Like many people with concern for the environment, I am deeply opposed to fracking. This profoundly destructive process fuels demand for carbon based fuel that we do not need, and should not burn, whilst polluting and causing landscape devastation, as well as earthquakes.
The good news (and there always has to be some) is that this crisis will see the end of fracking, probably for good. With oil prices now getting as low as $20 a barrel in the USA there is already a glut of oil in the world that the Saudis have no intention of removing.
This, of course, reduces worldwide inflationary pressure.
It also destroys the economics of fracking, which have always been almost incomprehensible given the massive up front costs and the remarkable fall off of yield after only a couple of years of production. Now they simply don't make sense, in the USA or anywhere else.
I would never have wished for this crisis: no sane person would have done. I am not celebrating anything about it. But I am pleased that we might see the end of this particularly destructive and harmful process as a consequence of it. The end of fracking cannot come too soon for the sake of the world that we live in.
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Do you understand the chemistry behind why fracked gas produces less than half the CO2 emissions per unit of energy than coal?
Happy to explain if you don’t.
There’s good evidence that the emissions from fracking at UK latitudes are about the same as solar, but that would require quite a long analysis. But if you could answer the first question, I’d be grateful.
I do not understand it all: there are limits to my time. That is the constraint
But I am more than happy to rely on those who have invested that time and assure me you are wrong
Save your lecture in that case. I have already appraised the evidence sufficiently to know you are wrong
It doesn’t require a lecture, just a little knowledge of chemistry, but I would have liked to pitch it at the right level. Someone with an A-level in chemistry already knows the composition of the atmosphere, and a little about photosynthesis. I wouldn’t want to talk down to that person.
Do you understand the physics behind why nuclear is such an efficient means of producing energy in terms of land area required. You can argue it’s dangerous, or leads to weapons of awesome brutality, but the question is whether you get that it is an efficient energy source which doesn’t produce CO2 emissions on any significant scale.
If your knowledge of Physics is at the level of people who think a light year is a very long time, then fair enough, I can recommend an explanation at the appropriate level.
If your level of analysis is at the level this comment implies please do not bother – we think about externalities here and you clearly do not
I am really not interested
I also happen to note – as readers cannot – where you come from and I am not willing to promote your views
Coal in the Uk is dead (& ditto in mainland Europe – Poland is in a zombie condition) – the comparison wrt nat gas needs to be nat gas vs renewables. Putting to one side the ultra low gas prices at the moment – nat gas as a fuel for CCGTs struggles to compete with renewables. There is then the not so small issue of SMR+CCS which as the Foster Wheeler 2017 report for the IEA showed (yes sad isn’t it – I read these things) hydrogen from the SMR+CCS set-up will struggle to compete with renewable hydrogen – if only on price certainty. Future ain’t looking so good for gas & I await with interest the special pleading by the fossil fan-boys. & if gas has such a bright future – what is Shell doing north of Groningen with its monster off-shore wind farm (3? 4? 10GW?) coupled to electrolysers – clearly voting with its feet. Once gas is forced to internalise its impacts – it has no future.
There have been a number of articles in the US on the unprofitability of the fracking industry. The virus will probably tip it over the edge. Gas prices (like oil) have tanked – 0.7eurocents/kWh made worse by a collapse in demand both industrially and for space heat (nice weather we are having).
The current situation provides a chance to analyse a world (well Europe) in which there are very high levels of renewables and very low levels of fossil generation. The first three months of this year have delivered very strong output from renewables plus the March inflection point where demand collapses, but renewable output remains strong (as you would expect given it has zero marginal cost).
On the fossil front it will be interesting to see how the usual suspects (BP, Shell, Total et al) emerge at the end of all this and what form their subsidy pleading takes. The other battle being fought is over the focus of the EU financial “package” – will it be more or less green?. Various players on both sides (fossil/car bunch, renewables/energy efficiency bunch) are lining up their arguments. In the case of the car rabble, VW is using the virus as a fig leaf to hide its failure to complete the software needed for its new range of electric vehicles. Suddeuche Zeitung reported on this one the same day as the Euro car org ACEA was bleating about needing more time to meet new emission regulations on cars (this should sound familiar btw – special pleading & kicking the can down the road).
Apologies if some of the above seems a bit off-topic – but it is to illustrate that the crisis the virus has created is being used by some fossil fan-boys as a smoke screen and, doubtless, will be used by others as well.
There is nothing I want more than the immediate stop to all fossil fuels, but it is beyond wreckless to pretend that Wind and PV are in any way close to being able to replace them now. Not enough batteries that are too expensive and extremely toxic anyways. Besides that, the amount the amount of overbuilt capacity you need just to charge the batteries enough to compensate for seasonal variation is literally insane. https://youtu.be/h5cm7HOAqZY
“but it is beyond wreckless to pretend that Wind and PV are in any way close to being able to replace them now. Not enough batteries that are too expensive and extremely toxic anyways”.
The wind resource in Europe (on & off-shore) totals around 24,000TWh/year – more than enough to power the totality of EU (& UK) industry & society. & this does not include PV. Wind and PV can be built with no subsidy (in the right place) expressed another way: they have a (positive) business case. European industry is quite capable of scaling to the +/- 40GW/year of new construction. GW-class off-shore wind farms are commonplace.
In the case of storage, your statements about batteries are entirely correct. The solution to storage is to re-purpose the existing gas network for hydrogen (most of the network with the exception of compressors) is hydrogen ready – including the low pressure network. As you probably know, taking the example of Germany, the existing gas network has a strorage capacity of 220TWh – even when repurposed for hydrogen (70TWh) more than sufficient to cover multi-day calm periods. Batt’s have their uses, certainly for passenger transport, possibly home stroage (PV+batts gives you 60% electricity independence) and maybe for frequency response. Othwerwise, it’s a gas gas gas (in this case – hydrogen). & for clarity, I mena of course electrolysed hydrogen using renewable resources.
@Mike Parr,
Producing hydrogen from natural gas using electrolysis will use an awful lot of renewable electricity. Do you see any role for Steam Methane Reformation with CCS in the medium term?
Hydrogen produced by electrolysis uses renewable electricity and water (not natural gas). SMR+CCS is the other low(ish) carbon route to produce hydrogen & does use natural gas. Two problems with the SMR/CCS route. First – broadly speaking there is cost parity between renewable hydrogen and SMR/CCS hydrogen – but nat gas prices move all over the place – electricity prices from renewables don’t – take your pick constantly changing fossil hydrogen prices or fixed renewable hydrogen prices. Second, the future trajectory is to decarbonise using renewable electricity – this require energy storage – the only scalable technology is electrolysers (powered by renewables) with the hydrogen stored in a re-purposed gas network. These are all realities. I have a powerpoint with voice over on the subject for non-technical audineces and will put this up on YouTube.
Only one problem with that, Hydrogen won’t work in infrastructure built for Methane. Hydrogen diffuses into steel causing brittleness and failure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
and if it’s plastic piping H2 diffuses through it much quicker than methane.
ah yes, the embrittlement meme. Mr Userfriendly – you need to read more widely – various governments (UK, Dutch, French) have produced reports covering pipe-re-purposing for hydrogen. Taking one example: 100% of the Dutch high pressure and intermerdiate pressure networks are hydrogen ready because, the type of steel used in the pipes is X52. This is unaffacted by embrittlement. Gasunie have just repurposed an HP gas pipe for hydrogen. About 40% of the UK’s North Sea gas network can carry 100% hydrogen (without embrittlement risk). Wikipedia is a great resource but can sometimes be out of date. Reading widely on a subject avoids this.
Batteries only make sense for short-term storage or off-grid operation. For example, smoothing out rapid fluctuations in demand, time-shifting energy from household photovoltaic panels, or powering electric vehicles.
For longer-term storage, you need pumped-storage hydroelectric (which is good for feeding electricity straight to the grid) and the hydrogen gas storage Mike Parr has already discussed (which is good for direct heating at point of use).
The details of implementing hydrogen gas storage are still being nailed down, but pumped-storage hydroelectric has been a proven technology for at least 50 years, if not longer.
Storage is not a problem. The problem is getting politicians at Westminster to pull their fingers out and make it happen.
I have often thought that hydrogen produced by electrolysis using renewables was the way to store energy. Good to hear people are looking into the practicalities of it.
I’m not convinced that it needs to be a substitute for natural gas in the existing distribution network though. I think electricity, being clean energy at the point of use, is better suited to domestic heating going forward. No explosive gases or flue gases to deal with. I could be wrong, but maintaining electric and gas networks may not be as cost effective as just having one.(electric)
The hydrogen could be created and stored adjacent to a gas fired power station and used to create electricity as a back up to renewables. Could come on line very quickly to cover peak demands. Transportation costs would be very low. Would probably need the renewables close too to keep costs down.
Not sure which would be most cost effective? Lots of smaller power stations providing local electricity, or large units but with the electricity being distributed over longer distances?
If “User Friendly” isn’t a professional troll I will eat my hat.
This general topic area is notoriously rife with them.
Some who have tried to post here looked so strongly like they were that they have failed….
Glad to hear it.
Totally agree Richard. The argument about natural gas being lower carbon than coal was always false because (a) it is not low enough for the speed of decarbonisation necessary and (b) there is huge evidence of methane leakage in the processes of production and distribution — and of course methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
Fracking also illustrates what happens to the energy system at the limits to growth — to get the oil and gas out of shale takes more energy, more wells, more water, more pipelines, more heavy transport, more noise and pollution per unit of energy extracted — and thus more money costs, damage to public health away and damage to the environment. It is however wonderful business for a corrupt PR sector. They got away with it because for over a century the oil (and natural gas) sector has been strategic so the industry is well connected in government (including to the military ) and integral to the finance sector.
The point is that at the limits to growth the costs of further “growth” outweigh the benefits — except the costs, the harms, are largely not researched, not counted and are not monetized — the damage therefore is noticed after the event when it is way too late. Which is what is happening too with destruction of the biosphere which is now turning up covid 19 and other diseases.
I’ve long said that fracking and LPG shipments are utterly pointless for Europe as the Russians bring their massive reserves online via the now almost live notdstream2, the now onlibe TurkStream and the restored Ukraine stream.
We are thus in a secure international pipeline grid which will keep our boilers and cookers functioning on gas until we get off it and replace it with a hydrogen based economy.
It’s over for fracking and tar sands and their ugly deadly industry and they failed to stop the pipelines – think Qatar is going to hang with the failing plan of sending their gas in dangerous voyages by ship to deepwater ports such as Milford Haven for onward pipeline distribution, of they can just plug it into a Eurasian wide grid and sell and deliver to anywhere within minutes?
Fracking, like oil extraction from tar sands in Canada, seems to be at the very worst end of oil/gas extraction. We know that in USA there are plenty of polluted water sources (from many industries) as the EPA has continually had it’s powers cut. Fracking just adds to that.
RThe US uses the ‘scientific’ approach, rather than the ‘precautionary principle’ of EU. I know which I prefer – caution every time.
I did note that Aberdeen is going green and an oil/gas player (Woods?) is going to decarbon oil to produce hydrogen. I like the idea of hydrogen, but only if it is produced at scale from wind/solar/renewable.
If something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck…
“It also destroys the economics of fracking, which have always been almost incomprehensible given the massive up front costs”
Are you just making things up? A fracking well costs perhaps $10 million to get up and running. A conventional oil field $10 billion perhaps these days. Which one is massive?
“This, of course, reduces worldwide inflationary pressure”…possibly the dumbest comment I’ve heard..The saudis are doing this so they can control energy prices in the future, and to give you a clue that price action in years to come will be inflationary not deflationary.
I was talking in terms of yeild to return ratios
Speaking of yield to return ratios. I see that this question ” A fracking well costs perhaps $10 million to get up and running. A conventional oil field $10 billion perhaps these days. Which one is massive?”
probably rates as “possibly the dumbest comment I’ve heard”.
By that measure of thinking bus travel would be more expensive than driving a Porsche.
The issue for me with fracking is that it seems to cause geological disturbance and damage to water tables that is frankly unacceptable and what I would call ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ (i.e ‘desperate’) as far as energy resources are concerned. There are better ways of doing things I feel.
Every cloud has a silver lining…!
Thank you…
There is so much – soooooooooooo much that this current crisis is going to change forever. And some of it, most of it we don’t even know.yet.
To paraphrase that notorious quote from Donald Rumsfeld: there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
Now that we have reached a point where renewables + storage are cheaper or as cheap as fossil fuels, the process of transition to a new phase industrial revolution (where energy will have virtually no variable costs) is well underway. To keep up, people like the Saudis will keep selling fossil fuels at cheaper and cheaper levels until their products are no longer viable. That then leaves some pretty big questions about the future of oil-producing nations, the wars and geopolitics that are mostly about oil, the Petrodollar arrangement that underpins the world’s foremost reserve currency (and as such international trade as we know it).
Either way these changes are an ecological necessity and the current crisis, whilst not shaping these changes, is certainly helping to push them along a bit quicker.
At the moment I’m kind of liking the way that these conservative governments in the English-speaking world are having to initiate these socialistic stimulus and relief measures. But that’s another topic for another time.
This is good news news for oil fracking but unfortunately doesn’t cover the problem of coal-seam gas and shale gas fracking.