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Fracking: An American Miracle

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”


—Charles Dickens


“Despite the headlines, we live in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in human history.”


—Steven Pinker


“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic… I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”


—Greta Thunberg


In the minds of many, we live in the worst of times. Here racism, there fascism, and lurking around the next corner, a stabbing in the back from a planet hot with the anger of having her climate polluted by manmade CO2.


Here at the Rational Optimist Society, we survey the world in all its many glories and mostly find the best of times—with growing abundance, thriving populations, declining early death rates, medical mysteries solved, and more to the point of today’s essay, a surging army of innovators marching under the banners of Forward Motion! and Never-Say-Never! problem-solving.


In the following paragraphs, it’s not our intention to cheer up the gloomsters—though that would be nice—but rather to tell the story of how members of the innovation army have already largely solved concerns about excessive CO2 emissions…


… in the process, saving consumers hundreds of billions of dollars, some of which, naturally, landed in their own pockets as well-earned cherries atop the cream.


A Telling Picture


The extensional threat to Mother Earth, according to the climate-concerned, boils down to the carbon dioxide output of the global pestilence known as humankind.


Following a well-worn script, their solution is to call upon government to use its considerable coercive powers to punish and suppress “bad” sources of energy, while lavishing subsidies and regulatory kisses to favored “clean” energies, even if this requires spending literally trillions of monetary units.


Should you be one of the aforementioned worriers, we are here to provide you with happy news in the form of the chart below showing the waterfall decline in CO2 emissions from power generation in the United States since the year 2000.


US Energy Emissions chart

Given the good news, all that seems left to do is to pack our climate cares in the old kit bag and head to the beach. Yes?


Not so fast. You see, most of the harried hoard will refuse to join in the celebrations due to the underlying cause of the dramatic downturn in CO2.


Which is… drum roll… the advent of widespread fracking in the United States.


As we probably don’t need to tell you, the same people who see carbon dioxide as Earth’s silent killer tend to also see fracking as the devil’s hammer used by greedy capitalists to pound dear Mother Gaia into pieces in order to suck petrochemicals from her shattered crust.


Even so, even so.


The Fracking Truth


The fracking process dates back to the 1940s, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that an innovator by the name of George Mitchell figured out that marrying hydraulic fracking with horizontal drilling allowed access to gas and oil trapped in shale formations thousands of feet under the surface.


Simply put, after drilling vertically into the Earth, the well turns horizontally, often extending for miles through the shale layers. Fluids are injected under high pressure to create small fissures in the rock, allowing the trapped gas or oil to flow to the surface. By accessing a much larger area of the rock layer this method makes each well far more efficient.


As the 2000s dawned, the technology, now improved, began to be adopted in previously uneconomic deposits such as the Barnett Shale in Texas.


The excitement about this new technology can be seen in the growth of the number of horizontal wells in the United States.


In 2000, there were only a few hundred horizontal wells. A decade later, over 10,000 such wells were merrily producing both oil and natural gas in abundance.


Since 2010, the massive increase in clean-burning natural gas led to over 30% of US coal-fueled power plants being shuttered or converted to gas.


And that, dear readers, led to the aforementioned sharp reduction in CO2 emissions, along with a significant decline in particulate pollutants.


US Natural Gas vs Coal chart

Show Us the Money


The enthusiasm for fracking in the US has resulted in a number of benefits far beyond reduced reliance on coal.


According to a 2015 article by the Brookings Institute, thanks to increased fracking, between 2007 and 2013, consumer gas bills in the US dropped by $13 billion per year.


And things have only gotten better.


This, from a November 2023 report by the US House Energy and Commerce Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials subcommittee:


... the EPA has air quality data showing that, as of 2022, the total emissions of the six major air pollutants have dropped by 73 percent since 1980.


During this same period, gross domestic product increased 196 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased 108 percent, energy consumption increased 29 percent, and U.S. population grew by 47 percent.


Why is this important? It shows that becoming more prosperous and secure as a nation is possible, while also decreasing emissions. We’ve done it!


We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In fact, during this time, America has flexed its muscles as a global energy production superpower.


From the same report…


It is estimated that the shale revolution saved U.S. consumers $203 billion annually, breaking down to $2,500 per family of four. It also lowered energy-related greenhouse gas emissions by 527 metric tons per year.


Today, thanks to the fracking revolution, about half of US homes use natural gas for heating. As you can see here (except for an anomaly in 2022 caused by a number of coinciding factors), the trend for natural gas prices in the United States has been down… well below the rate of inflation.


Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price chart

Source: EIA Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdM.htm)


Then there’s the matter of energy independence: Thanks to fracking, the US went from being a net energy importer to becoming the world's largest producer of natural gas and crude oil in 2019, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia.


Given these simple truths—cleaner air, lower prices, and energy independence—what’s the rub against fracking?


Gaslit by Gasland


Gasland movie poster image

"If you ask me, it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we’d do with it." —Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute


One might lean toward skepticism when reviewing the persistent negativity toward rational energy solutions, such as fracking and nuclear, suspecting, perhaps, a deeper anti-progress agenda might be at work.


Mr. Lovins is certainly not alone among the environmental community who sees a greedy commercial interest hiding behind every energy solution that actually works.


One member of that community, Josh Fox, made a rabidly anti-fracking “documentary” called Gasland that was released in 2010, just as fracking was coming into its own.


As is sadly too often the case with these sorts of things, Fox, who holds a degree in the theatrical arts, brought no scientific background to bear in creating his film.


No matter, the vision he presented was in his role as an outspoken generalist activist who ticked all the required boxes (vocal supporter of the Green New Deal, indigenous rights, equity, diversity and inclusion, tree frogs, polar bears drifting about on icebergs, etc.).


Proving his competence as a filmmaker, Fox’s Gasland scored well in a number of film industry award competitions, assuring it found a wide audience.


Much in the same way Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth scared people into thinking CO2 was an imminent threat, the fans of Gasland moved firmly into the “Just Say No” camp on the topic of fracking.


Yet, upon review by actual scientists, Gasland was found to be, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, outright deceptive in its dramatic claims about fracking.


In one memorable scene in Gasland, a resident sets their tap water afire, which the film attributed to methane contamination from nearby fracking activities.


This was despite studies conducted by state environmental agencies confirming the methane in the water wells was naturally occurring and predated any fracking operations in the area.


Also, according to Gasland, fracking poses a high risk of contaminating underground water reservoirs, ignoring that the fracking process occurs thousands of feet below the water table and is separated by thick layers of impermeable rock.


Could poor well construction result in some contamination? Sure. But when conducted properly, fracking poses no risk of contaminating groundwater.


Furthermore, despite Gasland trumpeting the dangers of chemicals used in fracking fluid, the film’s many critics point out that fracking fluids are up to 95% water, with most of the rest being sand. A tiny 0.5% to 1% actually consists of chemicals, which a number of studies confirmed were not harmful in the concentrations used.


To push back against the contamination claims, the head of a drilling company went so far as to drink fracking fluid during a press conference.


In sum, Gasland provided almost no scientific data or peer-reviewed studies to support its most dramatic, and therefore most damaging, claims.


“No matter,” replied the filmmaker, defending the inaccuracies in his film by saying that it wasn’t meant to be based on anything as mundane as scientific research, but rather only to reflect the “lived experience” of the participants.


To wit, if Joe could light his drinking water on fire, then dammit, fracking must surely be at fault!


Inaccurate it may be, but there’s no doubting Gasland’s success helped stir up an environmental hornets’ nest around the world.


Fortunately, as evidenced by the abundance of natural gas here in the United States, the long list of positives won the day against the environmentalists and kept fracking’s momentum intact.


Other countries, sadly, were not so fortunate.


The Sad Case of Germany


Roger Harrabin, a senior environmental editor for the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC), used the BBC’s extensive reach to regularly scare the public about the “explosions” the frackers were using to release the trapped gas—“explosions” which, in his science-free opinion, led to a heightened risk of earthquakes.


And by explosions, what he was actually referring to was the pumping of high-pressure fracking solutions into the shale beds, located 9,000 feet under British soil, in order to fracture the rock. No explosives involved.


In regard to the fears of fracking causing earthquakes, with over a decade of data to work with, the correlation between fracking and earthquakes is tenuous at best. Hydraulic fracturing itself generally causes only very minor tremors, at a level that is not felt on the surface.


On the other hand, the injection of wastewater produced by fracking into deep underground reservoirs has been associated with more noticeable seismic events—typically earthquakes with magnitudes of 3.0 or greater, which can occasionally be felt at the surface but rarely cause significant damage. Regulatory changes have helped to mitigate this risk.


Regardless, in no small part thanks to Mr. Harrabin and his BBC associates, fracking in Britain has been all but banned. Fortunately, the United Kingdom has the North Sea with oil and gas in abundance.


Since the first well in the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) came online in 1976, over 46 billion barrels of oil have been extracted, and conservative reserve estimates are that another 20 billion barrels remain.


In addition, the UK is building a new nuclear power station called Hinkley Point C in Somerset, England which, when completed in 2027, will have two reactors with a total capacity of 3,260 MWe, providing a remarkable 7% of the UK's electricity needs.


While government policies and taxes result in higher energy prices in the UK than they would be otherwise, the country enjoys energy security.


Germany, on the other hand, has not been so lucky. Politically effective environmental zealots, armed with science-free enviro-porn, have dominated the public discourse and legislative agenda for decades.


And so it is that the Green Party and its allies pushed through a law in 2011 requiring all German nuclear plants to be shuttered by 2022, effectively taking about a quarter of its baseload power offline.


Then, with time on their hands, the bureaucrats followed up in 2017 by passing a law banning the use of fracking despite all of the hard proof being generated in the US about the safety and efficiency of the process.


To help us maintain our perspective about these moves, here’s a comparison between the sources of German power in 2010 (as the fracking revolution was reaching its stride in the United States) and in 2023, after the political machinations had time to take effect.


Germany 2010 vs 2023 Electrical Grid chart

While a touch off topic, I suspect some might review those befores and afters and be cheered by the fact nuclear has all but disappeared from the mix, while “clean” renewables have skyrocketed.


Sadly, as we have discussed elsewhere, because of the inherent downsides of renewables—for example, night for solar, no wind for wind turbines, etc.—the German power grid has to be essentially duplicated at great expense to assure power at night or when the wind isn’t blowing.


Nuclear plant demolition image

As bad, a network that must integrate constantly fluctuating supplies of energy from a variety of sources is, out of necessity, far more complex than one would want. As we all know, the greater the complexity of a system, the more likely that system is to fail.


The end result of German policy decisions is a continued heavy reliance on coal and natural gas piped in or shipped from vulnerable sources.


And, please, don’t get us started on the German government’s decision to not only shutter their nuclear plants but then blow them up to ensure a future generation doesn’t wake up some cold morning and want to fire them back up again.


Dummköpfen!


Show Us More Money!


In terms of economics, the average German household paid 40.07 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) in the second half of 2022, compared to 32.16 cents/kWh in the previous year.


Of course, the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine has created special pressures, but those pressures only exist because of the dog’s breakfast that is the German energy mix.


In the United States, by contrast, households pay, on average, 16.41 cents per kWh. That’s a whopping 59% cheaper than German prices.


Takeaways to this point include:


  • Thanks to Germany’s meddlesome energy policies, 65% of its power now comes from hydrocarbons, of which a full 30% comes from the oil and, ironically, the burning of lignite, the dirtiest form of coal.

  • Due to the large percentage of unstable renewables, the country’s energy network is far costlier and complicated than it should be, resulting in significantly higher energy costs to consumers.


Is there hope for Germany?


While one can never tell about these things, we can only hope that on some dark winter day, the masses in Germany will decide enough is enough and relegate their current Greenie masters to the dustbin of history.


But any resurgence of energy sanity in Germany won’t happen overnight, and the damage done will take years and maybe decades to repair.


If there’s a positive, it is that the slow-moving-trainwreck occurring in the German economy due to their energy decisions will serve as a cautionary tale to others thinking about following them down the same path.


Back in the United States


Meanwhile, while there are still those who will resist fracking at all costs (to the consumer), back here in the US we can take pride in the innovators who revolutionized oil and gas extraction, saving the citizenry hundreds of billions of dollars in the process.


And we can take comfort in the knowledge that other innovators—now encouraged by the US government with a loosening of anti-nuclear regulations—are quickly moving to make the widespread adoption of small nuclear reactors (SMRs) a reality.


Between SMRs—which produce no carbon emissions—and the abundance of natural gas released by fracking, it is demonstrably possible to enjoy a clean and secure energy future.


Armed with this information, the next time you find yourself in the company of some depressed soul moaning about the amount of CO2, you can happily inform them that the solution is in hand!


“But what about the big polluters such as China?” your depressed acquaintance might respond.


Good ideas eventually chase off the bad ones. The Chinese have recently announced plans to build 11 new nuclear reactors and have zero hesitation deploying fracking to meet their considerable energy needs.


A bit of patience is required, but the trend is definitely humanity’s friend.


Until next time…


David Galland for The Rational Optimist Society



Sources for household cost of energy in US vs. Germany.



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