Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future by Heinberg Richard

Author:Heinberg, Richard [Heinberg, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Post Carbon Institute
Published: 2013-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Bottom Line on Fracking’s Potential to Revolutionize Oil and Gas Production

Raymond Pierrehumbert, Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, recently summarized the situation with crystalline brevity: “Oil production technology is giving us ever more expensive oil with ever-diminishing returns for the ever-increasing effort that needs to be invested.”23 The numbers tell the story: in the decade between 1994 and 2004, roughly $2.4 trillion in oil industry capital expenditures buoyed the worldwide rate of oil production by 12 million barrels per day. Yet a similar $2.4 trillion in capital expenditures spent from 2005 to 2010 failed to stem the tide of declining production in the world’s older, supergiant oil fields. Global oil production during those five years declined by two hundred thousand barrels per day.24 The ongoing substitution of conventional, cheap oil with expensive, technology-intensive, unconventional oil sources can be compared to the human body’s use of internal energy resources in the absence of sufficient food. If one doesn’t eat for a few days, the body starts burning stored fat, then muscle, and finally tissues surrounding internal organs. Each next step in the process reduces overall health but is necessary to maintain life. Similarly, the global economy naturally prefers to burn regular, conventional, cheap petroleum. But as supplies dwindle, markets prioritize the use of functionally similar fuels, even though their extraction requires much higher rates of drilling, is therefore more expensive (thus impacting oil prices and the global economy), and is more environmentally risky.

Fracking gives our current energy system a brief, fragile reprieve. New extraction technology cannot return us to the bygone era of cheap energy and easy economic growth. The best it can do is to buy us a few years of relative economic stability in which to develop alternative energy sources and build low-energy transport and food systems.

But instead of embarking on that needed project, our political leaders have unquestioningly seized on exaggerated claims from oil industry hucksters promising a century of cheap natural gas and soaring oil production rates. The result is an “all of the above” energy policy with no clear direction, and a dangerous complacency about the fate of essential but highly vulnerable food and transport systems designed during past decades of hydrocarbon abundance.

Rather than a century of plenty, we face the likely recommencement of declines in US oil and gas production before 2020. We’ve purchased a few years of respite from the relentless and inevitable erosion of our nation’s oil and gas production rates, but at what cost?

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