Eight Arguments for the Exploitation of Shale Gas and Oil

James Woudhuysen, Professor Of Forecasting & Innovation, De Montfort University, Leicester, provides us with eight arguments for the exploitation of shame gas and oil.  James will speak on a panel at Flame this year which will discuss the progress of European Shale Gas.

1  The world needs more energy, and Britain is not alone in needing to avoid power cuts

2  Shale is not the whole answer but it is part of the answer

3  In the quest to match supply to demand, it is worth noting that US shale gas operations have a productivity three times higher than that which obtains with conventional natural gas

4  Shale gas and oil deserve experimentation and development on principle. In Britain, gas prices reflect European markets. We also live in world of state subsidies for energy and energy price cartels. So though the high productivity of shale gas operations in the US has in practice lowered energy prices there, we can’t be certain that the same will happen here. On the other hand, we can be sure that shale will never allow the US, let alone Britain, to be autarchic in energy. Yet, suitably regulated, and paying attention to local peculiarities, shale is a large and potentially cheap world resource. Its CO₂ content can best be tackled by upping efforts in carbon capture and storage, by raising the energy efficiency of transport, and by a wider drive toward a New Carbon Infrastructure (Generation 2 biofuels, algae, Jatropha; air capture of atmospheric CO₂, etc)

5  New IT- and sensor-based tools, and in particular Logging While Drilling, now direct horizontal drilling, and help determine the geology of shale formations. Using technological  innovations and real-time data, it is easy to know when to stop. However anti-frackers believe that the Earth, like its climate, is inherently non-linear and unknowable, full of catastrophe for generations yet unborn, liable to be irreversibly contaminated, about to hit a tipping-point, etc. In fact these are themes that Greens have long spun in debates around climate change. They now find an echo in debates on shale gas, in part because, feeling a bit on the back foot, carbonistas like to recruit the immediate, non-carbon ‘threats’ to safety around fracking to the anti-carbon cause – in the same way as they tried to recruit climate to the left-liberal cause years ago

6  Anti-frackers in the US are well funded and dominated by celebrities. Yet shale in the US is not the subject of mass claims and class-action litigation, in the manner of BP and Deepwater Horizon. So the exploitation of shale in the US has brought no major distress, and cannot therefore be regarded as seriously dangerous. The tiny number of worker casualties involved around US shale, especially when compared with other means of energy generation, tends to confirm this

7  If shale was half as dangerous to life as nuclear power, even US regulators would be conducting inquiries. To believe that there is major, undetected collusion between frackers and regulators to cover up injuries, deaths and diseases is to fall victim to conspiracy theory

8  It is not locals actively harmed by the exploitation of shale who are protesting, but the worried well. In many ways the campaign against shale follows that against electric cables, etc. Health campaigns on wind turbines, and growing anxiety about the metals used in solar panels, are part of the same pattern. The issue here is not the dangers of each particular energy source, but society’s free-floating angst about every kind of technological advance.

James Woudhuysen is Professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. James analyses the sociology, politics, economics and technologies of energy in a counter-intuitive but pragmatic manner. He wrote about North Sea oil for The Economist, and is co-author, Energise! A future for energy innovation (Beautiful Books, 2009), and BIG POTATOES: The London manifesto for Innovation (Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press, 2012).

You can hear from from Professor James Woudhuysen at Flame 2014.  Download the latest Agenda, or visit the Flame Conference website for more information.