Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future Read Online Free
Author: Richard Heinberg
companies sell off assets and submit to mergers and takeovers). Therefore, it is in their interest to support drillers’ exaggerated claims for reserves and future production potential. When the fracking boom inevitably goes bust, it won’t be the banks that will take the hit; it will be the investors (including retirees) who bought shares of stock in oil and gas companies.
Finally, in Chapter 6, we will examine other unconventional fuels and fuel sources (tar sands, methane hydrates, and oil shale) to see whether they might be game changers waiting in the wings. And we will explore likely scenarios for our real energy future. (Just one preliminary hint: it’s time to learn how to live well with less.)
* * *
The data we will survey in the chapters ahead suggest that, through the technology of hydrofracturing, the oil and gas industry will generate 10 or fewer years of growing fuel supplies. (In the case of shale gas, the clock started ticking roughly five years ago; for tight oil, about three years ago). Industry promises of a hundred years of cheap, abundant gas, and of domestic oil production growth making the nation self-sufficient in petroleum are unlikely to be fulfilled given what we know now about the nature of the resources and the technology being used to access them.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that the United States will run out of shale gas or tight oil sometime in the next five to seven years, but that the current spate of oil and gas supply growth will probably be over, finished, done and dustedbefore the end of this decade. Production will start to decline, perhaps sharply.
Meanwhile the brief, giddy production boom we are currently seeing in towns, farms, and public lands in Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and a few other states will have come at an enormous cost. In order to achieve just a few years of domestic supply growth, the industry will need to drill tens of thousands of new wells (in addition to the tens of thousands brought on line in just the last three to five years), ruining landscapes, poisoning water, and forcing families to abandon their homes and farms.
This temporary surge of production may yield a very few years of lower natural gas prices and may temporarily improve the US balance of trade by reducing oil imports. What will we do with those years of reprieve? In the best instance, the fracking that has already been accomplished could provide us a bonus inning in which to prepare for life without cheap fossil energy . But to make use of this borrowed time we must build an energy infrastructure of wind turbines and solar panels rather than drilling rigs and pipelines. This will constitute the biggest investment, and the most ambitious project, of our lifetimes. Currently, instead, many renewable energy efforts are being hampered by the false perception of vast, long-term supplies of cheap natural gas.
We are starting the energy transition project of the 21st century far too late to altogether avert either devastating climate impacts or serious energy supply problems, but the alternative—continued reliance on fossil fuels—will ensure a future far worse, one in which even the bare survival of civilization may be in question. As we build our needed renewable energy system, we will also need to build a new kind of economy, and we must make our communities far more resilient, so as to withstand environmental and economic shocks that are inevitably on their way.
Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry is doing everything it can to convince us we don’t have to do anything at all—other than simply to keep on driving. The purveyors of oil and natural gas are selling products that we all currently use and that we still depend upon for our modern way of life. But they’re also selling a vision of the future—a vision as phony as the snake oil hawked by carnival hucksters a century ago.
SNAKE BITES
1. THE INDUSTRY SHILLS SAY:
Peak oil is crap. World oil reserves are increasing
Finally, in Chapter 6, we will examine other unconventional fuels and fuel sources (tar sands, methane hydrates, and oil shale) to see whether they might be game changers waiting in the wings. And we will explore likely scenarios for our real energy future. (Just one preliminary hint: it’s time to learn how to live well with less.)
* * *
The data we will survey in the chapters ahead suggest that, through the technology of hydrofracturing, the oil and gas industry will generate 10 or fewer years of growing fuel supplies. (In the case of shale gas, the clock started ticking roughly five years ago; for tight oil, about three years ago). Industry promises of a hundred years of cheap, abundant gas, and of domestic oil production growth making the nation self-sufficient in petroleum are unlikely to be fulfilled given what we know now about the nature of the resources and the technology being used to access them.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that the United States will run out of shale gas or tight oil sometime in the next five to seven years, but that the current spate of oil and gas supply growth will probably be over, finished, done and dustedbefore the end of this decade. Production will start to decline, perhaps sharply.
Meanwhile the brief, giddy production boom we are currently seeing in towns, farms, and public lands in Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and a few other states will have come at an enormous cost. In order to achieve just a few years of domestic supply growth, the industry will need to drill tens of thousands of new wells (in addition to the tens of thousands brought on line in just the last three to five years), ruining landscapes, poisoning water, and forcing families to abandon their homes and farms.
This temporary surge of production may yield a very few years of lower natural gas prices and may temporarily improve the US balance of trade by reducing oil imports. What will we do with those years of reprieve? In the best instance, the fracking that has already been accomplished could provide us a bonus inning in which to prepare for life without cheap fossil energy . But to make use of this borrowed time we must build an energy infrastructure of wind turbines and solar panels rather than drilling rigs and pipelines. This will constitute the biggest investment, and the most ambitious project, of our lifetimes. Currently, instead, many renewable energy efforts are being hampered by the false perception of vast, long-term supplies of cheap natural gas.
We are starting the energy transition project of the 21st century far too late to altogether avert either devastating climate impacts or serious energy supply problems, but the alternative—continued reliance on fossil fuels—will ensure a future far worse, one in which even the bare survival of civilization may be in question. As we build our needed renewable energy system, we will also need to build a new kind of economy, and we must make our communities far more resilient, so as to withstand environmental and economic shocks that are inevitably on their way.
Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry is doing everything it can to convince us we don’t have to do anything at all—other than simply to keep on driving. The purveyors of oil and natural gas are selling products that we all currently use and that we still depend upon for our modern way of life. But they’re also selling a vision of the future—a vision as phony as the snake oil hawked by carnival hucksters a century ago.
SNAKE BITES
1. THE INDUSTRY SHILLS SAY:
Peak oil is crap. World oil reserves are increasing
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