Natural gas: Chemicals, secrets, and controversy

The future of natural gas looks a lot like the future for oil; secrets surrounding toxic chemicals will shroud the industry in controversy for decades to come.  Without a fully-functioning EPA, the general public will face continued environmental and heath risks associated with extracting, refining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.  Water contamination and atmospheric pollution currently dominate congressional hearings on the industry, and controversy around these issues is just beginning to heat up. 

While the industry claims that burning natural gas for power lowers overall emissions, new studies out show that natural gas does not reduce emissions much when compared to coal or oil; in addition, while the natural gas industry also claims that there is not a single documented case whereby their toxins were linked to fracking, contaminated groundwater keeps showing up around drill sites.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the process whereby rock formations deep below the Earth's surface are cracked and held open with chemicals and proppants in order to allow the gas that is trapped within the rocks to escape upward so that it can be collected.  The chemicals that are used to hold the fractures in the rock formation open are currently industry trade secrets, protected much like the formulas for Coca-Cola or pharmaceutical drugs are; this is the reason why no documented cases of groundwater contamination have been definitively pinned on the industry.  The problem with protecting these chemicals as trade secrets is that the EPA nor any other federal agency can hold drilling companies accountable when groundwater contamination shows up.  Several ideas have been floated around in the past in order to clear up this confusion; for instance, one solution proposes marking each company’s chemical cocktail with a distinct non-toxic chemical that when tested for in the case of contamination will link the site to one (and only one) company.  Of course, this idea was rejected by the natural gas industry.  The industry is happiest when its contamination remains a secret.

The natural gas industry makes the claim that the chemical mixture that is injected into the ground is pumped back out to the surface, collected, and treated, but studies have shown that a significant portion of the chemical cocktail remains underground after the fracking job is completed.

Eventually, the formation will not be able to absorb the fluid as quickly as it is being injected. At this point, the pressure created causes the formation to crack or fracture.  The fractures are held open by the proppants, and the oil or gas is then able to flow through the fractures to the well.[3] Some of the fracturing fluids are pumped out of the well and into surface pits or tanks during the process of extracting oil, gas and any produced water, but studies have shown that anywhere from 20-40% of fracing fluids may remain underground.[4]

ProPublica has an extensive series documenting the recent boom in natural gas drilling in America and its effects on groundwater.  Their series began in November 2008 when a hydrologist sampled groundwater from a well just 300 feet below the surface.  What was pulled up was alarming.  The brown, oily water with a foul smell, when tested showed levels of benzene (known to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia) in concentrations 1,500 times the safe levels for people.

Since then, the natural gas industry has launched a significant PR campaign, as well as has entered into an extensive expansion period both domestically and globally.  The rate of drilling has created a boom that has already burst, some analysts say, claiming that gas prices will remain depressed in America unless the industry can find a way to start burning more of the resource.  America is home to some of the richest gas reserves in the world.  The method of extraction that gave birth to natural gas’ modern-age boom was discovered by an American company (Halliburton), and as a result of the initial boom phase for the industry, America has a surplus of gas.  Harvested gas, though, is not the only thing that is being exported to the rest of the world.  The method, called unconventional gas extraction, is itself being exported across the globe as countries search for ways to meet their societies’ growing demands for energy.

The process of fracking for fossil fuel resources located deep below the surface trapped in difficult geologic formations is controversial.  The unconventional technique to obtain natural gas can also be used to get at oil deposits that were previously locked away below the Earth's surface.  These oil and gas resources that were locked up in difficult shales were previously financially unobtainable, meaning the capital needed to free up the oil was higher than the return; in other words, harvesting the fossil fuels was prohibitively expensive.  All of that is now changing with hydraulic fracturing.  The process has made resources that were financially unobtainable profitable now, adding a new momentum to both the oil and gas drilling markets.  Hydraulic fracturing, by transferring the costs of harvesting fossil fuels onto the general public through environmental contamination, is now beginning to be seen as the innovation that will save our global energy woes.  While the process may provide us with more fossil fuels to burn for energy in the short term, the questions surrounding groundwater contamination and its related health risks have not been answered, and the controversy in the communities where fracking is taking place is just starting to heat up.

Already in places in England, Russia, Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, and across the U.S., fracking is being used to harvest oil and gas.  As in America, many countries around the world are just now beginning to see that natural gas may not be the bridge-fuel to the future that was hoped for.  Even though governments around the world can see a future whereby natural gas can power the global economy for 20-50 years, providing a bridge to a renewable energy future, some officials are starting to think that it is not necessary to wait for the technology around wind and solar energy to improve.  They see the choice between putting up wind turbines or injecting chemicals cocktails into the ground as an easy one.  The people living in the communities where hydraulic fracturing is taking place decided a long time ago that the risks were too high to expand this gas expansion campaign nationally and then globally.

The 'golden age' for gas, otherwise known as 'the dash for gas' seems to be beginning without a proper study of the industry’s effects on groundwater.  It is also beginning without a proper study of the lifecycle emissions of the fuel.  It is apparent that the natural gas industry thinks that saying they are not responsible for groundwater contamination, but individual states like NY, PA and OH, as well as TX and LA (not to mention countries like the UK, France, and other regions around the globe) have begun to halt the momentum that was developing with the industry until studies can be completed.  Local residents want more information on the process; they want to know what chemical being injected into the Earth before their regional governments approve vast campaigns to harvest unconventional deposits.

Natural gas deposits and oil deposits usually go hand in hand, which should clear up any confusion over who is behind the secretive and controversial nature of the toxic chemicals being thrust upon the general public.  Up until recently, gas finds were considered a major disappointment to oil drillers; the gas usually had to be vented off, simply burned and released into the atmosphere; but that era has changed and natural gas is moving into a period in its development where there is a realistic chance for the resource to replace coal in the near-future as the dominant fuel to produce electricity.  In the recent past, unproved unconventional gas estimates have risen from 353 trillion cubic feet to 857 trillion, a significant jump that has caused natural gas prices to fall from $13 per unit to $4 in the U.S. in the past 3 years.  There is a glut in domestic gas markets, giving America incentive to find either a way to start burning the resource with a fury or ways to export the fuel to other countries with higher prices.  Enter the claim that natural gas is part of the clean energy future that people are calling for or that it can be a bridge-fuel to a renewable energy future.

Natural gas is quickly becoming the oil industry's newest darling, hence the campaign to stifle any criticism of the fuel.  It is the reason why recently the natural gas industry has entered the business of picking Oscar Award winners.  Apparently, Josh Fox’s Gasland is a significant threat to the established storyline that energy conglomerates want to establish for the future. Both Exxon and Shell have made considerable investments in natural gas in the recent past and view it as becoming a dominant source of energy over the next several decades.  Why have oil companies bet their future on natural gas?  Oil companies are already well positioned to monopolize the gas industry because gas is a byproduct of oil development.  With their market dominance already established in the transportation sector, oil companies hope to start chipping away at coal’s dominance in the electricity generation markets by increasing the share of electricity generated from natural gas.  Oil conglomerates in this paradigm become even more powerful and influential.

The price of natural gas on today's markets is still too low relative to the costs of extraction in order to fuel a full-scale boom in the industry, but this will change if natural gas can get itself lumped into a clean energy standard that is approved worldwide.  This is the reason behind the huge lobbying effort by the natural gas industry to get labeled as clean, as well as the push to produce it domestically here in America and export it to the world. It is also the reason why the oil industry is fighting clean energy standards so feverishly.  Oil’s days are limited and the industry knows they are; natural gas is the industry’s hope for the future; clean energy is a distinct threat to oil companies that have influenced world governments for longer than a century now.  The battle over oil will be violent and full of vitriol, as is evident now through the GOP of the American Congress.

Pickens' plan to introduce natural gas into the transportation industry faces the same restrictions as hydrogen fuel cell cars, namely, there is no infrastructure for it; hydrogen can do what natural gas can but with less pollution and groundwater risks.  But both simply do not compare to the relative ease and economic benefits, with which an of a full deployment of electric vehicles and a national high-speed railroad far outweigh any of alternatives.  Coal is used to produce domestic electricity, EVs will primarily be powered by coal in these initial days, but the question of whether power plants switch from coal to natural gas is still not answered; does a natural gas bridge replace a straight buildout of solar and wind projects and bring jobs with pipelines and drillsites instead of jobs improving transmission of people and electricity from demand response to stored capacity to high-speed internet and rail.  The oil industry of course would have no trouble accepting the deployment of EVs in America if the electricity being used to power those cars was generated using another product from within the industry.  If natural gas can needle its way into the electricity market, the oil industry's control over energy politics can continue.  Instead of purchasing oil from the Middle East with debt to meet domestic transportation needs, America will be building pipelines across the Midwest Farmbelt to import Canadian Oilsands oil and frack-drill major domestic gas deposits across the midwestern and northeastern U.S.; this would replace the proposal to go after clean energy a little more aggressively.

Since natural gas is a public resource and found on public land, and since an expansion of the industry would drastically raise the amount of toxic chemicals being injected into the Earth in local communities where the shale gas deposits are, it seems reasonable to allow the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to study the issue regarding natural gas drilling for unconventional deposits on public and private lands and its collective effect upon the local environments of the regions where it is being employed.  Of course the oil and gas industry is objecting to needless domestic regulations. At the same time; they are lining up along the receding icecap like vultures waiting to drop in for some high-risk deepwater oil.  With an increase in domestic natural gas production added to the mix now, maybe the drive for more drillsite leases can slow down the dash for gas long enough to let officials and scientists study the process.  Already sparks are flying in places where people want more answers than drilling companies are willing to give or over evidence of contamination.  Utilities and investors are showing more and more that they would prefer less uncertainty over energy if the economy is going to stabilize.

In some places, moratoriums on unconventional gas have been drafted on regional deposits by local governments.  The GOP is assaulting the EPA, attacking the agency’s credibility in general.  This only gives global investors and utilities further pause on whether to build natural gas power plants or invest in a smart grid powered by wind and solar with battery storage.

Giving investors further pause are the lessons learned from the ethanol industry.  Like with corn ethanol, initial studies regarding overall carbon emissions throughout the lifecycle of the fuel were positive, meaning that widespread use of them would bring down overall toxic emissions.  But, upon further look, it was shown that corn ethanol's lifecycle emissions were actually higher than the fuels they were seeking to replace because of impacts of production in addition to its atmospheric emissions.  Similarly, the claim of natural gas cuts emissions in half is based upon incomplete analyses of the full lifecycle of natural gas from production to refining to shipping to burning.  A more detailed analysis of natural gas has shown that industry emissions are closer to the coal industry's than previously estimated.

Advocates for natural gas routinely assert that it produces 50 percent less greenhouse gases than coal and is a significant step toward a greener energy future. But those assumptions are based on emissions from the tailpipe or smokestack and don’t account for the methane and other pollution emitted when gas is extracted and piped to power plants and other customers. The EPA’s new analysis doubles its previous estimates for the amount of methane gas that leaks from loose pipe fittings and is vented from gas wells, drastically changing the picture of the nation’s emissions that the agency painted as recently as April. Calculations for some gas-field emissions jumped by several hundred percent. Methane levels from the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas were 9,000 times higher than previously reported. When all these emissions are counted, gas may be as little as 25 percent cleaner than coal, or perhaps even less. Even accounting for the new analysis, natural gas—which also emits less toxic and particulate pollution—offers a significant environmental advantage. But the narrower the margins get, the weaker the political arguments become and the more power utilities flinch at investing billions to switch to a fuel that may someday lose the government’s long-term support.

The size of the expansion being called for within the natural gas industry warrants further study.  It was upon inspection that the EPA found companies using diesel fuel to frack in some areas.  The industry’s response was somewhat more disturbing than the offense; despite industry assertions of their ability to police themselves internally, industry spokespeople defended the use of multiple diesel fuel injections used in certain fracking jobs by stating that the EPA had never explicitly banned the use of it in extraction, even though it is regulated elsewhere.

With Big Oil getting behind natural gas, the reality of the situation is probably that natural gas will be burned while coal is phased out in the near-future.  If clean energy can get a foothold in the energy race, it can assist in meeting America's insatiable and growing demand for energy.  This is the political ‘reality’ that the Chamber of Commerce and the gas and oil party, which has taken over the GOP, are pushing.  The other end of the spectrum has a much more aggressive tact on clean energy deployment. The costs of extracting and burning fossil fuels will continue to be transferred onto the American public in the form of public risks both economically and environmentally, and GOP will continue to fight for gas and oil by dismantling federal agencies that produce Science that undermines industry objectives; the political battle that is being fought in Congress is the reality of the energy industry today.  What plays out most in the Koch exposures is the reach of the influence of the gas and oil industry over the GOP, and adding ignition to that launch is Citizen’s United v. Federal Elections Commission, the Supreme Court reversal asserting unlimited corporate donations to political parties as protected speech.

Meanwhile, global environments continue to shift.  Congressional regulation of the natural gas industry, like the battle to regulate the oil industry, is now so heavily lobbied that proper analysis of the social and environmental impacts involved is under attack.  With lucrative incentives to export their way out of the glut and into higher prices, drilling companies don’t want to slow down and add costs to production.

The chemicals, secrets, and controversy in the natural gas industry mirror those of the oil industry because of the link between gas and oil deposits in the ground.  Oil companies have signed onto gas not only because they are already well positioned to capitalize on a boom, but also because of the potential to increase their share in electric markets in order to capitalize on the electric vehicle deployment and increased electricity demand.  Controversy already follows the secrets surrounding the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing and will most probably amplify upon an expansion in domestic drilling campaigns to feed the growing global demand.

Read more at EarthPulseDaily or Examiner.com

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