a­tions will live after the fos­sil fuels are gone. Will we use the sec­ond half of the fos­sil fuels for big­ger high­ways or bet­ter trains? Relo­cal­iza­tion of food pro­duc­tion or more glob­al­iza­tion? Resource wars or glob­al coop­er­a­tion?

Mark Robi­nowitz is author of “Peak Choice: coop­er­a­tion or col­lapse” at PeakChoice.org