Four myths about fracking—and why they are wrong (The Fracking Debate, Part 2) By Scott Nyquist

The debate over fracking often sheds more heat than light. In his recent book, The Fracking Debate, Daniel Raimi recalled that at one public meeting in North Carolina, an anti-fracking speaker compared the authors of a report on the subject to Germans complicit in Hitler’s rise to power. That was surely over the top, but the anger at just about any anti-fracking event is palpable.

Fracking proponents, for their part, can be contemptuous of the critics, and dismissive of legitimate concerns. One of the goals of The Fracking Debate is to clear away misconceptions, and to create common ground for discussion. Drawing on Raimi’s work, and my own background, let’s debunk some common myths about fracking in the United States.

Fracking is unregulated.

This myth comes up a lot, and it’s hard to kill because it is in fact true that oil and gas exploration is exempted from parts of such major US federal legislation as the Safe Water Drinking Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). In 2005, Congress passed legislation that specifically exempted fracking from federal water rules (a provision that became known as “the Halliburton Loophole”). This all sounds terrible.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether the role of the feds should be bigger, smaller, or stay the same. But the facts are clear. The oil and gas industry is and has throughout its history been actively regulated, but largely at the state level. As for the Halliburton Loophole, argues Raimi, “it effectively changed nothing. Oil and gas companies had used fracking for decades, regulated by states and not the federal government. They did not have to receive fracking permits from the EPA before 2005, and the Halliburton Loophole did not change that.”

In addition, the industry does have to get permits for water discharges at the surface under the Clean Water Act, and to comply with the RCRA on hazardous wastes. The Clean Air Act regulates pollutants from oil and gas wells. The industry is also subject to other laws on toxic controls and insectisides. Development on US federal lands has to follow all federal and state laws, and there have also been specific rules created for such sites.

There certainly is a case to be made that the industry should, like others, be subject to federal regulation on common practices, such as construction run-off or methane emissions, for example. But it is also true that because local conditions vary widely, state regulation can make more sense regarding things like how far wells should be sited away from homes or schools.

But it is simply not true to say that fracking in particular, or the oil and gas industry in general, is unregulated in the United States.

Fracking makes natural gas worse than coal in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions.

One of the most important benefits of natural gas, say its US supporters, is that it is considerably cleaner than coal, in terms of emitting both pollutants and greenhouse-gases. But if lots of methane is leaking, the advantage of gas in terms of the latter is much smaller than the headline figure (40 to 50 percent of coal). If that was the case, there would still be a case for gas because it is much cleaner than coal, in terms of particulates and smog, which have well established health effects. Still, the idea that gas can also play a role in dealing with climate change has been a major part of its appeal in the United States.

The culprit is said to be methane, a greenhouse gas that is more than 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide (though it breaks down faster). Methane (CH4) is the primary component of natural gas, and it can leak at any stage of development. The Environmental Defense Fund, a think tank that worked with Colorado to devise fracking regulations, and with the Obama Administration to devise methane strategies, estimates CH4 accounts for about a quarter of global greenhouse-gas emissions. 

So methane is important, and if a lot of it leaks, that makes natural gas more emissions intensive, which is what some fracking critics say is happening in the United States. “The leakage during compression, the leakage during transportation,” Al Gore told the Houston Chronicle, “is now at or above the fraction that outweighs the CO2 advantage.” Another article puts it simply: “Methane leaks erase climate benefit of fracked gas, countless studies find.” 

Not quite. Methane can leak from any well (fracked or not) and any pipeline, and also from storage facilities and power plants. So measuring it is fiendishly difficult. What can be said, argues Raimi, is that while US methane emissions are likely higher than EPA estimates, the most comprehensive studies have found leakage rates well below the level at which natural gas becomes worse than coal in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions. Also, much of the leakage that does exist is from older wells, drilled long before fracking became common, or not from fracking operations at all. The massive Aliso Canyon methane leak in 2015-16, for example, was due to a leaking well; the many thousands of abandoned oil wells could also leak, as well as offshore operations. In fact, many fracking operations seek to capture fugitive methane, which can then be sold. 

Methane leaks and fracking overlap, but are not at all the same thing. If all fracking were stopped—indeed, all oil-and-gas development—there would still be methane leaks. So the alleged cure—banning fracking—does not deal with much of the disease.

A more complex issue is whether low-cost gas presents a market barrier to the use of more renewables, and thus slow the pace of emissions reduction. It may. But it may also be the case that natural gas is a bridge to renewables and other low-emission options, providing the backup that is now needed to provide power when the sun is not shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

On methane, however, there is obvious common ground: When it comes to leaks, less is better. Plugging them would simply be a good thing, reducing the industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions and also alleviating concerns about water contamination.

There has never been a case of water contamination from fracking.

I discussed this topic in the previous post, but note it here because this is a classic example of the rhetorical looseness with which both sides try to score debating points.

Advocates are apt to define fracking so narrowly as to rule out even reasonable interpretations, such as incidents in which contamination occurred due to activity associated with a fracked well, but not to the precise process. For example, if there are surface spills that affect private wells in an area dominated by fracking, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to connect the dots.

For their part, critics are apt to describe any incident that happens in any oil-and-gas field as fracking’s fault. In a recent interview, Raimi put it this way: “Advocates who are typically opposed to shale drilling will use the word ‘fracking’ to encompass the entire oil and gas industry, so people may refer to fracking wells or fracking companies or fracking pipelines.” To clarify: there is no such thing as a fracking company. There are companies that use this procedure in some of their operations. It’s not a small difference.

The fact is, there have been incidents in the United States in which fracked wells have been implicated in water contamination. So, the number is not zero. Given that there are well over a million active oil and gas wells, though, it’s not much. Indeed, fracking’s safety record, which critics cite as a reason against it, is solid.

Big Oil/Big Gas knows fracking is bad and is hiding the evidence.

For any topic these days, there seems to be an associated conspiracy theory. And this one is a doozy—that US oil industry leaders have known for years, even decades—of the evils of fracking and have hidden the facts from the public. Josh Fox, who made the anti-fracking film Gasland, also made The Sky is Pink, in which he says that the industry itself is hiding evidence, mostly to do with stray gas escaping from weak well casings. “Just as there is no safe cigarette,” says Fox, “there is no safe drilling.” Drawing a comparison to the tobacco industry, the oil-and-gas industry, he says, has hidden this evidence of widespread well failures that cause “immediate and constant risk to groundwater.”

Raimi demolishes all this rather nicely, noting that Fox himself keeps citing published reports from the industry, which is hardly the stuff of secrecy. Yes, US oil and gas companies are in favor of fracking. That is not exactly shocking news. There are reality-based concerns on fracking. Hiding evidence about well integrity isn’t one of them. And if there is “no safe drilling,” that is not an argument about fracking. It is about all oil-and-gas exploration everywhere.

It’s also important to note, says Raimi, that even when there are problems in the cementing and casing of wells—and of course this happens—that rarely translates into stray gas, pollution, or any kind of harm in terms of environmental or human health. In Pennsylvania, for example, Raimi cites evidence that even as drilling has expanded greatly, the number of stray gas cases has declined, from 0.8 percent of new wells in 2010, to zero in 2015.

Raimi notes that “The truth is that there are real risks, real benefits, and real uncertainties surrounding fracking.” And it is to his credit that after reading his book closely, I am not sure where he stands on a number of subjects, so evenhandedly has he delineated the issues.

 As for me, I agree that there are “real risks” for fracking, but I believe these can be managed. I believe that the benefits of natural gas to the United States—and thus the fracking that has done so much to bring it to the surface—are big and getting bigger. As for the uncertainties, it is in the interest of the industry to understand them, and to work with governments and communities to take effective action (check out my next post for more on this).

I suspect Raimi and I are not a million miles apart on these assertions. And I am with him wholeheartedly in the desire to be part of a debate on fracking that is considerably more civilized and honest.