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July 21, 2011
What did one frustrated oil man say to the other? "Let's get fracking."
Hydraulic fracturing would be a joke if the oil and gas industry didn't take it
so seriously.
It's ridiculous that they would pump millions of liters of water into the ground
when climate change is making water a precious resource. It's absurd that they
would mix chemicals into the water without even telling us what the chemicals
are. It's not funny that blasting natural gas out of shale will industrialize
our landscape for little gain.
The discovery of shale gas in B.C.'s Horn River Basin near Fort Nelson has
doubled our province's natural gas reserves to about 160 trillion cubic feet but
that's small compared to North American demands.
Fracking requires a lot of drilling to break up the shale and release the
trapped gas. According to a report released by the David Suzuki Foundation and
the Pembina Institute: "with hundreds or thousands of wells drilled annually, a
well pad roughly every square mile, the number of well pads needed to produce a
given amount of shale gas over 25 years is on the order of 100 times greater
than the expected number needed to produce the same amount of gas in the
Mackenzie Delta, a high quality conventional-like resource."
Fracking releases not only gas but lots of junk. Geochemist Tracy Bank has been
studying the way water interacts with shale. "Shale is a garbage-bucket rock,"
she warns in Discover science magazine. "The more organically rich the shale is,
the more natural gas is present, but the more other stuff is in there too." When
Bank and her team of researchers examined shale samples they found a toxic suite
of metals including uranium, barium, chromium, zinc, and arsenic.
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Not only will the water be contaminated with the chemicals added by
drillers, it would be further poisoned with toxic and radioactive waste.
"This water needs to be treated like industrial waste," says Bank. Instead,
a lot of the water is injected into disposal wells where it remains toxic
for generations.
Not only does fracking turn farmlands in to industrial sites and render
valuable water and land useless, it can also contaminate good drinking water
and even make it flammable as gas leaches into wells.
And for what? The Horn River Basin reserves may seem like a lot of gas but
the entire cache could supply the U.S. for only four months. All that misery
to continue an unsustainable way of life for a few months longer.
Fracking gives gas a bad name. Natural gas was supposed to be the "bridging"
fuel that would cover our energy needs until renewal sources could be found.
Conventional gas has been the darling of conservationists because it burns
so cleanly. But success has been its downfall. So many U.S. electricity
generating plants use it that supplies have been running low - - until
garbage-bucket loads of shale gas was found.
It's easy to ridicule big oil and gas tycoons as money-grubbers but there
are other beneficiaries. Governments love big oil and gas finds because they
generate revenues without raising taxes. The magic of expensive government
programs such as health care paid using energy royalties instead of taxes is
too hard for politicians to resist. In addition, their reputation as sound
fiscal managers gets a boost even though found wealth takes no talent to
spend.
And energy consumers will be happy because they will be shielded for a
little while longer from the real price of energy. We can blissfully carry
on as though the dream of endless fossil fuels will never end.
David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at
dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca
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