Power Hungry (40 page)

In June 2009, shortly before the Potential Gas Committee estimated U.S. gas resources at more than 2,000 trillion cubic feet, U.S. Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, along with representatives from New York and Pennsylvania, introduced a bill called the “FRAC Act” that would put regulation of hydraulic fracturing under the purview of federal regulators.
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If the bill becomes law, the oil and gas industry estimates that it could increase the cost of fracturing each well by about $150,000.
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Representative Maurice Hinchey, a New York Democrat who is among the bill's authors, said the legislation would protect drinking water and lift “the veil of secrecy currently shrouding this industry practice.”
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The push for more regulation comes, in part, from articles written by Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for ProPublica, an independent news outlet. In a November 2008 article, Lustgarten reported on water contamination in Sublette County, Wyoming, near the huge Pinedale natural gas field, a region that has been extensively drilled over the past few years. He claimed that a contaminated water well in Sublette County was among “more than 1,000 other cases of contamination” that have been “documented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.”
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While there's no doubt that the oil and gas industry has caused isolated cases of groundwater contamination, the extent of that contamination is not known. Industry officials contend there is no need for additional regulation. A 2004 study by the EPA found that there was no evidence that fracturing was a danger to drinking water. The Independent Petroleum Association of America claims that more than 1 million wells have been fractured over the past fifty years and that there have been no documented cases of contaminated drinking water during that time.
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But as a reporter with a long history of writing about the oilfield, I find that claim disingenuous.

Lustgarten's reporting on the problems in Wyoming helped to bring about an inquiry by the EPA. In 2009, the agency found traces of toxins—
including arsenic, barium, cobalt, and copper—in eleven of the thirty-nine drinking-water wells it tested near the town of Pavillion. One of the wells that tested positive was owned by a local farmer named John Fenton, who said the water in his well was fine until EnCana, the big Canadian gas company, began drilling near his home.
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The EPA's investigation into the problems in Wyoming are continuing. Regardless of what happens in Wyoming, some industry opponents want more federal oversight on the oil and gas industry in general and the hydraulic fracturing process in particular. Calls for more regulation will almost certainly grow as drilling ramps up in the Marcellus Shale, which underlies large swaths of New York, Pennsylvania, and other eastern states. Gas producers have begun responding to the pressure. In late October 2009, Chesapeake Energy announced that it would not do any drilling in the upstate New York watershed, a region that provides drinking water for 8.2 million people in New York City and surrounding areas. The CEO of Chesapeake, Aubrey McClendon, has called on the industry to reveal all of the chemicals that are used during the hydraulic fracturing process.
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While environmentalists lauded Chesapeake's announcement that it wouldn't drill in the upstate New York watershed, the U.S. gas industry will still need lots of new wells in order to keep gas production in line with gas demand. The new shale gas wells being developed in the Barnett, Haynesville, and Marcellus regions have steep decline curves, meaning that output from some wells may fall by 80 to 90 percent during the first year of production. Those steep declines are part of a continuing drop in average well productivity. In 1971, the average U.S. gas well was producing 435,000 cubic feet of gas per day. By 2008, that number had decreased to 113,000 cubic feet per day.
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That reduction in productivity, combined with the steep decline rates in the new shale gas plays, leaves the U.S. energy industry with no choice but to continue drilling tens of thousands of new wells per year. In 2008 alone, more than 60,000 wells were drilled in the United States, with gas wells outnumbering oil wells by 2 to 1.
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Exactly how many new wells will be needed is not yet clear, and it will likely take several years before the industry figures out how to manage the huge quantities of gas available in the various shale deposits.

FIGURE 37
U.S. Natural Gas Wells, Average Productivity

Source
: Energy Information Administration, Table 6.4, “Natural Gas Gross Withdrawals and Natural Gas Well Productivity, 1960–2008,” n.d.,
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0604.html
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But as the number of gas wells increases, and those production facilities get closer to people's homes and businesses, the costs of developing U.S. natural gas will be felt by more people. Concerns about water—both in terms of the quantity of water used during the fracturing process, and the allegations that fracturing may have negative effects on surface and groundwater supplies—will almost surely increase.

Although some of those concerns may be valid, many of the complaints about water usage are clearly overblown. For instance, if the gas industry is able to ramp up its operations in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania to the point where it is drilling and fracturing 3,000 wells per year, the industry expects water consumption to total about 30 million gallons per day. For comparison, the Pennsylvania electric utility sector uses about 5.9
billion
gallons of water per day, or about two hundred times more than the projected needs of the natural gas sector.
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Furthermore, the gas industry is continually improving both its seismic monitoring and its ability to perform drilling that has a small footprint. The industry's ability to extract hydrocarbons from reservoirs that are miles away can be seen by the November 2009 news that Chesapeake Energy had drilled a gas well inside the city limits of Fort Worth. That's not overly uncommon, given that the Barnett Shale underlies
much of the city. What was newsworthy was that the target zone for the well was underneath the north end-zone of Amon G. Carter Stadium, the home venue of the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs football team. But visitors to the stadium, and students, faculty, and university administrators, will never notice the well, because the drilling site for the well is about 1.5 miles southeast of the stadium.
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Though critics of the industry will claim that the costs of natural gas development are significant, in reality those costs are not new, and they aren't unusual. For decades, drillers have been sinking tens of thousands of wells all over the United States in their search for more hydrocarbons. And they have found them in huge quantities. The development of shale gas causes some disruption—in the form of traffic, noise, big drilling rigs, temporary fluid tanks, and generators—no question about it. But once the gas wells are in place, there is virtually no more disruption, and those wells can remain productive for decades.

Natural gas is not a perfect fuel. But natural gas is the greenest of the hydrocarbons. Once we move beyond hydrocarbons in the search for something that is yet greener, there is only one choice that can provide the scale of energy we need and provide it in a way that is both affordable and environmentally friendly. That choice, of course, is nuclear power.

Nuclear Goes Beyond Green

N
UCLEAR POWER IS BEYOND GREEN.

Of course, that's not the message you're going to hear from the media darlings and mainstream environmental groups. For them, nuclear power has become a rallying point around which they can raise money and continue pushing their message that the only options for the future are renewable energy and efficiency. They insist that nuclear power is too expensive—and too dangerous—for use in the modern world.

That message, particularly the part about danger, evokes a strong response among the population. Some of the fear is understandable. The enduring image that marks the beginning of the nuclear age is, of course, the mushroom cloud. By unlocking the forces inside the atom, humans unleashed the most fearsome weapons the world has ever known, and the United States has used that knowledge twice, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to devastating effect. More recently, the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, along with movies such as
Silkwood
and
The China Syndrome
, have stoked fears about what might happen in the case of a nuclear accident. And environmental groups continue to use fears about nuclear proliferation as the reason to fight nuclear power.

In short, for many people, nuclear power's future has not yet overcome its past. But progress on the issue is being made. Perhaps the best single rebuttal to these fears comes from James Lovelock, the British scientist who proposed the Gaia theory, which posits that the Earth is a self-regulating organism. In 2004, Lovelock wrote an opinion piece for
the
Independent
in which he made it clear that nuclear power is the only viable option for large-scale reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. “By all means,” he wrote, “let us use the small input from renewables sensibly, but only one immediately available source does not cause global warming and that is nuclear energy.” Lovelock went on, writing,

Other leading environmentalists have also endorsed nuclear, including Patrick Moore, who was a founder of Greenpeace, and the late Anglican bishop Hugh Montefiore, who was a trustee of the United Kingdom's Friends of the Earth for two decades. Despite the growing support for nuclear power, some of the most established members of the Green/Left continue their opposition. Among the most strident—and consistently wrong—of the nuclear opponents: Amory Lovins.

In 1986, when asked about the future of nuclear power, Lovins declared flatly, “There isn't one.... No more will be built. The only question is whether the plants already operating will continue to operate during their lifetime or whether they will be shut down prematurely.” Since then, Lovins has repeated one of his favorite lines: “Nuclear is dying of an incurable attack of market forces.”
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In 2007, when I interviewed Lovins, he declared that “a huge and capable propaganda campaign by the [nuclear] industry and its political allies is spinning an illusion of a renaissance that deceives credulous journalists but not hard-nosed investors.”
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How did Lovins do on his prediction back in 1986? According to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), about 130 new reactors with nearly 123,000 megawatts of generating capacity have been brought online over the past two decades or so. Those reactors represent nearly one-third of global nuclear capacity, which in late 2009 included 436 reactors with 370,000 megawatts of capacity.
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As for his 2007 claim
about the “illusion of a renaissance,” the numbers, once again, have proven him wrong. By the end of 2009, more than four dozen new reactor projects, representing nearly 48,000 megawatts of new nuclear capacity, were under construction.
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And many more were on the way. Japan, the third-biggest producer of nuclear power (after the United States and France), plans to construct 11 new reactors over the next decade or so.
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And the country plans to be getting 60 percent of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050—double the current percentage.
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The International Energy Agency (IEA) sees nuclear power as an essential part of the effort to stabilize global carbon dioxide levels. In its 2009 World Energy Outlook, the agency said it expected global investment in nuclear power to total some $1.3 trillion over the next two decades.
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More importantly, the IEA's latest report makes it clear that nuclear power is competitive with conventional power plants. “New nuclear power plants can generate electricity at a cost of between $55 and $80 per MWh [megawatt-hour], which places them in a strong competitive position against coal- or gas-fired power plants, particularly when fossil-fuel plants carry the burden of the carbon cost associated with the cap-and-trade system” that is in place in Europe, and proposed for the United States.
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