AGENDA Frack off?
Anthony Seaton
Fracking in the US
What should we make of the arguments for and against fracking? There is a moratorium on agreeing licences to those who wish to frack until such a time as certain conditions are met; assessment of any public health risk and consultation of the public seem to be the main ones, though the processes involved are as yet unclear. The former will presumably review the information available from the United States, where fracking has been economically and politically transformative. The latter is clearly dependent on the public having an educated view on what is a rather technical subject. I should set out by stating that I have no conflict of interest nor do I have any axe to grind, but I have come to a personal opinion and it is: ‘It all depends…’.
First, the public health risk. This has been considered by an independent committee of the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering (RS/RAE). I served on one such committee some years ago relating to nanotechnology, about which similar anxieties had been expressed and technological miracles foretold; a moratorium had been called for. Clear description of the likely advantages and of the possible hazards allowed the technologies to advance with appropriate regulation into what is now a completely transformative range of industries. So far no obvious harm has been done to anybody. In the specific matter of fracking, the RS/RAE report has explained how risks could be controlled and noted the success of the United States in doing this after initial alarmist reports. Proper assessment of hazard and effective control measures, subject to a specialist inspectorate, are key to this.
The much discussed hazards are earthquakes and escape of toxic substances into the local environment. Scientific understanding of the mechanisms of both is well-advanced and neither is new since they apply also to coal mining and various other less well-known extractive methods that have a longer history than shale fracking. If, as is almost always necessary, fracking is carried out a kilometre or more below the surface, neither tremors of sufficient magnitude to be felt at the surface nor contamination of the water table is likely. Even if toxic chemicals are used (I can find no evidence that any of the ones in current use are toxic in the sense that they could harm people or the ecosystem by their stated use) they would be buried far underground and any hazard would be to workers handling them at the surface.
A more realistic hazard than this is escape of methane (the gas that is being harvested) from the boreholes into the general atmosphere, thus increasing the overall greenhouse gas burden. The main sources of methane currently are agriculture and other extractive industries. Since it is the desired product of the fracking industry, it makes commercial sense to reduce as far as possible any fugitive emissions, and regulation is required to monitor and control this. The overall opinion of the RS/RAE report was that with appropriate regulation and monitoring, fracking could be carried out without significant risks, other than those associated with all heavy industry.
While I accept that fracking can be carried out safely and with relatively little inconvenience to the locality and its people (obviously there is some from the presence of an industrial site and consequent transportation and noise issues), I share the uncertainty of the RS/RAE about its necessity in the context of decarbonisation of our energy supply. Unfortunately, at present this depends on many imponderables. In the USA, fracking has not only made the nation’s energy independent and rendered the ill-advised attack by Saudi Arabia on oil prices impotent, it has allowed a move from the much more climate-unfriendly coal and helped the US to move towards its decarbonisation target.
In Scotland it has the potential to save our industrial petrochemical base and help in our decarbonisation in the face of terminal decline of coal and oil. Although combustion of methane is less polluting than coal burning, its production by fracking will nevertheless still add to the greenhouse effect; if it is to contribute to prevention of irreversible climate change its use must be as a substitute, not an addition, to oil and coal, while moving to a carbon-free economy. In this context it may have a value in Scotland that should not be dismissed out of hand.
In Scotland we have a precedent. I think everyone has seen the shale bings in West Lothian while driving towards Edinburgh from north or west. In the 1850s James Young, a Glasgow chemist, discovered that he could produce oil from rock deposits in the banks of the river Almond. He set up an industry to extract and refine this oil and produced paraffin and petroleum (oil from rock). This was the world’s first mineral oil industry and led to the Scottish Oil company and ultimately, British Petroleum and the Grangemouth refinery complex. The industry, initially transformative, was almost put out of business by the discovery of liquid oil in gas measures in USA, saved by the use of a by-product as fertiliser, but finally closed in the 1950s.
Some decades later, during an oil price crisis, the US started to open up shale mines in the Rocky mountains and needed a risk assessment in order to reduce hazards to workers and the local environment, and I had the opportunity of studying the short- and long-term health hazards among our Scottish workers for the US Department of Energy.
These risk assessments are the sort of thing that are being worked out now in relation to the much less hazardous business of fracking. Should we countenance fracking in Scotland? Only if it is clearly used as a substitute for, not as an addition to, coal and oil production, and as a step towards decarbonisation of our energy supply. Anyone thinking of voting in future for an independent Scotland should consider very carefully the consequences of opposing fracking.
By Anthony Seaton | June 2015
