In response to my piece: How Dangerous is Fracking? my friend and colleague Glenn Doty makes some excellent points:
The question is not “is fracking safe”. The question is: “given what we know, how likely is it that fracking would cause more net trouble to society than not fracking”? The answer to that is: 0%.
Last year we went into winter with a record natural gas inventory level, and we came out with a low that we haven’t hit in 20 years. Had it not been for fracking, our inventory level would have been more than a trillion cubic feet lower going into the wintertime, and there would have been shortages that would literally have resulted in people freezing to death. That’s not hyperbole, that’s a real effect.
This year, because we drew down our inventory levels so far, there has been less reliance on natural gas for electric power production… And coal power has increased its load by 42 TWh for the first half of the year. That’s ~15 million tons of additional coal consumed in 6 months, because we had a draw-down of an extra Tcf. Imagine if our production level were 10 Tcf lower per year – due to the loss of Fracking. That would mean ~800 million tons of additional coal consumption, and people literally freezing to death.
There has not been one single shred of evidence that fracking results in more pollution than old-style vertical drilling. There’s no reasonable postulates put forward as to why fracking would result in more pollution than normal vertical drilling (aside from the obvious: greater consumption.)
And for that you’re willing to make thousands of people freeze to death and commit this country to burning 800 million more tons of coal per year?
(For comparison, during the first 6 months of this year, there was ~8 TWh YOY increase of additional renewable generation – counting all sources.)
The anti-fracking people are nuts. You have to prove to me that fracking is worse than coal in order for me to be against it… and to that effect they haven’t even found the singular first argument. Maybe in 30 years, when coal is no longer on the grid… I’ll consider entertaining the notion of trying to stop fracking… But for now, Fracking is doing far more good than harm – whatever the harm… it’s reducing our consumption of coal and keeping us warm in the winter. We need both of those services. ;)
Thanks for the excellent insight, Glenn. Here are a couple of things to consider, however.
1) You write, “given what we know…” What about: “given what we don’t know?” I hope what you’re saying turns out to be correct, but there is no reason to assume that, given that we’re talking about dealing with hundreds of billions of gallons of poison in a way that has no precedent.
2) The existence of low-cost fossil fuels provides an economic environment that is hostile to the development of renewable energy, which I believe is 100% required if humankind is to avoid wholesale catastrophe. The fact that fossil fuels are artificially inexpensive due to tax-payer subsidies, lavished onto the industry by a congress that it essentially owns, is deplorable, putting it kindly; you’ve heard me say worse in our private conversations.
3) We all need to be concerned that the oil/gas people refuse to tell us the exact set of chemicals they’re using. That our leaders refuse to fix this, and continue to subject the citizenry to this form of terrorism, is also “deplorable.”
4) We also need to understand that no one (outside of the industry) knows the truth about the scope of methane leaks that are routine in this practice.
