Unconventional gas is not a 'bridge' to a green future - it's a treacherous cliff that the Government are asking us all to step off.
As Charlie Chaplin said, "Wars, conflict, it's all business ... Numbers sanctify."
That was certainly the case with the UK Government's approach to shale gas. They hoped that they could whitewash the climate effects of fracking with some fancy formulas.
Instead what they produced was another 'dodgy dossier' [1] - a straightforward denial of the uncertainties and the likely effects of what unconventional gas will do to the climate.
Fracking climate impacts 'relatively small'?
In December 2012 the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) commissioned a report on the climate impacts of shale gas. In September 2013 the report [2] - The Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions Associated with Shale Gas Extraction and Use, by David 'No Hot Air' MacKay [3] and Timothy Stone - was published.
It said that the greenhouse gas impacts of shale gas would be "relatively small", and were likely to be no worse than conventional gas [4]. But if we look at the numbers behind that report there's no proof to backup those claims.
Natural gas is methane - a potent greenhouse gas [5]. On a 100-year time-line, including climate feedbacks, the latest science report from the IPCC [6] says that methane is 34 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide. Obviously, not the sort of stuff you'd want to be releasing large quantities of [7].
Methane - 86 times more powerful than CO2 over 20 years
What's less well known is that on a 20-year time-line it's 86 times worse for the climate. By releasing methane today - let's say from intensive factory farms, or from very messy unconventional oil and gas drilling - it forces a lot of short-term warming of the climate.
Unconventional gas is not a 'bridge' to a green future - it's a treacherous cliff that the Government are asking us all to step off.
Given we're very close to some major climate tipping points [8], such as melting polar ice or Arctic tundra, we definitely don't want to be releasing large quantities of methane.
Back in 2010, the fossil fuel industry dismissed methane emissions from oil and gas extraction. A report for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which was quoted in a study [9] of shale gas produced for the Co-op by the Manchester Tyndall Centre (which they later revised [10] ), considered methane emissions to be "insignificant".
At last, some peer-reviewed science ...
That all changed in June 2011 when a group led by Robert Howarth [11] released the first peer-review study of the climate impacts of shale gas.
According to their research, given the poor quality of the data available on the emissions from unconventional oil and gas operation, on a 20-year time-line shale gas had as bad an impact on the climate as if you were burning coal.
Needless to say, the oil and gas industry went into PR-overdrive to say the opposite [12] .
This scientific ding-dong made the Government commission MacKay and Stone's report. But if some scientists say that shale gas is so bad for the climate, how come the Government's report says there's no problem?
First of all you have to look at where the data is coming from. The data which MacKay and Stone use is based upon 'emissions inventories'. When the industry drill holes they measure the gases coming off - and then commercial companies buy that data, collate it, and sell it back to the industry and governments to do studies of the impact on the environment.
The problem is that inventories are never complete [13]. They can't measure all the leaks, and the occasional accidental or unintentional release of gases.
Air sampling: actual methane emissions 2-8 greater than declared
What scientists have been doing recently is flying aircraft over oil and gas fields [14] taking air samples, and they've discovered that the emissions are two to eight times worse than are declared by the inventories.
If more than 3.2% [15] of the gas produced leaks then the effect of burning gas to make electricity is worse than coal. Some studies have found leakage rates of nearly 9% [16].
What half a dozen scientific studies now show is that data in emission inventories is useless. The oil and gas industries are emitting far more methane than they claim.
The latest study [17], published in April, showed that large quantities of methane were being emitted from drilling even before the fracking operations got under-way - something the inventories didn't measure.
And it gets worse, as wells produce far less gas than declared
Comparing the climate impact of fuels requires a calculation of the amount of equivalent carbon emissions per unit of energy produced - dividing the total emissions from production by the energy supplied to the market. The more gas produced per well, the lower the emissions per unit.
It turns out that the industry has been exaggerating the gas production per well [18]. A recent study for the US Argonne National Laboratory [19] put the actual amount at a half to a third of the figures quoted by the industry.
And in their study, MacKay and Stone used figures which were twice what average shale wells actually produced - which means their results for methane emissions were only half of what they would have been with the correct figures.
Other serious problems with Mackay & Stone
The issue of exaggeration is significant [20]. In order to justify the viability of shale gas, MacKay and Stone quoted figures for gas production two or three times higher than the latest US figures.
That means one of two things - either shale gas in Britain will be uneconomic, and simply not take place - or the amount of gas produced will be a tenth or less of the figures the Government is promoting.
The other problem with the MacKay-Stone report is that they believe the industry will do things which they don't do in practice. For example, they assume that they might capture "100%" of the emissions because someone from BP told them so - but no source or reference for that is given.
In order to justify their claims, MacKay and Stone referred to a report that had not yet been published - by Allen et al. [21] at the University of Texas.
A week after MacKay and Stone's report came out that paper was published - and it looked brilliant! Only 0.42% of the gas was leaking! But when you look at the detail the facts mean anything but that.
In fact, the paper is hardly 'science' at all
The Allen paper is not a life-cycle study - it omits the totality of losses covered in other papers. More importantly, it's a non-randomised sample of 0.1% of the wells drilled in the US.
In other words, the gas industry - whose names and site details remain anonymous - told Allen which sites to go and sample. The paper doesn't even say if the sites were producing shale gas, coal-bed methane, or if gas production was associated with shale oil wells.
The bottom line is they couldn't even get the details of who they were working for correct. When the Allen paper was published the PNAS website stated, "The authors declare no conflict of interest".
But a month later, when the media coverage had died down, PNAS had to publish a correction. It turns out most of those involved in the study had links with the oil and gas industry.
Plug the proper figures into the model, and it's as bad as coal
The figures the Government quote about the carbon emissions from shale gas are meaningless. We know that inventory-based assessment are significantly under-estimating emissions, but the Government ignore this debate [22] . Shale wells produce a fraction of what is claimed, and yet we're told it's going to be an economic boom for Britain [23] .
When the Government published the MacKay-Stone report they didn't publish the modelling spreadsheet. Reviewing all the evidence, using the details from the text of the MacKay-Stone report and the data tables, it's possible recreate their spreadsheet pretty accurately. Then you can modify the input values to produce the correct results!
If you plug the right values into the MacKay-Stone model, and then assume the bits they don't tell you in order to get a 20-year time-line for methane emissions, what's the result? Burning shale gas to produce electricity is about as bad as burning coal! Just as Howarth stated back in 2011.
Who is fooling who?
In discussing the available evidence on the climate effects of fracking, the latest IPCC report on tackling climate change [24] states that, "Recent empirical research has not yet resolved these uncertainties".
If the IPCC don't know what the impacts are, how can the UK Government? The fact is they don't - they just think they do and want us to believe their delusion too.
There is no evidence to prove that natural gas is a 'low carbon' fuel - as stated this month in the new paper produced by Howarth [25] , and in a number [26] of other recent journal papers [27] . Natural gas doesn't save enough emissions to avoid dangerous climate change.
If we want to do that then we have to change to non-fossil energy sources, but most importantly we have to drastically cut the demand for resources that drives emissions - including methane and nitrogen oxide emissions from intensive agricultural systems [28] .
Unconventional gas is not a 'bridge' to a green future - it's a treacherous cliff that the Government are asking us all to step off [29] .
Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer. He runs the Free Range Activism website.
This article may also be read on the FRAW website.
References:
- Wikipedia: 'Iraq Dossier' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
- Potential Greenhouse Gas Emissions Associated with Shale Gas Extraction and Use, David J.C, MacKay, Timothy J. Stone, Department of Energy and Climate Change, 9th September 2013 - http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/decc_2013-2.pdf
- Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air - http://www.withouthotair.com/
- Edward Davey today made the case for the safe and responsible exploration of shale gas in the UK, in line with UK's climate change targets, DECC, 9th September 2013 -https://www.gov.uk/government/news/davey-uk-shale-gas-development-will-not-be-at-expense-of-climate-change-targets
- Wikipedia: 'Global-warming potential' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential
- Chapter 8, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Assessment Report 5, Working Group I, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013 - https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
- More Bad News For Fracking: IPCC Warns Methane Traps Much More Heat Than We Thought, Joe Romm, Think Progress, 2nd October 2013 -http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/02/2708911/fracking-ipcc-methane/
- Climate forcing growth rates: doubling down on our Faustian bargain, James Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Makiko Sato, Environmental Research Letters, vol.8 no.1 id.011006, March 2013 - http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/climate/hansen_2013.pdf
- Shale gas: A provisional assessment of climate change and environmental impacts, Tyndall Centre Manchester, January 2011 - http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/tyndall_coop_2011-1.pdf
- Shale gas: An updated assessment of environmental and climate change impacts, Tyndall Centre Manchester, The Co-operative, November 2011 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/tyndall_coop_2011-2.pdf
- Methane and the greenhouse-gas footprint of natural gas from shale formations, Robert W. Howarth et al., Climatic Change, vol.106 no.4 pp.679-690, June 2011 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/howarth_2011.pdf
- Assessing the greenhouse impact of natural gas, L. M. Cathles, Geochemistry-Geophysics-Geosystems (G3), vol.13 no.6, 19th June 2012 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/cathales_2012.pdf
- Air Impacts of Increased Natural Gas Acquisition, Processing, and Use: A Critical Review, Christopher W. Moore et. al., Science of the Total Environment (undated preprint), March 2014 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/moore_2014.pdf
- Air sampling reveals high emissions from gas field, Jeff Tollefson, Nature, vol.482 pp.139-140, 9th February 2012 - http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/tollefson_2012.pdf
- Greater focus needed on methane leakage from natural gas infrastructure, Ramón A. Alvarez wt al., PNAS, vol.109 no.17 pp.6435-6440, 24th April 2012 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/alvarez_2012.pdf
- Methane leaks erode green credentials of natural gas, Jeff Tollefson, Nature, vol.493 p.12, 3rd January 2013 - http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/tollefson_2013.pdf
- Toward a better understanding and quantification of methane emissions from shale gas development, Dana R. Caulton et. al., PNAS (early edition), 14th April 2014 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/caulton_2014.pdf
- A reality check on the shale revolution, J. David Hughes, Nature, vol.494 pp.307-308, 21st February 2013 - http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/hughes_2013.pdf
- Updated Fugitive Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Natural Gas Pathways in the GREET Model, A. Burnham et al., Energy Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratory, October 2013 -https://greet.es.anl.gov/files/ch4-updates-13
- Drill Baby Drill: Can Unconventional Fuels Usher in a New Era of Energy Abundance, David Hughes, Post Carbon Institute, February 2013 - http://www.postcarbon.org/drill-baby-drill/
- Measurements of methane emissions at natural gas production sites in the United States, David T. Allen et al., PNAS, 16th September 2013 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/allen_2013.pdf
- Getting ready for shale gas: supply chain estimated to be worth billions as new environmental measures announced (press release), Department of Energy and Climate Change, 24th April 2014 - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/getting-ready-for-shale-gas-supply-chain-estimated-to-be-worth-billions-as-new-environmental-measures-announced
- The Economic Impact on UK Energy Policy of Shale Gas and Oil, 3rd Report of Session 2013-14 (HL172), Lords Economic Affairs Committee, 8th May 2014 -http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldselect/ldeconaf/172/172.pdf
- pages 18/19, chapter 7, Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change, Assessment Report 5, Working Group III, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, April 2014 -http://report.mitigation2014.org/drafts/final-draft-postplenary/ipcc_wg3_ar5_final-draft_postplenary_chapter7.pdf
- A bridge to nowhere: methane emissions and the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas, Robert W. Howarth, Energy Science and Engineering, 15th May 2014 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/howarth_2014.pdf
- Coal to gas: the influence of methane leakage, Tom M. L. Wigley, Climatic Change, vol.108 pp.601-608, 26th August 2011 - http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/wigley_2011.pdf
- Implications of Shale Gas Development for Climate Change, Richard G. Newell, Daniel Raimi, Environmental Science and Technology (preprint), 22nd April 2014 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/extreme/newell_2014.pdf
- Agriculture at a Crossroads: Synthesis Report, International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, April 2009 -http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/food/iaastd_syn_2009.pdf
- YouTube: 'Cause & Solution to Unemployment' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBHHFnUqo5o
