CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 3Perhaps no media event galvanized public unease with the shale gas and oil industry as the release of Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary, Gasland, with its striking images of flaming water blooming from rural faucets. The film was nominated for an academy award, and deservedly so. It’s beautifully done, and Fox strikes a pitch-perfect balance of sorrow and slow-burning anger, without becoming strident—and plays a terrific banjo besides. Most important, almost all of his accusations are true, although he was fiercely attacked by the industry for his supposed inaccuracies. Some of the fiery water shown in the film most likely acquired its methane from naturally occurring surface sources. (Methane was long known as “swamp gas.”) But subsequent peer-reviewed research at those same areas shows conclusively that, while most oil country groundwater will test positive for methane, contamination of groundwater close to shale wells is far worse than in nearby locations without wells. And methane is among the more benign of the contaminants; the operation of the wells uses large volumes of noxious chemicals that also migrate into the soil and surface water.
There are two prongs of the anti-shale argument, however, and Fox focuses on just one of them—the disturbing side effects of rapid industrialization on water supplies, habitat, the attendant water and air pollution, plus all the traffic, noise, and strain on local infrastructure. The second case for the prosecution, which is quite different, is based on methane’s potentially baleful effects on global warming. I’ll deal with them separately in this chapter, because they are much different diseases.
The unconventional gas and oil industry is in the mid-stage of an extraordinarily rapid development cycle. Just a decade or so ago, the industry was driven by entrepreneurs with limited capital who were making up the rules as they went along and racing to generate product as fast as they could. They have been spectacularly successful in producing new energy at very attractive rates, but in an unusually intrusive way. The gross environmental damage caused by the shale industry is far less than that of coal, and no individual shale well could ever do the damage that the blowout on the BP Macondo well did in 2011. But shale forces itself into the public consciousness, because its product is widely distributed and thinly concentrated. Recovering industrial-scale quantities of shale product requires venturing far beyond the places where extractive industries typically cluster.
Coal mining and conventional oil drilling usually happen in well-defined regions where daily life is dominated by the extractive activity. When the country singer Loretta Lynn called herself “a coalminer’s daughter,” she evoked an entire culture defined by the mines. The shale industry model is very different. The region in and around Fort Worth on top of the Barnett shale may be the most intensively developed shale area in the world, with some 16,000 wells within an hour’s drive of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. But the individual wells are small, scattered throughout the area, and easy to miss unless you’re looking for them. I recently spent a morning driving around the area, following a rough map supplied by an industry consultant. At first, I didn’t see anything at all, then after I picked one out, I realized that they were everywhere, but painted in a kind of camouflage khaki, designed to blend in. These were all mature wells, so the rigs and the engines and trailers, and nighttime floodlights were long since gone. All of the action was subterranean, with the wells soundlessly releasing gas or liquids into underground pipes, possibly throwing off modest amounts of water that is captured in aboveground tanks. Most of them were not much bigger than a decent backyard, just a concrete platform with up to a half dozen Christmas trees—the valve-laden access pipes that rise about four feet above ground—and a small tank, surrounded by a chain link fence. Few of the people living near them would think that those wells are what Fort Worth is “about,” and may not think of them at all unless they leak—which does happen, probably more frequently than it should. Several of the wells were backed up right against residential developments, and the people who lived there must have gone through hell during the drilling and completion stages.
During the great days of conventional oil production in the legendary Texas Permian Basin, environmental violations were probably far worse than those of the modern shale industry, but those wells weren’t sitting next to somebody’s neighborhood. The very nature of the drilling and production cycle offers many opportunities for mishaps—spills, leaks, large vapor releases, loss of fracking water flowback—the kind of problems featured in Gasland. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently released a paper, “Golden Rules,” that suggests rules of behavior that the shale gas industry will need to maintain to retain its “social license” to keep expanding production.1 The paper’s focus is primarily on the “little” problems, like spillages.
But little problems, simple as they seem, can be the most difficult to manage, for they require sustained and consistent management attention, of the kind epitomized by GE’s “six sigma” internal quality control system. Managing little problems is also dull, and the shale industry isn’t good at doing dull. Preventing twenty-gallon fluid spills doesn’t capture management attention the same way as the discovery of a rich new shale play does.
Shale is a high-speed, high-growth business. The face of the industry, until recently, was Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon, dubbed by Forbes as “America’s Most Reckless Billionaire.” His company was usually the most active shale driller, drilling roughly 1,500 wells a year with 150 of its own rigs, and participating through various partnerships in as many more, pushing up revenues fifteenfold in a decade. McClendon is an entrepreneurial genius, a plunger and lover of financial leverage, who took his company and its share price on a wild ride. He was finally forced out because of financial arrangements of a kind that are not uncommon in private equity, but raised alarms in a listed company with a half-million shareholders.2 Although the shale industry now produces more than a third of the country’s gas, it still has a wildcatter ethos, a drive for the big hit, a mindset that is ill-adapted to achieving a consistently high levels of execution in the detailed process controls that prevent fluid spills.
Consider a typical mundane but serious problem. The investigative journal ProPublica has been running a series on the shale industry for several years now. It recently reported that in the Bakken shale, truck drivers bringing waste fluids to treatment sites frequently dump their loads in vacant fields, especially at night and especially if there is a long line at the treatment location.3 On our visit to the Devon water treatment center, Sarah Terry-Cobo, the reporter on the trip, raised the question with Robert Brodbeck, the Devon engineer, for she had heard a number of such stories from locals. He pointed out that the drivers using the Devon treatment center were picking up just from Devon wells. So their loads were metered at both the pickup and disposal sites, and the values were paired in an electronic database.
But no other company in the Cana-Woodford exercises that level of control, and the Cana-Woodford, in any case, is the only place where Devon has such a facility. Standard practice is to use contract drivers who get paid by the load. And it’s not likely that many companies maintain files of treatment center receipts, least of all the very small companies. A web search for companies operating in the Bakken shale returned seventy firms, all of them production companies, including a large number with only a handful of wells.
This gets at the crux of the industry’s challenge. Achieving the energy production levels to support the kind of industrial and economic revival outlined in the last chapter will require sustained development of America’s shale energy resources for many decades. But to maintain broad support for the continued expansion of its footprint, the industry will have to get much cleaner, crisper, and more controlled in managing its sites. That will never happen when every new play has seventy, or fifty, or even thirty companies cobbling together little deals for water access or waste treatment with townships up and down a state.
In an ideal world, before any production drilling commenced in a region, the industry would develop a comprehensive water acquisition and recycling plan, together with a staged supporting infrastructure program. The goals would be to make minimum impact on drinking water; to ensure maximum feasible pipeline transport for both clean and contaminated water; and to provide dedicated treatment facilities for all of the industry’s fluid wastes. Reaching those goals won’t eliminate all spills and contaminations, but it should reduce them to more tolerable levels.
Clearly that kind of organized development process is not going to happen soon, but it’s not impossible. Regional development planning could be carried out by a consortium of the companies that own the development rights and contribute fees to fund the upfront costs. Or, conceivably, the industry will come to be dominated by a smaller number of large companies who can internalize the upfront costs themselves. An organized, staged development process shouldn’t cost more than the current non-system. In fact it should be cheaper, because it will be more efficient, although it may force the companies to bear some of the costs that are now being palmed off on the local communities.
While the industry has clearly made a lot of progress over the past decade, it still has a long way to go. Public revulsion has come close to crippling the nuclear industry in the United States, and the same thing could happen to shale. That would be sad, for it could scuttle a real opportunity to revive the dynamism of the whole economy.
So the shale industry must deal with a handful of chronic issues, starting with the emotion-laden water question, and including the standard problems that arise at each stage of shale gas and oil extraction, storage, and distribution. For the analysis below I have relied both on the “Golden Rules” paper and on a survey conducted by Resources for the Future, an environmental and energy think tank that found quite a high degree of consensus on the important issues among a carefully selected panel of industry, government, and academic shale experts.4
Although it’s nearly heresy to say so, pressure on water supplies may be the least important problem with the shale energy industry. According to the US Department of Agriculture, farming accounts for 80–90 percent of US “consumptive” water use (water lost to the environment by evaporation, crop transpiration, or incorporation into products). In seventeen western states, farming uses 90 percent or more of all available water, and uses it very inefficiently. About half of all farmland irrigation is performed either with traditional, wasteful gravity methods or with older, inefficient powered methods. In the fall of 2012, Colorado farmers complained that the lack of “a level playing field” was allowing energy companies to pressure farmers’ water supplies. A New York Times reporter respectfully catalogued their complaints, then noted without comment that irrigation and agriculture consumed 88.5 percent of the state’s water, while oil and gas drilling claimed 0.1 percent. The energy companies also paid one hundred times as much for their water as the farmers did.* Even in semiarid Texas, with 100,000 gas wells, the most of any state, the gas industry accounts for only 1 percent of state water usage.
Environmentalists also claim that wastewater from farming and other conventional uses stays within the water supply, while fracking water is consumed forever, since so much of it stays in the ground. The truth is that in most industrial applications, water does not efficiently return to the water supply without careful retention practices, which are uncommon on even the best managed farms. Farm runoff that is not purposefully retained can readily percolate deeply into the soil and become “severely degraded in quality or . . . uneconomic to recover.” Doubtless, some of it is later regurgitated up as produced water from shale wells.5
The entire US energy industry consumes a relatively modest share of the water supply—an estimated 27 percent of nonagricultural water uses—and shale drilling is the least greedy of the thermoelectric processes. Shale gas consumes between 0.6 and 1.8 gallons of water per million British thermal units (MMBTU), a measure of energy produced, while coal mining uses between 1 and 8 gallons per MMBTU, onshore conventional oil wells use between 1 and 62 gallons per MMBTU, and corn-based ethanol consumes up to 1,000 gallons per MMBTU. Nuclear generation is also a large consumer of water, although is not in the class of corn ethanol.6
So, why the hue and cry over the shale industry’s alleged wasteful use of water? Well, if you’re a resident of a small town in Colorado, and it’s drought season, and convoys of giant water tanker trucks assemble early every morning outside your window to fill up from the local fire hydrants, you might get upset, even though they had paid for the privilege.7 It takes 1,000 or more very large tanker trucks for a single fracking job, and when wells are in their active development stage, the trucks can be an overwhelming presence. If the industry could get its act together and work out best-practice regional water solutions, many of these criticisms would fade away.
The first consideration must be the distance of a well from buildings, residential areas, and water sources, especially drinking water sources. Current regulation on this, as on most other aspects of the shale industry, is very spotty.
Of thirty-one states with regulations, as of the fall of 2012, seventeen had specific building setback restrictions, ranging from 100 to 1,000 feet, with an average of 261 feet; three others had setback requirements from specific structures or equipment other than buildings; and the rest had no evidence of regulation. Texas regulations require setbacks of 200 feet.8 The wells I saw in the Barnett area may have been drilled before the current regulatory framework was in place, because several of them looked a lot closer than that.
Recall that on shale drilling sites everyone, workers and visitors alike must wear fire-resistant coveralls or smocks. Wells have accidents, especially during the drilling and fracking stages. At the time we were visiting Devon, one of their wells in Utah had a blowout that ignited. Some families had to be evacuated, and state troopers closed off an area of a half mile radius.9 Blowouts are relatively rare events caused by sudden powerful surges from inside the well. All wells use blowout preventers, extra-strong emergency valves at the top of the well. But surges sometimes occur before the valves are in place, and preventers sometimes fail. Characteristically, there are no reliable data on the frequency of blowouts in shale drilling. Offshore drilling is federally controlled, so there is a good blowout database showing that they occur between one and ten times per 10,000 wells when blowout preventers have not yet been set; the different frequencies relate to the stage of the process.10 Most shale drilling blowouts do not result in fires, but some do. Texas is a state with good data; in 2011, they experienced twenty-one well blowouts, of which three involved fire.11 Common sense suggests that such operations should be kept well away from populated areas—not out of sight, but at a distance that ensures that civilians are not in danger. A thousand feet, less than a quarter mile, would seem the absolute minimum.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), a research and lobbying group for the industry, produces excellent training manuals and best-practice recommendations for every aspect of the business. Their best-practice suggestion for well setbacks, however, is one that falls short. It is: “when feasible, the wellsite and access road should be located as far as practical from occupied structures and places of assembly.” Although I’m sure it’s unintended, the infelicitous implication is that you must consider civilian safety only when it’s “feasible” to do so.
The second group of setback rules apply to bodies of water and municipal water supplies. Nine states have numerical setback requirements, of which 2,000 feet is the farthest, specifically applying to municipal water supplies. A number of other states regulate setbacks from tanks, holding pits, and the like. The effectiveness of such standards probably depends on local geology. Again, the API has a “feasibility” qualifier on its recommendations, which seems inappropriate.
The mother of all water setback cases, which Josh Fox highlighted in Gasland, is the New York City watershed, which provides high quality, unfiltered drinking water to more than fifteen million people, making it the largest such system in the world. The system was put in place a century ago at great cost, and maintaining its quality has required an assiduous process of land acquisition, zoning, forest management, and other preventive measures, at a sunk cost that must run into the many billions. If the system were polluted, it would take more billions to repair the damage or to provide treatment. Still, the industry is fighting for the right to drill in the watershed, which is just dumb. It shouldn’t win every argument, it probably won’t win this one, and it needs to develop a better sense for when it shouldn’t even try.
The initial work on a well, which may entail six to nine months of excavating, earthmoving, utility fixing, deliveries of giant equipment, etc., is much like any other heavy construction job—annoying but time-limited. Because of the large volumes of fluids that will be used at sites, however, special attention needs to be paid to water management, including dikes and ditches to control spills and to prevent storm-induced overflows of temporary holding areas for noxious wastes. Site plans normally have to be approved by state regulators.
Once the drilling and completion processes are underway, a host of important everyday issues arise. In approximate order of importance:
• Spillage of greases and diesel oil, and of the noxious chemicals used in fracking (which are more dangerous before they are added to fracking water, since they are much more concentrated). Spillage of noxious flowback and produced water, either from the rig or from holding tanks or pits.
• Leaching of methane, fracking chemicals, or other noxious substances into local groundwater supplies and wells.
• Emissions of methane, by intentional venting in order to manage pressures, or by accidental loss through fugitive emissions. In modest quantities, methane isn’t toxic to humans, but it is highly flammable, and in high concentrations can cause asphyxiation. And because it is odorless and colorless it can readily accumulate to dangerous levels without being detected. More than one house or shed has blown up when methane leached into formations below them and exploded.
• Endangering artesian aquifers through drilling and fracking activities.
Although fracking gets the most publicity—the word is so evocative—the evidence is that far more damage is done by surface spills and poorly constructed wells. For example, the town of Dimock, in the Pennsylvania Marcellus, was one of Josh Fox’s prime exhibits. A careful study of several shale gas areas, with a good representation from Dimock, found that 85 percent of the water wells examined in the area contained methane. But the concentrations differed sharply depending on how close a water site was to a shale well, on average by a ratio of 17:1. The average concentration of methane in the water supplies in active well areas was already in the range that federal standards recommend for hazard mitigation, while the highest concentrations were well above that.
The high methane concentrations near active well sites immediately suggested contamination by fracking wastes. Its chemical signature was that of thermogenic methane—formed by deep underground cooking rather than by surface bacterial digestion—and was very similar to deep-source methane in the Devonian and Utica shales. But the samples showed no traces of the chemicals and brines associated with fracking. So yes, there was substantial migration of deep-source thermogenic methane into surface waters, but no evidence to link it with fracking. The most likely explanation is that the well casing was leaking.12
The only case that seems definitely to implicate fracking in surface water contamination occurred in the Wind River Basin of central Wyoming, dominated by vertical wells—that is, those sunk straight down without directional drilling—owned predominately by Encana. After a series of complaints from local residents, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) performed a study, which involved drilling 1,000-foot test wells, that found methane bound with chemicals that tracked closely with those in the fracking compounds. The study has been fiercely disputed by the industry. A separate study was performed in 2012 by the US Geological Survey, but it was designed to produce additional data for an outside peer review panel to be convened by the EPA, and did not draw any conclusions. The industry and the EPA differ on whether or not those results support the EPA’s conclusion. The industry has also attacked the EPA’s preparation, preservation, and handling of the samples, and the sample size—the Lance Armstrong defense.
Aside from the chemical matches, the geology of the gas well placement seemed predisposed to fracking contamination. The target shale was only 150 meters or so below the deepest of the municipal wells (it’s usually a mile or more below), and there was no intervening cap rock to prevent the upward migration of fluids. Nor did the bottom of the surface casing on the well pipes extend beyond the bottom of the deepest water wells. The quality of the cementing and consistency of the bonding also seems to have been indifferent at best (exhibiting “sporadic bonding over extensive intervals . . . [including] directly above intervals of hydraulic fracturing.”) With such a configuration, it might have been a surprise if fracking fluids had not migrated into the water wells.13
The industry reaction to criticism can be as rote as that of a consistory of Vatican cardinals. It believes that it is impossible for fracking fluids to migrate into water supplies, and contests any challenge to its doctrine to the bitter end. In fact, based on studies done to date, such contamination is exceedingly rare, which is a good thing. But it is clearly not impossible, although the chemical maelstrom around any energy extraction area may always raise some ground for doubt.
That circle-the-wagons reflex only damages industry credibility. The energy industry should learn from the airline industry. When there is a serious incident, the airline industry and its regulators join in convening impartial science-dominated inquiries. Incident reviews are highly cooperative, and investigative conclusions are highly credible. When the fault for an untoward incident is laid at the feet of the industry, standard practices are usually upgraded accordingly. It’s the grown-up way.
Another issue revolving around fracking is disclosure of the chemicals in the fracking fluid. The industry long opposed any such disclosure on “trade secret” grounds. After a number of states began to insist on full disclosure, the industry organized a web site, FracFocus.org, for voluntary reporting of chemicals. All the major companies are cooperating, but it is still a work in progress. It is designed to search data on specific wells, rather than to develop broader data sorts. Its purpose, according to the industry, is to allow local authorities and residents to ascertain the chemicals in wells near them, although the data aren’t posted until considerably after well completion. The companies have committed to disclosing only chemicals rated as hazardous by federal or state authorities, and they may still withhold data on proprietary grounds.
In 2011, the DOE’s Energy Advisory Board created a Shale Gas Subcommittee to review safety and environmental priorities for the industry, under the chairmanship of John Deutch, a senior professor at MIT who formerly supervised the science and technology branches at the DOE and was later undersecretary of the department. Besides recommending a more readily searchable database, their recommendations came down strongly for “immediate and complete” disclosure of all chemicals used in the fracking process. Many such chemicals have never been subjected to hazard analyses, and so slip past hazardous-only specification, and many “hazardous” rating systems do not capture effects of exposure through environmental pathways. In the Committee’s words, the public benefit of immediate and complete disclosures “completely outweighs the restriction on company action, the cost of reporting, and any intellectual property value of proprietary chemicals.”14 It is hard to understand how anyone could argue to the contrary.
Another hot-button issue around well completion and subsequent production phases is the scale of methane emissions. An analysis of methane concentration in an active shale drilling area of Colorado showed a methane concentration in the atmosphere of 3.8 percent, considerably higher than conventional estimates. Many emissions are intentional. Well and pipeline maintenance and repair procedures typically require de-pressurizing, which is usually done by venting—releasing gas into the atmosphere. Similarly, the storage of gas and gas liquids can lead to dangerous vapor buildups that must be vented. Water and gas condensates must be regularly cleared, or “pigged,” from gas gathering lines, which requires venting. And so on. There are a variety of tools and procedures for dramatically reducing venting volumes by recapturing and recycling the product, but they do not seem to be in general use. (The EPA argues that they can increase revenue, by conserving saleable product; but the savings are small and are likely sacrificed to speed.) A second issue is whether vented gas should be flared in order to prevent possibly explosive buildups of methane or for environmental reasons, in order to convert methane to CO2, a less potent greenhouse gas. States differ widely on the topic, while the API recommends flaring all gases that cannot be economically recaptured.15
So-called fugitive emissions, those that are unintentional, may be far more important. The first recommendation of the IEA “Golden Rules” report is: “Measure, disclose, and engage [with local communities].”16 I’d like to stress the measuring and disclosing part, which bridges the discussion of the immediate impacts of the shale industry and its possible impact on global warming. Over the past few years, there has been a heated academic controversy over the volume of methane emissions from shale gas wells. The kickoff came with the publication of a paper by three Cornell professors that, using the limited data samplings available, projected the life cycle global warming impact from shale gas production. Natural gas has been hailed by many environmentalists as the climate-friendly fossil fuel: its CO2 emissions are much lower than those of other hydrocarbons, and processed methane is virtually free of particulates, heavy metals, and the other toxic contaminants. Methane, however, is a powerful greenhouse gas, with at least twenty-five times the warming effect of CO2 (although its lifetime is shorter), and the Cornell paper estimated that methane losses from fugitive emissions were much higher than previously supposed—to the point, in fact, where the global warming impact of shale gas might be worse than that of coal.17
I spent most of a day with Tony Ingraffea, one of the paper’s authors. He’s a professor at the Cornell engineering school, who did his doctoral work in rock mechanics. He is seriously worried about the consequences of runaway climate change in the medium future, and is an advocate of slowing the advance of the shale industry. Unlike many critics, he is both knowledgeable and scrupulous in his use of data. According to Ingraffea, he and his colleagues were shell-shocked at the violence of the reaction to the paper, which began even while the paper was still in peer review. A rushed refutation by one of the federal energy laboratories was trumpeted by the industry and financial press.18 Many critics attacked what they saw as inadequate data in the Cornell paper, ignoring its conclusion that:
the uncertainty in the magnitude of fugitive emissions is large. Given the importance of methane in global warming, these emissions deserve far greater study than has occurred in the past. We urge both more direct measurements and refined accounting to better quantify lost and unaccounted for gas.
I have read most of the back-and-forth, which has become a footless exercise in competing projections, since there are no reliable data on methane emissions from the gas industry—indeed, there are no reliable data on very much at all, except for basic production and rig statistics. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), one of the few environmental organizations that has focused on limiting the damage from fossil fuel production rather than attempting to ban them already has a number of projects under way. Their preliminary research tends to support Ingraffea: while low-CO2 gas is theoretically an improvement over coal and other fossil fuels from a global warming perspective, their most likely levels of methane emissions wipes out their advantage. EDF has joined with nine major gas companies including Southwestern Energy, Shell, Chevron, the ExxonMobil gas subsidiary, and Encana, among others, along with several universities, to document the life cycle emissions—from well to end use—in a statistically valid way, and come up with best-practice methods to reduce them to environmentally tolerable levels. The first study, to be released in 2013, will establish a baseline for typical emissions at the well production point. The data collection will be conducted throughout the well sites of the nine participating companies, covering a representative sample of wells, geologies, and techniques. A second project, in cooperation with the University of West Virginia, will track emissions from large compressed natural gas (CNG) truck and bus fleets and fueling stations, with results early in 2014. Subsequent studies through the remainder of 2014 will focus on local distribution systems, transmission and storage systems, and gathering and processing facilities.19
Most state regulations already require detailed reporting of spillages and other incidents, and the major shale gas and oil states have already formed standards bodies, such as STRONGER (State Review of Oil & Natural Gas Environmental Regulations) to evangelize best practices. Modest amounts of federal support might speed the development of more responsive and publicly available reporting systems than we have now, which would be money well spent.
The shale industry may be at a stage much like that of the personal software industry in the early to mid-1980s. Little companies led the surge of creativity that made the industry possible. Had it not been for the thousands of entrepreneurs who saw the shale opportunity and charged recklessly ahead, it may never have developed in the United States, just as it mostly hasn’t anywhere else. The personal software industry sorted itself out within just five or ten years, as companies like Lotus and Microsoft and others imposed a kind of order. The shale industry seems on the threshold of a similar consolidation, probably with ten to fifteen companies controlling almost all the production. As that happens, regulatory pressures should push for area-based development planning rather than just well-by-well permitting, including initial environmental surveys, projected well placement, spacing and well pipe layouts, area-based fluids and waste management programs, dedicated treatment and recycling facilities, comprehensive air and water monitoring devices, and good data collection and dissemination. The sooner that begins to happen, the faster the industry can realize its great promise.
The regulatory apparatus probably should remain centered in the states. Most states with resource-based industry concentrations have strong geologic services, and are intricately involved with setting parameters for mineral rights ownership and protection regimes—to prevent theft of product from a neighbor’s plot, for instance. Overarching air and water pollution standards, however, should rest with the federal government, although states could impose higher standards.
The question for the shale industry is not whether it increases air and water pollution, traffic noise, and other disturbances, for it surely does all those things. The question is: What is a reasonable price to pay to reindustrialize the United States? Reindustrialization has been a long-time policy objective of both liberals and conservatives. But industrial jobs are, after all, pretty industrial. The golden age of American manufacturing didn’t happen amid green meadows. But it was a time of good employment and growing middle-class incomes when smart and hard-working high school kids and community college graduates could get decent jobs and get ahead on talent and hard work alone. Today, even the heaviest industries operate with far less waste and pollution than was true in the 1950s and 1960s. And I would argue that with close attention and committed management, the shale industry could substantially reduce its environmental and aesthetic impact. President Obama has identified a manufacturing revival as a key objective of his second term, and fundamental forces seem indeed to be realigning in America’s favor. The energy bonanza may be the critical advantage that makes it inevitable; it would be tragedy to lose the opportunity through simple carelessness in the little stuff.
The second question, the one that Josh Fox only alluded to in Gasland, is: What about global warming?
The earth has clearly been experiencing a warming trend for a number of decades now, and there is substantial evidence that discharges from fossil fuels have been an important factor in inducing the warming. Because of the complexity of the interactions of solar activity, ocean tides, the atmosphere, and much else, such things can never be proved beyond doubt. So while it is conceivable that climate change deniers will turn out to be right, the correlation is sufficiently strong that it would be foolish, or thick-headed, to ignore the warming.
So what should we do about it? In part that depends on how the problem is framed. One prominent formulation measures the danger by the volume of CO2 in the atmosphere relative to the preindustrial age, set by convenience as ending in 1850. At the time, scientists infer, CO2 loading was 285 parts per million (ppm). Now it is closing in on 450 ppm, which many of the scientific climate-change fraternity believe is close to a tipping point where catastrophic events could begin to happen—like a radical redirection of the Indian monsoons. If that is true, we must start now rapidly reducing carbon emissions all across the globe, for it takes a long time for greenhouse gases to clear. A common calculation is that we have perhaps twenty years to turn the trends around.20
But if that science is right, we’re doomed; the horse has long since left the barn. China has already surpassed the United States as the world’s largest carbon emitter, and India and other emerging market countries are not far behind. There are a couple of billion poor people in the world, who want to have a better life, and a “better life” is generally determined by the amount of energy you have at your disposal: for cooking, heating, delivering clean water, as motive power for machines to do the nasty work, or to allow you to travel, and for bringing you news and entertainment, and classes from MIT. In other words, they want to be like us, and their daily lives often contain horrors that leave little room for worries about climate change.
The scientists and advocates who are pressing for global action tend to speak of what “we” have to do. But the human race is not a “we.” Chinese and Indian officials will say all the right things at international climate conferences, but they know that at home they have to keep delivering rapid growth. China’s leaders, especially, also know they have to stop the detritus from inefficient coal plants burning low-grade fuel, because it’s already killing people, but the focus is on particulates and poisons; any carbon reductions will be a side effect. As emerging countries evolve to the point where services begin to dominate their economies, the energy requirement for each unit of GDP steadily drops. China and India, and much of the rest of Asia, however, may still be a full generation away from reaching that point.
The advanced countries are in no position to complain; it was our pollution that brought things to such a critical point. Moreover, our recent carbon reductions, which appear to be quite substantial, are probably an illusion. If one tracks the carbon content of Western imported goods, as Dieter Helm did for Great Britain, it has risen faster than the advanced nations’ carbon reductions. The huge leap in Chinese manufacturing in the 2000s was, from a climate vantage point, simply an episode in rich country outsourcing of industrial pollution. Indeed, given the chaotic state of the Chinese energy sector, the net effect of the Western carbon reductions was almost certainly to increase atmospheric carbon loading. If the United States starts bringing home heavy industries like chemicals and steel, the overall effect may well be to decrease emissions.21
Advocates alarmed by the proximity of a tipping point generally recommend extreme actions. Nicholas Stern, an economist who has held senior positions at the World Bank and at the British Treasury, whose report, the Stern Review, became something of bible for the climate change movement, laid out a plan whereby all carbon emissions would be reduced to two tons per person per year across the globe by 2050. For the United States, that would require an 80 percent reduction, and for China about a third, since the majority of Chinese still use so little artificial energy. Failure to achieve that, Stern argues, will almost ensure a global catastrophe around 2100. Stern’s book The Global Deal, laid out a detailed action and funding plan to accomplish that goal, and proposed that the plan be accepted by the “world leaders” and “heads of government” at the 2009 Copenhagen climate change conference, and seems to have sincerely believed that it would be.22
Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, an engineer and an economist at Stanford and UC Davis, respectively, have laid out a plan for getting the entire world off fossil fuels within twenty-five years, involving massive development of wind, solar, and tidal power to go along with somewhat expanded hydro and geothermal power.* Their plan contains a lot of interesting engineering—like modeling ways to reduce the problem of the intermittency of wind and solar power by linking regional arrays. They do note that there are “socio-technical impediments” to achieving such a plan, which “may require concerted social and political efforts beyond the traditional sorts of economic incentives outlined here.”23
An underlying, but explicit, assumption of activists like Stern and Jacobson and Delucchi is that you never discount the future when it comes to humans. If you can avert a trillion-dollar disaster in 2100 by spending a trillion dollars now, you should. But humans, and much less human politicians, don’t think that way. We freely undergo hardships for family and children, somewhat lesser ones for our neighbors, and occasionally even for our country, but never for all the people in the world, and particularly not for all the people of the world of ninety years from now. More tellingly, espousing a zero-discount principle for such a distant future requires absolute certainty that you’re right. Rightly or wrongly, we have learned to be skeptical of highly certain engineers.24
Humans solve overarching fifty-year problems by muddling through, doing what they have to when they finally have to. It is conceivable that that reflex will doom the species to extinction by global warming—an appropriate Darwinian outcome—in which case the earth would have to manage without us. In the meantime, it is surely right that governments should demand environmentally sound behavior, at levels of inconvenience and cost that people are willing to tolerate, while constantly nudging up the bounds of their tolerance. Perversely, the catastrophist literature may just make that harder: if disaster is inevitably on its way—assuming we don’t carry out an agenda that looks impossible—then all environmentally friendly measures may seem pointless.
Until quite recently, natural gas was assumed to be a major tool in slowing the pace of climate change, since its CO2 profile is by far the lowest among the fossil fuels. The Cornell paper has thrown cold water on those prospects—even, I suspect, among its critics. Given the age of our natural gas infrastructure, can anyone really believe that there is not a lot of methane escaping? Upgrading and repairing that infrastructure, installing good measurement and monitoring systems, and ensuring best-practice, methane-conserving methods of depressurizing and controlling vapors, is a big, dull undertaking, which will require constant attention. Yet it may be the best way that the gas industry can make a genuine environmental contribution, by lowering CO2 with only minor offsets by methane and thereby perhaps win and retain the public good will to allow its continued growth and progress.
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* One the primary reasons for the waste of water in farming is that farmers are undercharged for it. Some arid regions of California are major exporters of rice, which is ridiculous.
* I admit to being jaundiced about very big, and very tight, engineering schedules. Some forty-five years ago I worked in the New York City government expediting capital projects through the multiple bureaucratic and political hurdles, and helped in various minor ways to advance the badly needed third city water tunnel to the point where it was financed and construction actually started. Construction was supposed to take a decade or so, as I recall. Current expectations are that it will be completed around 2020.