#fracked gas

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

Washington state is on the cusp of making its biggest climate pollution decision in years. The state has the power to stop the world’s largest fracked gas-to-methanol refinery, proposed along the Columbia River’s shores in Kalama. But a dangerous new climate theory stands in the way: the displacement theory.

If built this single refinery would use more fracked gas than all the power plants in Washington combined and increase the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by between 4.17 and 5.41 million metric tons a year.

Yet project-backer Northwest Innovation Works suggests that building this new methanol refinery is somehow good for our climate.

How is that possible? The company’s rationale is based on the “displacement theory,” which posits that global emissions will increase more slowly if Washington approves the Kalama methanol refinery because the company would ship the methanol to China to make plastics or to burn as fuel. And if Washington-produced methanol doesn’t exist, China will produce methanol using coal-fired power instead of fracked gas.

This twisted logic isn’t just the company’s rhetoric; it’s been repeated in a new draft study by consultants hired by the Washington Department of Ecology, which is now weighing whether to permit the refinery.

The department’s analysis rests on the assumptions that no cleaner methanol or substitutes will attempt to enter the market in the next 40 years and neither the United States nor China will enact new regulations to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. This presents a dim view of humanity’s history of innovation and commitment to tackling the climate crisis.

Despite a raft of accounting gimmicks, the industry wasn’t able to hide the fact that it was drowning in red ink. By mid-year, Sightline’s Clark Williams-Derry reported that:

A cross-section of 29 fracking-focused oil and gas companies reported more than $2.5 billion in negative free cash flows in the first quarter of 2019. These results were even worse than in the fourth quarter of 2018…

And as the year went on, the frackers’ problems kept getting worse. By December, the oil and gas giant Chevron was forced to write down its assets by more than $10 billion, with industry analysts widely accepting that dozens of other companies in the sector would face a similar reckoning.

Whatever financial pain the industry is facing, though, looks like a flesh wound compared to the injury it has inflicted on the rest of us—and our environment. As Chevron tried to put on a brave face for investors, researchers at Stanford University dispelled the characterization of natural gas as a necessary “bridge fuel” to clean energy. Quite the opposite:

A surge in natural gas has helped drive down coal burning across the United States and Europe, but it isn’t displacing other fossil fuels on a global scale. Instead, booming gas use is fueling the global growth in greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University and other institutions.

In fact, natural gas use is growing so fast, its carbon dioxide emissions over the past six years actually eclipsed the decline in emissions from the falling use of coal, the researchers found.

Consider also the grim news that came in December, when the National Academy of Sciences reported that a new satellite-based methane analysis determined that a single gas well blowout in Ohio last year was one of the largest methane leaks in US history. The New York Times reported:

The blowout, in February 2018 at a natural gas well run by an Exxon Mobil subsidiary in Belmont County, Ohio, released more methane than the entire oil and gas industries of many nations do in a year, the research team found. The Ohio episode triggered about 100 residents within a one-mile radius to evacuate their homes while workers scrambled to plug the well.”

The Ohio blowout released more methane than the reported emissions of the oil and gas industries of countries like Norway and France, the researchers estimated. Scientists said the measurements from the Ohio site could mean that other large leaks are going undetected.

When you sign up for fracking—”shale gas development,” as the industry likes to have it—that’s what you should expect. Not often, but not never.

Even when methane is not gushing skyward from ill-conceived fracking operations, it’s a persistent menace. As Sightline’s Tarika Powell explained in her three-part series on the topic, methane is like carbon dioxide on steroids. The whole notion of using gas as a bridge fuel is alarmingly deceptive and understanding how methane works is a critical component of any coherent climate policy.

This year was also the year when the human and economic costs of fracked gas became abundantly clear. A suite of new expert analyses showed definitively that fracking is a clear danger to public health—and a costly one.

In a journal article published in Nature this month, economists at Carnegie Mellon University demonstrated that the shale gas boom in the Ohio Valley was a wrecking ball for communities and climate, not just a bust. Sitting atop the gas-rich Marcellus and Utica shale formations, it is one of the most intensively fracked regions of the world. That geology yielded short term profits for industry while exacting a terrible price from the public in the region. For every three jobs created by the shale gas industry, someone’s life in Appalachia was cut short by a year. This from an industry already responsible for thousands of premature deaths. And the costs of air pollution from shale gas extraction exceeded the employment benefits by over $2 billion in the Ohio Valley, while the climate impacts add another $34 billion in estimated losses.

The findings were consistent with research published in May by economists at ECONorthwest who studied the costs of fracking in Pennsylvania. They found that the annual costs of fracking in the Keystone State are roughly $1.5 billion per year—the equivalent of 0.3 percent of the state’s GDP. If fracking there continues at current rates, they calculated that the costs would rise to $54 billion over the next 20 years. And that’s not even counting a whole range of costs that their study could identify, but not monetize. The true cost would add in cancer, cardiac conditions, occupational hazards, groundwater contamination, seismic activity, and much more.”

The Trudeau government has approved the expansion of a TransCanada fracked gas pipeline.

Reuters reports, "The Canadian government on Monday approved the $1.3 billion expansion of a natural gas gathering pipeline in western Canada belonging to a wholly owned subsidiary of TransCanada Corp, with 36 conditions attached. ...The current NOVA Gas Transmission Ltd (NGTL) System is a 23,500-km pipeline that gathers natural gas from the fast-growing Montney and Duvernay shale plays in northern Alberta and north-eastern British Columbia."

A Natural Resources Canada media release notes, "Approximately 91 percent of the project will parallel existing pipelines and roads."

Natural Gas Intelligence comments, "Canada's year-old Liberal government confirmed Monday that environmental and native opposition has failed to stop natural gas pipeline construction in the western heartland of the industry. ...The project enables gas producers both to maintain and expand output for oil sands plants by replacing aging conventional wells with new shale output, chiefly the accessible Montney but also the more remote Horn River, Cordova, Liard and Duvernay deposits."

Study: Fracking, Not Just Fracking Wastewater Injection, Causing Earthquakes in Western Canada

A groundbreaking study published today in Seismological Research Letters has demonstrated a link, for the first time, between hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for oil and gas and earthquakes. “Hydraulic Fracturing and Seismicity in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin” confirms the horizontal drilling technique (which in essence creates an underground mini-earthquake to open up fissures for oil…