OrbitalDawn
Ulysses Everett McGill
South Africa is facing a double crisis: unemployment, and electricity. A local shale gas industry – if successful – could make a big contribution to solving both.
In the US, the shale revolution created nearly a million jobs. Energy independence was a distant dream for Americans when the boom began in 2008. Today, the US is the world’s largest oil producer. Shale has turned the energy world upside down.
If energy companies find sufficient gas deep below the Karoo, and begin to produce it in five or ten years, South Africa’s economy could change dramatically too.
It will create not only direct jobs, but thousands of indirect jobs, throughout the energy, transport and manufacturing sectors. It could revitalise our anaemic economic growth figures, and contribute to solving our electricity crisis.
Gas-fired power stations are cheap and quick to build, can be switched on and off like a generator when needed. They can produce far more power than comparable renewable plants. At present, we run our gas turbines on diesel, which is insanely expensive. An abundant local supply of gas would make all the difference.
However, the myths and propaganda spread by anti-fracking activists have been very successful. Every time the topic comes up, you’ll hear their claims about groundwater contamination or air pollution parroted. The truth is more mundane, however. Any environmental risks are small and manageable.
At the moment, the oil price is very low. This is good for consumers, but not for producers. It would have been far smarter to issue exploration licences when the moratorium on drilling was lifted in 2013 and the oil price was still north of $100.
Thanks to delays caused largely by anti-fracking groups, we’ll just have to hope applicants are still interested. The breakeven oil price for American shale gas has reached as low as $45, but still, a quarter of their shale oil & gas industry has shut down since the oil price collapsed. Saudi Arabia has them by the short-and-curlies. The Russians aren’t keen on everyone else producing their own gas, either.
We could also be both too greedy and unlucky, like Poland, where the once-promising prospects of shale gas drilling is now a forlorn hope.
Having said that, exploration companies work on 10 and 20-year horizons and nobody is expecting the oil price to stay this low forever. We may yet get our shale gas industry.
We might not enjoy a shale boom like the US, but by prohibiting it, we can be sure we won’t.
Some make the argument that gas will not last forever. Of course it won’t. But we don’t need it forever. We need it until something more efficient is rolled out, whether that is solar, wind, nuclear, or something else entirely. If you’re unemployed, would you refuse a job because it might only last a few years?
The claim that shale oil and gas drilling use techniques that are new, untested and dangerous is as misleading as the oil industry’s claim that fracking has a 65-year track record.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Yes, hydraulic fracturing is not new, but two things changed.
During the 1990s, they replaced the mostly-chemical fracturing gel of the past with water, using only some additives to reduce friction and corrosion. The recipe was discovered by accident, while searching for techniques that could liberate hydrocarbons from dense rock formations like shale. It resulted in a fracking fluid that was very much cleaner than the stuff used in conventional wells of yore.
The second change is that, they learned to combine fracturing with horizontal drilling. That makes little difference at depths of three or four kilometres below ground, except that higher volumes and pressures might be needed.
This has obvious implications for well integrity, which does matter a great deal. However, whether a well holds up under pressure is important not only to environmentalists. Drilling companies cannot afford loss of integrity either. If they miscalculate, and the fractures escape from the hard, dense shale into an adjacent rock layer, or the well sleeve fails closer to the surface, they lose well pressure. Loss of pressure means that the fracturing will not be effective, or the well will not produce. Oil and gas companies don’t like $20 million wells that don’t produce oil and gas. They have every incentive to drill as safely as possible, long before regulations and lawsuits come into play.
The oil and gas industry has to report every case of well failure, and they do. On this basis, Anthony Ingraffea made the infamous claim that 60% of all shale wells suffer integrity failures, and could therefore cause groundwater contamination.
Ingraffea is an engineering professor whose anti-fracking claims feature in Gasland II and UnEarthed, and whose data celebrities like Yoko Ono rely on in their anti-fracking campaigns. He was also a co-author of the debunked methane emissions study mentioned earlier. (With considerable chutzpah, he denies being an anti-fracking activist.)
His claim about well failures is demonstrably false. It is based on a 2003 report of sustained casing pressure in offshore wells. That report measured neither well sleeve failures nor shale wells.
The barrier failure rate for on-shore shale wells is between 2% and 6%. If that still sounds like too many, it is important to realise that well sleeves consist of multiple barriers at environmentally sensitive depths. Most of those failures do not lead to any leakage, because they only involve one layer of the sleeving, or are detected and repaired as soon as they happen. Leakage incidents are much rarer. Horizontal multi-fracture wells are the safest of all wells, with a documented containment failure rate of only 0.004%.
A US Geological Survey study in 2013 found no groundwater contamination in a region with over 4,000 shale wells. It was conducted by, among others, the very same Avner Vengosh and Robert Jackson of Duke University who had earlier concluded that methane migration from gas wells was a significant risk. That study was also debunked by several other studies.
The late prof. Gerrit van Tonder, the chief hydrogeologist at Free State University (with whom I crossed swords before), was very concerned about this issue. However, his published work found that his fears about well sleeve failure could easily be dispelled. All he’d want to see is that gas drillers are required to drill three 100m-deep monitoring wells around each gas well. To prevent well failure over the long term, he simply wants abandoned wells to be properly plugged to depth, and fitted with a monitoring sensor to detect sustained casing pressure. These are not insurmountable obstacles to shale gas drilling.
There have been claims that shale gas is worse for atmospheric emissions than coal. This has been roundly refuted by several subsequent studies, and has even been rejected by major environmental groups. The most recent study found that emissions from shale drilling were even lower than regulatory estimates, and on a rapid decline.
Gas-fired power stations have half the carbon dioxide output of coal-fired stations. They virtually eliminate all other associated pollutants, like carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide and particulates. The Karoo is sparsely populated with wide open spaces in which any remaining and unavoidable atmospheric emissions during drilling, such as from truck or generator exhausts, would easily be dispersed.
As a matter of fact, dust is a greater risk than pollution, to both sheep farmers and the Square Kilometre Array project. Dust mitigation measures on roads used by drilling-related trucks will be required.
Still, all this makes natural gas the cleanest source that actually produces significant quantities of energy, other than nuclear.
The water requirements of shale gas drilling are also a red herring. Water is scarce in South Africa only in the sense that it is unevenly distributed among catchment areas, and infrastructure is old and leaky.
The water use of South Africa’s golf courses could fracture 15,000 wells. If that amount of water was drawn from the Gariep Dam in one fell swoop, it would consume 3% of the dam’s capacity.
The fall-back argument, that this water would be permanently removed from the water cycle, is also misleading. It is technically true, but that water is replenished by evaporation from the oceans. The amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is controlled by temperature, not by how much we extract from surface water. Besides, shale gas drilling can use seawater, or undrinkable brack-water from deep aquifers. Even waterless methods are available. Shale drillers may not have to make any imposition on the supply of fresh water in South Africa at all.
