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Page added on July 21, 2014
Hard Facts About Fracking
A new book evaluates whether natural gas is a ‘transitional fuel’ to a low-carbon future—or perhaps, more like a methadone addiction that’s tearing apart rural communities.
Growing up in northern West Virginia in the 1970s, I remember seeing a lot of big white plastic candy canes sticking out of the ground, marking the natural gas pipelines that ran just below the surface. You’d encounter them along streams and fence lines and the backcountry roads that always made me carsick. What I didn’t realize as a kid was how much of my family history was intertwined with those hidden gas lines.
My great-great-grandfather, William Dodd, helped lay some of the first pipe across the state, working for a subsidiary of Standard Oil at a time when John D. Rockefeller craved alternatives to oil (not for any environmental reason, but because even back then he was worried we would run out). William’s son was an administrator for Hope Gas, and his grandson (my grandfather) was a supervisor at a company extraction plant on the Ohio River. Then my dad spent his career as a corporate executive for Hope’s successor, Consolidated Natural Gas, until it was gobbled up by Dominion Resources.
That time line of mergers and name changes—from Hope to Dominion—serves as a rather succinct summary of the role of natural gas in the U.S. economy over the past couple of centuries. First used commercially in 1821 to light lamps in Fredonia, New York—almost four decades before an oil well was drilled in nearby Pennsylvania—gas has nevertheless remained oil’s “invisible twin,” as David Waples put it in his 2005 book, The Natural Gas Industry in Appalachia. Gas was often seen as an unwanted by-product, frequently burned off because coal was cheaper and oil more versatile.
Fracking, as Wall Street Journal energy reporter Russell Gold writes in The Boom, has changed all that, fundamentally altering both the U.S. economy and the nature of communities across the country. That’s because it takes place literally in our backyards. Much of the most recent wave of natural gas drilling is occurring in densely populated states like Pennsylvania, California, Ohio, and Illinois. Small towns are now ground zero for the noise, industrial activity, and environmental and health concerns associated with fossil fuel extraction.
By last year, roughly one out of 20 Americans lived within a mile of a recently fracked well. “This new proximity between wells and homes is one of the defining features of the new energy landscape,” Gold writes. And this change has happened in a minuscule amount of time—less than a decade, in most of the country—driven by technological innovation and Wall Street financing, without the corresponding changes in community awareness and the government safeguards needed to ensure fracking’s safety.
By last year, roughly one out of 20 Americans lived within a mile of a recently fracked well.
For most of his well-researched book, Gold focuses more on the history of hydraulic fracturing and the businessmen behind the boom than on its environmental impact. He’s a diligent reporter and able profiler of the mostly dull petroleum engineers and slightly more colorful energy company execs, men like the controversial Aubrey McClendon, who made their fortunes from fracking. But he never quite brings to life the impact on families and communities in the way that Seamus McGraw manages in his more personal and intimate The End of Country, published in 2011.
When Gold does turn from chronicling the boom to evaluating its consequences, however, he reaches a very simple conclusion: we need to slow down. Our communities, our health, our water, and our future climate, he says, could very well depend on it.
Throughout my family’s four generations in the industry, wells were sunk mostly the old-fashioned way: drill a hole in the ground at a likely spot, hope to hit a pocket of gushing oil or gas, then pump the fuel out over a long period of time, with diminishing returns every year as the pocket emptied and pressure subsided. When my grandfather died a couple of years ago, he left my father shares in three West Virginia wells, all decades old, that still pump a trickle of gas today.
What changed all of that was a process originally patented in 1948 by Halliburton, though the idea goes back even further—all the way to the original Titusville, Pennsylvania, oil boom, when a court-martialed lieutenant colonel created a “petroleum torpedo” to fracture rocks in order to access more fuel. It wasn’t until 1998 that a 34-year-old engineer named Nick Steinsberger suggested the revolutionary idea of using mostly water—but massive volumes of water, mixed with a cocktail of chemicals to reduce friction—to fracture the dense slabs of Texas’s Barnett Shale and release the fuel trapped inside. (The word trapped is a bit of a misnomer; the gas is essentially part of the shale rock itself, embedded in tiny holes you can only see with a $2 million scanning electron microscope.)
When Steinsberger proposed using water, the idea was counterintuitive, to say the least. One of his bosses said he would “eat his diploma” if it worked. But Steinsberger was successful (no word on how the diploma tasted), and “the era of the massive slick-water frack had begun,” Gold writes.
Steinsberger’s “massive” volume of water was actually paltry by today’s standards. He used 1.2 million gallons; some modern wells employ five times as much. And while he drilled straight down, what has made fracking even more effective is the ability to turn the drill horizontally, sometimes for as much as two miles, breaking up more deep shale from a single pad aboveground.
Fracking a single well requires what Gold describes as a “movable factory,” and the equipment, trucks, pipelines, and all the other associated infrastructure, as well as the demands on water, the waste, and the manpower involved, are what makes modern gas drilling such a disruptive force in communities. And because of the perversities of the market (companies are judged by Wall Street on the basis of how many new wells they drill and how quickly), the United States is now producing more natural gas than it can use.
“Perhaps it’s best to think of natural gas like methadone.”
Most critically, the cumulative environmental and health impacts of all this fracking remain to be seen. In the battle for the U.S. energy future, gas is winning, and its ascendancy over coal helped the United States cut greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent between 2007 and 2012, Gold writes (gains in energy efficiency and better fuel standards for cars are the other big reasons). But the gas glut also slowed the development of wind and solar energy, and while gas may be cleaner than coal (and some studies even cast doubt on that), it’s far from clean.
Gold gives McClendon’s financial maneuvering much credit for the fracking boom, but he makes it clear that a combination of market forces, disruptive technology, and government support drove the revolution. The lessons for wind and solar are obvious: “create the right market signals, set smart long-term policy goals, and let the technologists develop needed breakthroughs.” If fracking can indeed provide the road map for a low-carbon economy, as he believes, it might be argued that this justifies some of the damage and disruption it has wrought. Just don’t try to tell that to the people living next to the drill pads.
“Perhaps it’s best,” Gold posits, “to think of natural gas like methadone. It’s a way for an energy-addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps.” But whether or not gas can provide a path to cleaner energy, there’s no doubt that the rapid, unexpected, and largely unregulated expansion of fracking has brought disruption and risk to families across the country—even those who benefited economically. “Nobody would argue that a nuclear plant should be built as quickly as possible without spending the necessary time to ensure it is safe and robust,” Gold writes. “Fracking is different. The risks of any single well are tiny compared to a nuclear power plant. But several hundred wells? Several thousand?”
My parents now live in western Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh, a mile above the Marcellus Shale formation that has made their state a hotbed of drilling activity. There’s a new fracking well being erected about a mile from their suburban cul-de-sac; they can see it from their driveway. What it will mean for their lives, it’s too soon to say. But one thing is for sure: it’s a lot bigger than those candy cane markers I remember from my childhood.
21 Comments on "Hard Facts About Fracking"
Nony on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 7:55 pm
I bought and read this book. I think a lot of people here should do more in depth reading. You don’t even have to change your views. You will just have deeper knowledge than from these news snippets, comments below, and message board stuff.
I have bought and read this book as well as THE FRACKERS. I am halfway through THE QUEST (and get off the peaker versus cornie kick…that stuff is like 5% of the book…you can still learn a lot about Kashagan, VEnezueala, Putin, etc.) I have also ordered THE END OF COUNTRY and it arrives tomorrow. In addition, I printed and read the entire 10K for Continental Resources (2013). Lot of good info from reading.
Nony on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 8:10 pm
P.s. Natural gas contract is trading at 15 cents under $4. Marcellus>>Berman. 😉
www dot Bloomberg dot com/news/2014-07-21/natural-gas-falls-a-third-day-as-u-s-gas-inventories-increase.html
Makati1 on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 8:34 pm
Nony, If I bought every book about what someone thinks is happening today, I would have no money to actually prepare for what is coming. Peak oil is only one of many parts of our near future. Perhaps the least important part.
$26 + handling & shipping will buy a good hand tool, a 50lb bag of rice, or half of an heirloom seed vault.
The internet has everything the author put in his book except his view of the future. For the cost of some electric, an internet fee($20/mo in the Ps)and a miniscule percentage of the equipment costs, you have the world at your fingertips 24/7/365. If there is something you want to keep, print it out. I have notebooks filled with different articles and how-tos printed on acid free paper. Guaranteed to last as long as any book. I also have a growing library of grades 1 to 12 and college level text books for the neighbors kids and theirs. Far more important then the above book in future value.
Nony on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 8:43 pm
The net is good for surfing and skimming. But I think if you only do that, don’t do deeper reading, you miss something and tend to get very surface-y.
GregT on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 9:09 pm
Most books are already available on the internet. The choice is up to the reader whether he/ she wants to surf or skim through material.
Plantagenet on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 9:26 pm
Congrats to Nony for taking the time to read books on peak oil. I rarely agree with Nony, but he deserves credit for taking some time to research peak oil, fracking, and other subjects.
Plantagenet on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 9:28 pm
I found the articles comparison of NG to methadone to be misleading. The idea behind this metaphor is that oil is heroin, and NG is methadone.
Nonesense. Our modern society has flourished on cheap oil. Shifting to NG will be like going from sirloin steak to hamburger.
rockman on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 9:34 pm
Ran across an interesting stat: number of wells frac’d since the beginning of the shale…about 80,000. Total number of wells frac’d prior to the recent “boom in frac’ng”: 1.08 million at a minimum. So the wells that have brought such mounting recent concern represent about 7% of the total number of wells frac’d in the entire history of the US.
I wonder what changed?
Nony on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 9:46 pm
The anti-growth people want to stop shale oil and gas. They like peak oil. The Marcellus is their worst enemy.
Dave Thompson on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 10:55 pm
Growth is over, the oil industry is just keeping up with production. The increase we are seeing in US output is but a blip of short term gain.
GregT on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 11:07 pm
The peak oil aware people, understand why growth has been slowing down. They do not like what the end of modern industrial society will entail. The Marcellus is seen as an opportunity for most, to get their houses in order for the coming collapse. Then there are the others, that are too foolish to make any plans. May luck be with them, they will need all of the luck they can get.
GregT on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 11:16 pm
“Nonesense. Our modern society has flourished on cheap oil. Shifting to NG will be like going from sirloin steak to hamburger.”
Actually Plant,
Hamburger requires more energy that steak, but who cares about the small details right?
Shifting from oil to natural gas will be more like going from steak, to caterpillars. If you are lucky enough to be able to afford them.
Northwest Resident on Mon, 21st Jul 2014 11:44 pm
“Congrats to Nony for taking the time to read books on peak oil.”
That cracks me up. Right hand talking to the left hand? Clever ruse to boost stature? The possibilities are endless.
Nony just refuses to recognize that without oil, there IS no NG. There isn’t enough energy in NG — or enough NG — to drive the extraction and production of NG. No oil — no NG.
Converting from oil to NG isn’t going to happen, except on a relatively minor and inconsequential scale. NG is great stuff to have around, but it will never power the world. There will be no going from sirloin steak to hamburger — sorry Nony.
Beery on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 1:11 am
I think Nony and Planty need to get a room.
meld on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 1:59 am
@ Nony – you don´t think people here have read copious books on peak oil? This would explain your arrogant and ignorant posts towards other posters. You think you´re superior because you´ve been reading books on the subject? Well alarm call, so has everyone else.
And The Quest? seriously? a book written by a man who has been wrong more times that I´ve taken a shit. Good work
Nony on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 10:37 am
You need to become capable of reading more complicated things. Of looking at things other than with the lens of this little (dying) Internet community. Yergin is a Pulitzer prize winning historian. Wrote The Prize. Wrote a great summary of the Cold War. You can just skip the discussion of peak oil and shale (less than 5% of the book) and still just LEARN a lot about the world market, supply and demand, since 1990.
Or you can be an Internet commenter.
Northwest Resident on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 10:52 am
All kneel down to Nony, the great Learned One, the reader of copious amounts of books on Peak Oil, the magnificent operator of synchronized sock puppets each talking with and complimenting each other.
Nony — No oil = no natural gas. If you were truly as smart as you THINK you are, you wouldn’t be wasting your time wearing that pink tu-tu and doing the “woot woot woot” cheerleading routine for Marcellus and other shale plays, or for constantly posting on the great natural gas futures which are all rigged with newly digitized funny money. You pretend to be smart, but you can’t even put two plus two together and come up with a correct answer. Being so wrong all the time is forgivable and even understandable — being arrogant and “Mr. Know-It-All” plus being wrong all the time makes you a pathetic sight to witness.
meld on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 12:39 pm
@Nony – I don’t read yergin because he doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about. Why would I read a book by a man who is consistently in error? He can’t have a very good grasp on history can he?
You want to learn about markets? read the wealth of nations, want to learn about history? read Arnold toynbee or the Durrants or spengler.
Nony on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 12:53 pm
Natural gas is trading down at 3.80 (August01 delivery, Henry Hub, per NYMEX).
Meld, you don’t have to read The Quest as an argument. It isn’t even the topic of the book to cover doomer/cornie kerfuffles. You’d still benefit from just getting a deeper understanding of the worldwide supply and demand. Just as factbase. That’s why you should read it.
meld on Tue, 22nd Jul 2014 3:27 pm
@nony – My reading list is full of non fiction at the moment, thanks though.
Nony on Wed, 23rd Jul 2014 9:54 am
No sweat, meld. I end up buying books sometimes and not even reading them. Hard to stay engaged as much. I think some of it is age and some of it is how the Internet has transformed my (our) ability to concentrate.
P.s. Just got THE END OF COUNTRY in from Amazon. I used to feel weird that the price of shipping did not make sense. But…I have “Prime” and it’s free, so now I will just buy from home on the spur of the moment. Also, it’s even better for the planet than my driving the sportscar to the Barnes and Noble.