Chapter Three:
Environmental Wars:
Shale Gas – Energy Independence or Environmental Threat?
In early 2012 the Government of China and Chinese state oil companies joined the US shale gas bandwagon. They began to use highly controversial methods to literally break pockets of embedded natural gas free from formations of so-called shale rock, a clay-rich rock embedded with other minerals.
In June 2012, state-owned oil giant Sinopec started drilling the first of nine planned shale gas wells in Chongqing, expecting by year's end to produce 11 billion to 18 billion cubic feet (300 to 500 million cubic meters) of natural gas – about the amount China consumes in a single day. It's a small start, but China's ambitions are large; by 2020, the nation's goal is for shale gas to provide 6 percent of its massive energy needs.[71]
The technology to exploit shale gas is made in America. Chinese oil companies and the Chinese Government have invited American and British oil giants to help share know-how in hopes that China can find a domestic solution to its rising energy requirements. In March, 2012, the Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell Company
signed the first shale gas production-sharing agreement ever in China, with state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), also known as PetroChina. ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and the French company Total also have embarked on shale gas partnerships in China.[72]
The Beijing Government has received geologic estimates from the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA).
A preliminary EIA assessment of world shale reserves last year indicated that China has the world's largest "technically recoverable" resources – with an estimated 1,275 trillion cubic feet (36 trillion cubic meters). That's 20 percent of world resources, and far more than the 862 trillion cubic feet (24 trillion cubic meters) in estimated U.S. shale gas stores.[73]
The EIA US study claimed that in addition to Chongqing, Tarim Basin in Xinjiang holds the most promising prospects for shale gas.
It should be noted that in recent years, some of the most highly-classified US intelligence operations have been run through the Department of Energy. Disinformation and intelligence services go hand in glove. Was the EIA report deliberately “spiked” to promote a Chinese rush to exploit its shale gas without exploring alternative proposals offering clean, safe new sources of oil and gas? If so, it would not be the first US Government intelligence report that was altered to accomplish a political aim.
It’s interesting that US oil companies and agencies recommend Sichuan and Xinjiang as prime areas to extract shale gas. Significantly, the shale deposits in Sichuan and in Xinjiang Provinces are very deep compared with the US deposits. Shale in Sichuan is 1.2 to 3.7 miles (2 to 6 kilometers) below ground, and the mountainous terrain above ground increases the difficulty and cost of drilling.[74]
It is important to bear in mind that America’s shale gas boom began through pressure from US Vice President Dick Cheney. The technology that makes modern shale gas extraction possible in large volumes was developed by Halliburton, Cheney’s former company before he became President George W. Bush’s Vice President, and the man who was responsible for the Bush Administration’s energy policy. Cheney was rarely known to show any concern about harm to human life, either in Iraq or in the US, where shale gas extraction has ruined the lives and health of countless American citizens.
Interestingly, China’s shale gas adviser, Dr. Julio Friedmann, is from the US Department of Energy’s highly-secretive nuclear weapons lab, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.[75]
US oil industry executives openly state that they expect China will be very “relaxed” in enforcing strict environmental rules against pollution by the shale gas exploiting companies, meaning they do not plan to make any special precautions against damage their drilling and fracking operations will cause.[76]
The following facts about the real dangers of shale gas extraction have led several EU countries to ban shale gas fracturing entirely, pending thorough safety studies.
Dangers of hydraulic “fracking”
The US Government’s Department of Energy, together with a Washington energy consultancy in April 2012, released a major report estimating global resources of shale gas. Significantly, the report estimated that the largest untapped shale gas reserves worldwide were in China.[77]
In the US, oil and gas industry people have quickly forgotten the recent propaganda scare about oil and gas depletion, popularly known as the Peak Oil theory, in their new euphoria over huge new volumes of gas and also oil to be obtained by “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing of shale and coal beds. The Obama Administration speaks about a renaissance in domestic oil production.
Toxins and the Halliburton Loophole
Fracking techniques have been around since the end of World War II. Why then is the world suddenly going crazy over shale gas hydraulic fracking? One answer is that the record high oil and gas prices of recent years have made inefficient and costly processes such fracking – or extracting oil from Canada’s tar sands – very profitable to the oil industry. Another reason is the advance of various horizontal underground drilling techniques, that allow companies like Halliburton or Schlumberger to pierce a large shale rock formation and inject substances to “free” the trapped gas.
However, the major reason for the recent explosion of fracking in the United States was passage of legislation in 2005 by the US Congress that exempted the oil industry’s hydraulic fracking activity from regulatory supervision by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). “The oil and gas industry is the only industry in America that is allowed by EPA to inject known hazardous materials – unchecked – directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies.”[78] Little wonder they can reap huge profits.
The exemption of fracking from the SDWA is known as the “Halliburton Loophole,” because it was introduced thanks to lobbying efforts by the company that produces the lion’s share of chemical hydraulic fracking fluids – Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton.
When Cheney became Vice President under George W. Bush in early 2001, Bush immediately gave him responsibility for a major Energy Task Force to devise a comprehensive national energy strategy for America. Aside from designing plans to grab Iraq’s oil, as documents later revealed, the Energy Task Force used Cheney’s considerable political muscle and industry-lobbying money to win EPA exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act.[79]
During Cheney’s term as Vice President, he made sure the Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would give a green light to a major expansion of shale gas drilling in the US. In 2004 the EPA issued a study of the environmental effects of fracking.
That “study has been called ‘scientifically unsound’ by EPA whistle-blower Weston Wilson,” who risked his job to make the warning public. “In March of 2005, EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley found enough evidence of potential mishandling of the EPA hydraulic fracturing study to justify a review of Wilson’s complaints.”[80]
The US Oil and Gas Accountability Project conducted an independent review of the EPA study. They found that EPA deleted information from earlier drafts that indicated that unregulated fracturing poses a threat to human health. Even more disturbing, they found that the Agency did not include information that indicated, “fracturing fluids may pose a threat to drinking water long after drilling operations are completed.”[81] All such warnings were simply ignored by the EPA and the Bush Administration.
The Halliburton Loophole was no minor affair. The process of hydraulic fracking to extract gas involves staggering volumes of water and some of the most toxic chemicals known. During the uproar over the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Obama Administration and the Energy Department formed an advisory commission on shale gas. Their report was released in November 2011. It was a “whitewash” of the dangers of shale gas.
One did not have to look far to understand that the report would give shale gas high support. The commission was headed by former CIA director John Deutch. Deutch also sat on the board of Citigroup, one of the world’s most active energy industry banks, tied to the Rockefeller family. He also sat on the board of Schlumberger which, along with Halliburton, is one of the major companies doing hydraulic fracking. In fact, of the seven advisory panel members, six had ties to the energy industry. Little surprise that the Deutch report called shale gas “the best piece of news about energy in the last 50 years.” Deutch added, “Over the long term it has the potential to displace liquid fuels in the United States.”[82]
Attempts by citizen organizations and individual litigants to force oil companies to disclose the composition of chemicals used in hydraulic fracking have met a stone wall of official and corporate silence in America. The companies argue that the chemicals are proprietary secrets, and that disclosing them would hurt their competitiveness. They also insist the process is “basically safe and that regulating it would deter domestic production.”[83]
That piece of legal trickery allowed the fracking lobby to have its cake and eat it too. They claimed it was safe, refused to say what chemicals are used, and insisted that it must be free from the Environmental Protection Administration rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act. If they were right about how safe their chemical fracking fluids are, why were they afraid of being regulated for water safety like other chemical companies?
Shale gas and poisoned water
In a typical shale gas fracturing operation, a company drills a hole several thousand meters below surface; then they drill a horizontal branch perhaps one kilometer in length. According to one expert on fracking, after the horizontal drilling into the shale formation is done:
…[Y]ou send down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives. The package is detonated, and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations in the pipe. They then pump up to seven million gallons of a substance known as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas. It blasts through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force – more than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch – that it shatters the shale for a few yards on either side of the pipe, allowing the gas embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape.[84]
The shale rock in which the gas is trapped is so tight that it has to be broken up to let the gas escape. Then come the real problems. A combination of sand and water laced with chemicals – including benzene – is pumped into the well bore at high pressure, shattering the rock and opening millions of tiny fissures, enabling the shale gas to seep into the pipeline.
Not only does it liberate gas – or, in the case of Bakken in North Dakota, oil – it also floods the shale formation with millions of gallons of very toxic fluids. A study conducted by Theo Colburn, director of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange in Paonia, Colorado, identified 65 chemicals that are probable components of the fracking fluids used by shale gas drillers. Those chemicals included benzene, glycol-ethers, toluene, 2-(2-methoxyethoxy) ethanol, and nonylphenols. All of the chemicals are linked to health disorders when human exposure is too high.[85]
Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, who has researched fracture mechanics for more than 30 years, has said that drilling and hydraulic fracking “can liberate biogenic natural gas into a fresh water aquifer.”[86] In other words the chemicals and gas can pollute water aquifers that supply drinking water.
A new study authorized by two New York State organizations, Catskill Mountainkeeper and the Park Foundation, analyzed the effects of fracking in the Marcellus Shale in New York and Pennsylvania. The study puts the lie to the gas industry’s claims that fracking is harmless to ground water. Their report, published in the journal Ground Water, concluded, “More than 5,000 wells were drilled in the Marcellus between mid-2009 and mid-2010…Operators inject up to 4 million gallons of fluid, under more than 10,000 pounds of pressure, to drill and frack each well.” To date, little sampling has been done to analyze where fracking fluids go after being injected underground.[87]
Contrary to the industry’s assertion that fracking takes place in shale rocks that are impermeable, thereby preventing leaking of toxins into ground water, the scientists concluded, in their peer-reviewed article, that natural faults and fractures in the Marcellus, exacerbated by the effects of fracking itself, could allow chemicals to reach the surface in as little as “just a few years.” Tom Myers, the study head who was an independent hydrologist with clients including the US Government and environmental groups, stated, “Simply put, the rock layers are not impermeable. The Marcellus shale is being fracked into a very high permeability. Fluids could move from most any injection process.”[88]
Inducing Earthquakes by Fracking
Not only does hydraulic fracking risk poisoning the fresh water underground aquifers, it is done with such force that it has been also known to cause earthquakes. In the UK, the Cuadrilla Company was doing shale gas drilling in Lancashire. They suspended their shale gas test drilling in June 2011. following two earthquakes – one tremor of magnitude 2.3 hit the Fylde coast on April 1, 2011, followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 on May 27, 2011.[89] A UK Government study of the earthquakes, released April, 2012 concluded that fracking drilling operations had caused the quakes.[90]
The highly-respected US National Geographic magazine reported in January 2012, “The most recent dramatic example came on New Year’s Eve outside of Youngstown, Ohio. A 4.0 earthquake was the last and largest of a series of temblors that prompted state officials to halt nearby underground disposal of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Since fracking for natural gas requires typically about 4 million gallons or 15 million liters of water, a large volume of which will return to the surface at well completion, with more coming up over the life of the well, dealing with its disposal is a major environmental and health problem.”[91] There have been numerous other instances where the connection between fracking and earthquakes has been established.
The new technique of hydraulic fracking was first used successfully in the late 1990s in the Barnett Shale in Texas, and is now being used to liberate oil from beneath the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. But the largest shale gas fracking activity in the US has been a literal gas bonanza drilling boom in the Marcellus Shale that runs from West Virginia into upstate New York, estimated to hold as much gas as the United States consumes in a century.[92] More recent estimates put the figure at half that or lower, suggesting the energy industry is using hype about huge reserve potentials to promote its methods.
But control of China’s energy security and the attempt to manipulate China’s economy through currency wars were only part of the escalating Washington hidden war against the emergence of China as a Great Power. One of the most destructive and least understood weapons of the Washington and Wall Street US elites against China was its increasing control over China’s food security.
[71] Catherine T. Yang, “China Drills Into Shale Gas, Targeting Huge Reserves Amid Challenges,” National Geographic News, August 8, 2012, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2012/08/120808-china-shale-gas/.
[72] Ibid.
[73] Ibid.
[74] Ibid.
[75] Ibid.
[76] Trefis, “Can ConocoPhillips Help China Tap Its Shale Gas Reserves?”, September 18, 2012, http://www.trefis.com/stock/cop/articles/144078/can-conocophillips-help-china-tap-its-shale-gas-reserves/2012-09-18.
[77] Vello Kuuskraa, et al, “World Shale Gas Resources: An Initial Assessment of 14 Regions Outside the United States,” Advanced Resources International, Inc., prepared for US Energy Information Administration, Office of Energy Analysis, US Department of Energy, Washington, DC, April, 2011.
[78] Earthworks, “The Halliburton Loophole,” http://www.earthworksaction.org/issues/detail/inadequate_regulation_of_hydraulic_fracturing
[79] Ibid.
[80] Lisa Sumi, “Our Drinking Water at Risk: What EPA and the Oil and Gas Industry Don’t Want Us to Know About Hydraulic Fracturing,” April 7, 2005, http://www.earthworksaction.org/files/publications/ DrinkingWaterAtRisk.pdf
[81] Ibid.
[82] John Deutch, quoted in “Shale Gas Has Challenges But Study Group Holds Out Hope,” November 18, 2012, http://globalresourcesnews.com/getp.php?needle=deutchshale
[83] Ibid.
[84] Bill Mckibben, “Why Not Frack?”, The New York Review of Books, March 8, 2012, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/why-not-frack/?pagination=false&printpage=true.
[85] Cited in “Water Contamination from Shale Gas Drilling,” http://www.water-contamination-from-shale.com/
[86] Ibid.
[87] Abrahm Lustgarten, “New Study Predicts Frack Fluids Can Migrate to Aquifers Within Years,” May 2, 2012, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/02-3.
[88] Ibid.
[89] BBC News, “Fracking water pollution in Lancashire ‘extremely unlikely,’” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-16494766.
[90] John Daly, “UK Government Seismic Fracking Report Certain to Sharpen Debate,” 20 April 2012, http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/UK-Govt.-Seismic-Fracking-Report-Certain-to-Sharpen-Debate.html
[91] Marianne Lavelle, “Tracing Links Between Fracking and Earthquakes,” National Geographic, January 4, 2012, http://www.greatenergychallengeblog.com/2012/01/04/tracing-links-between-fracking-and-earthquakes/
[92] Ibid.