Modern shale gas development is, in my opinion, reversing what nature has done over the last 400 million years or so. In shale gas development we’re releasing carbon that nature stored for all that time. For 400 million years nature has been storing carbon underground and in water, in the oceans. And now humans are coming along and releasing the carbon and in the process we have to take fresh water off the surface of the earth and sequester it underground. And we get it out by pumping water down. This is at a time in human existence when global warming from excess carbon dioxide and methane and water shortages are problems worldwide. To me that is Frankensteinian—a devilish, deadly process”. Dr. Anthony Ingraffea—Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering, Weiss Presidential Teaching Fellow at Cornell University and president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, Inc.
Recent climate data suggests that the world is on track to cross the two degrees of warming threshold set in the Paris accord in just 10 to 15 years according to Ingraffea in a 13-minute lecture titled “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” posted online in April 2018.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration, “expects 1 million natural gas wells will be producing gas in the U.S. in 2050, up from roughly 100,000 today”.
Cornell University argues that if we had pursued wind energy in the late 90’s and early 2000’s instead of fracking as an alternative to coal, we may have had time to avoid and/or delay some of the worst climate impacts that are now predicted to occur.
Sharon Kelley of the The DeSmog Blog writes:
An average global temperature increase of 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) will bring catastrophic changes — even as compared against a change of 1.5° C (2.7° F). “Heat waves would last around a third longer, rain storms would be about a third more intense, the increase in sea level would be approximately that much higher and the percentage of tropical coral reefs at risk of severe degradation would be roughly that much greater,” with just that half-degree difference, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained in a 2016 post about climate change.
DeSmog Blog notes that a draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which leaked this January, concluded that it is “extremely unlikely” that world governments will keep to a 1.5° change. The IPCC estimates we will cross the 1.5 degrees threshold in approximately 20 years, but that is slower than what Ingraffea from Cornell University believes. “Every one of these scenarios under-predicted actual global warming. Whereas the worst-case scenario brought us to 1.5 degrees Centigrade in 2040, we're almost there today.”
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, U.S. natural gas production was flat or falling. If that trend had continued along the same track it was following from 2006-2008, then wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources might have had a chance to displace both natural gas and coal as major energy sources in America, according to Ingraffea.
Instead, the shale gas rush, propelled by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), swept across the U.S., with drillers snapping up land to drill for previously inaccessible fossil fuels locked in geologic formations of shale rock from coast to coast.
If the shale gas rush hadn't disrupted trends around that time, Ingraffea estimates that the wind energy sector alone could have produced roughly triple the amount of energy expected by the end of this coming decade, a difference of roughly 400 gigawatts.
“We can easily see there is a loss of potential — large amounts of wind energy — because of the injection of shale gas into our energy economy,” Ingraffea explains in the lecture.
While the shale gas industry promised benefits like jobs and American energy security, Ingraffea notes, those benefits would have been almost exclusively aimed at just 5 percent of the world's population, North Americans. But the harms will affect the remaining 95 percent of the world as well.
Ingraffea concludes that the earth’s climate is “changing faster and more dramatically than it might have otherwise, and — far from serving as a bridge fuel— fracking huge amounts of natural gas has already played a significant role in pushing the world toward a vastly more difficult future”
x xYouTube VideoIn this lecture “Shale Gas: The Technological Gamble That Should Not Have Been Taken,” Anthony Ingraffea poses that the fracking boom has placed the world’s population in grave risk for the supposed benefit of a few. Just because one can do something does not mean that one should, especially if the possible action is clearly a gamble. The wisdom of experience, and concern for unpredictable effects broader than the immediate outcome, should guide a decision to use a new-found capability. Early this century, gas and oil operators, regulators, and legislators collectively violated this precept across most of North America. Having discovered a way to extract gas and oil from a previously undevelopable source, shale, they forged ahead at unprecedented scale. This unwise boom led to three compounding results: the prolongation of the fossil fuel era for decades; the depression of the deployment of clean renewable energy; and the exacerbation of climate change. This lecture focuses on these three results of a risk that should never have been taken, incorporating data on natural gas production, the slowing of renewable energy development, and faster-than-predicted global warming.