‘A Rock and a Hard Place’
BOUNCY MUSIC and colouring book graphics introduce “A Look Underground,” a short video uploaded to YouTube last year by the Calgary-based Encana Corporation “to educate children about natural gas development.” In the demonstration, engineer Mark Taylor explains the principles of hydraulically fracturing shale and recovering natural gas to a dozen kids ranging from toddlers to preteens. The children stand gathered around a structure built from cupcakes arranged in a horseshoe, its top iced a vivid green and decorated with plastic trees and farm animals. A thick layer of white icing represents the shale layer below. Taylor shows how drillers push steel pipe down deep through the chocolate “earth” to the coveted shale, an operation depicted with plastic tubing. Next, he says, “we basically load it up with explosive charges like big firecrackers, and we blast holes into spots all along the way, so the gas can come out of the white shale here and into our well.”
It’s not a bad description of the process that has transformed North America’s fuel forecast and global energy politics within the lifetime of Taylor’s audience. And the subtext is one the gas industry hopes consumers will easily digest: that unconventional natural gas is as wholesome and safe as kindergarten. The hydraulic fracturing the video describes, also known as hydro-fracking, or simply fracking, is the sine qua non of the new gas, the key that has unlocked massive supplies of fossil energy once thought to be out of reach. Conventional gas sits in discrete underground pools; all it takes to get at it is to stick a straw down into the right place. But geologists have long known that much more natural gas remains sequestered in the minute pockets between the grains of certain types of rock. In most cases, fracking uses water with additives to shatter the rock, creating fissures that enable the gas to flow into a well.
First used to access gas in the American and Canadian West, where the process has been used on tens of thousands of wells, fracking has made a growing number of unconventional gas beds viable for recovery. Formations rich in gas micro-pores are strung in a patchy U across North America, beginning in British Columbia’s far northeast; trailing down the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains (with significant stores through Alberta, Saskatchewan, and North Dakota); and then sweeping across the southern US to a long band of gas-bearing shale that runs under half a dozen eastern states and up into Canada. The last in particular — the Marcellus Shale, which lies tantalizingly close to the energy-hungry markets of the eastern seaboard — has the industry salivating. Based on usage today, according to the Canadian Society for Unconventional Gas, Canada has enough frackable gas to maintain current production for about a hundred years.
Fracking has altered North America’s fuel supply so explosively that a gas bubble has saturated the market, driving down prices in recent quarters. Simultaneously, however, estimates of the abundance of unconventional gas have rescued producers from inevitable eclipse as conventional production declines. Instead, the industry has embraced a bold new ambition: to position gas as the economy’s energy mainstay, a fossil fuel as cheap and plentiful as coal, only cleaner and greener. Environmentalists, meanwhile, link fracking to a host of injuries to water, air, humans and wildlife, and to the integrity of ecosystems. France has banned the practice, and the European Union is toying with similar prohibitions.
Industrialized humanity exhausts more than 500 exajoules of energy each year, for every purpose from growing food to opening the door. That’s roughly the equivalent of setting off a Hiroshima-sized bomb every five seconds. In Canada, gas supplies more than one-quarter of the energy we use (I heated my shower with it this morning) but barely half the amount we extract from coal and oil — sources that environmentalists deplore even more than frack gas. And as much as we might like to see those sources replaced by renewable energy, that also comes with limits and costs.
The story of fracking, then, is a story about risk, about those unavoidable contingencies we face and trade off every day as individuals and communities, weighing our wants (income, a warm home, a good Christmas sales season) against the effort, cost, or hazards of getting it: a collision on the commute, a dammed-up river somewhere, a slightly warmer climate. Rarely is the answer kindergarten-simple.
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