Page 7 - Chemical Technology

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Chemical Technology • January 2013
special report
by over one million tonnes. The Navituspark will cover
175 square kilometres.
And so it goes on. It doesn’t really matter what is
being built. If it is large and industrial, or uses complex
technology, there will be protestors.
Mark Lynas was one of the people who coined the
phrase “Frankenfoods”. Speaking at the Oxford Farming
Conference in January this year, he declared: “I apologise
for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am
also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement
back in the mid-1990s, and that I thereby assisted in
demonizing an important technological option which can
be used to benefit the environment.”
Lynas describes his protest as explicitly anti-science.
“For me this anti-science environmentalism became
increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environ-
mentalism with regard to climate change.”
That conflict of using science when it supports
your argument and rejecting it when it doesn’t, often
makes discussion of major scientific, engineering and
environmental issues somewhat fraught. That is not
to say that all protestors are wrong, or anti-science,
merely that protest is an insufficient indicator of
anything remiss.
It is in this context that, two years after I first wrote
about it, I revisit the loaded topic of fracking.
In America, the home of fracking, the numbers as-
sociated with the industry are vast. According to the
Marcellus Shale Coalition, over 141 000 people now
work in Pennsylvania in jobs related to drilling for natural
gas. Their average annual income is about $70 000
and rising rapidly. Billions of dollars have gone into land
acquisitions by oil majors and some 2 879 wells are now
in active production, up 28% over 12 months.
The investment is triggered by one thing: the assess-
ment that the Marcellus Shale contains an estimated 10,3
trillion cubic metres of recoverable natural gas, sufficient
to supply the entire US energy consumption for 14 years.
As all these wells have come on stream natural gas prices
have plunged, hitting $3 per thousand cubic feet (10,6 US
cents per cubic metre) in October 2012. The falling price is
already having an impact on productivity.
A year ago there were 111 drill operators in Penn-
sylvania. Now there are 63 who drill deeper, more com-
plex horizontal wells in a fraction of the time. Produc-
tion productivity is rising too as techniques improve.
The basics of fracking have not changed. The drill
operates a drill-string which can be thousands of metres
long. Drilling fluid, a complex mixture of chemicals, fluids
and solids, is pumped down the drill well.
As the well is deepened, steel pipe is pushed down
the well, surrounded with concrete, and then set to stabi-
lize and isolate the borehole. Fracking fluid is blasted into
the shale at set intervals to create a network of cracks in
the gas-bearing rock and these cracks are held open by
the proppant residue in the fluid.
This process has become critical as regulations
limit the amount of methane that operators are permit-
ted to release as part of production. Once the well
ends its life, it must also be effectively sealed against
any later seepage.
Such cladding also isolates the bore from any water
it may pass through and prevents any entry of drilling
fluid into the water table. The drilling fluid – up to 20
million litres of it of which only 0,2% of it is actually
the fracking additive – is circulated through the bore
during production.
This much is not new and even hydraulic fracturing
of gas-bearing shale is not novel. What is improving is
horizontal drilling. The longer the bore running laterally
through gas-bearing shale, the more productive the well.
In the first six months of 2012, Marcellus Shale wells
produced $2,6 billion of gas, or about $930 000 per
well. Each well costs about $6-7 million to set up and can
be in place for decades. It produces the bulk of its gas
in its first year before rapidly tailing off, but its costs are
relatively static.
Obviously this excludes transportation, processing and
storage, but it does explain the manic rush to invest.
From an environmental perspective, the impact is
mixed. On the immediate plus side is that the operation-
al, above-ground, footprint of an extraction plant is tiny. A
small water tank and a pump are all that are present and
these can be easily hidden if needed.
More surprisingly, US carbon emissions hit a 20-
year low in early 2012. Natural gas prices are so low,
even touching $2 per thousand cubic feet recently,
that it is displacing coal as a primary energy source.
Since 2005 the US has reduced carbon dioxide emis-
sions from coal by 18% to 387 million tonnes. Overall,
carbon dioxide emissions are down 8% overall since
2011. And that is without the US signing up to the
Kyoto Climate Accords.
Over in Europe, however, carbon dioxide emissions are
up after nuclear plants have been closed, fracking has been
banned and coal plants have had to scale up production.
Let’s be clear, natural gas is not a solution to climate
change and carbon dioxide emissions but it is a useful
replacement to coal.
Not so clear is whether this mass investment isn’t
going to come to a bubbling end. With gas prices so
low it is becoming near impossible for wells to break-
even, demand is bidding up land prices even as new
wells come on stream and lower prices further.