Frack, Baby, Frack? What You Need to Know About Hydraulic Fracturing

There's many processes that go into getting the natural gas out of a shell formation. One of those is hydraulic fracturing or fracking. It's a word that talks about a stream of water being pumped down a well shaft. Added to that stream of water are chemicals and sand to fracture the shell.

But it turns out fracking is a misleading term because some of the most troubling things that we worry about in hydraulic fracturing and in really the whole of Shell Gas development have nothing to do with that particular process. To tick off the issues, they include local air pollution, a significant source of smog, the problem of where do you get the millions of gallons of water that you use, and what do you do with that water after you take it out of the hole.

The issue of the waste that comes out of the hole, drill muds, and soil, and other things that need to be properly disposed of. Local community impacts: noise, traffic, forest fragmentation from drilling a lot of holes and putting well pads in. And finally, there's the global impact of climate change. We've been told that natural gas is 40% or so better than burning coal, and it turns out that methane, which is the main component of natural gas, does burn cleaner than coal.

But uncombusted methane, which leaks from the pipes and from the well heads, undermines that advantage or can, under some scenarios, completely erase that advantage. The troubling thing here is that no one knows what that leak rate is. Estimates vary between 1 and 8%, and it needs to be under 1% in order to have natural gas be a climate benefit under all scenarios.

So the Environmental Defense Fund has launched a study with a series of partners. The lead is the University of Texas, to determine what that leak rate is. I think it's very important that we get the number right and simultaneously that we do everything we can to reduce the rate of leakage.