And on fracking

The same Archdruid comments on fracking...

Still, the chief focus of the discussion was less dated, though attentive observers will have seen it coming some time ago. "Fracking" technology – more properly, "hydrofracturing," but only engineers call it that these days – is part of the toolkit that’s used to extract fossil fuels, and it’s become all the rage among those who want to believe that the age of cheap abundant energy isn’t dead yet. Thus there’s been a great many claims insisting either that natural gas will fuel our current lifestyles for the foreseeable future, or that it will provide a bridge to a future of renewable energy that will, again, keep our current lifestyles supplied with all the power we think we need.

Now of course fracking is a reality, and one that’s had a significant impact on natural gas production in the US already. Those of my readers who, in their younger days, shook up a bottle of soda pop good and hard, and then opened the cap, already know a good deal about the fracking process. Instead of shaking gas-bearing rock, fracking pumps in a mixture of water and toxic chemicals under high pressure, but the result is the same: bubbles of gas that were trapped in the rock (or the soda pop) come bubbling out all at once. If you want a sudden fountain, it’s not a bad approach, but anyone who’s tasted soda out of a thoroughly shaken bottle knows part of the downside: you get most of the gas in that first big splash, and very little is left behind

That’s one of the two big problems with fracking. (The other comes from the toxic chemicals just mentioned, which inevitably get into the local water supply with predictably ugly consequences.) Natural gas wells treated with fracking technology produce a lot of gas at first, but production slows to a trickle within a year or so. The same thing is true, interestingly enough, of petroleum wells treated the same way; the drop in production there can be anything up to 80% in the first year. Thus fracking isn’t the answer to our energy future, unless "future" in this case means the next five years at most."