Shale-gas: just a gas?
Since quite a few months the energy-world is being battered with news and articles about the new kid on the bloc: shale-gas. It would change the geopolitics, it will change the supply-patterns and it will make certain countries not dependent anymore on others, changing the have-nots into have'rs.
But is this actually a reality picture of the situation?
True; the unconventional gas-business is booming in the USA and has made it, for now, the biggest gas-producer in the world. Recently it has been discovered that quite a few other countries have also potentially huge shale-gas presences, be it in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, or India or China, as well as several other countries that seem to be lucky. All are now frantically looking at the potentially huge reserves that may be changing the future of their country.
But that is only one side of the picture: the rosy side. The other side of the coin is something we do not hear much about, which is why it is highlighted here, for those that want to be able to form up a closer-to-reality-picture.
The other side of the coin is, that for shale-gas to be exploited in a 'meaningful' way, it needs a multitude of holes to be drilled, often to great length and depth. These wells then produce first substantial amounts of gas but are very soon waning into low productivity. This means that the drilling needs to go on and that after some time the shale-gas areas are starting to look like a Swiss cheese, with multiple holes and pipelines, whilst the drilling needs to move on to drill more holes to maintain production.
This also means that a shale-gas area not only will be littered with (idle) wells and pipelines but that the whole infrastructure to gather the gas from the multitude of low-productivity wells, means that whole areas are or will be covered with pipelines and gathering-stations, pumping-stations, as well as a continuously going on of drilling activity.
In a country that already has a very extensive pipeline infrastructure, this may not seem such a problem. But in countries that do not have such an infrastructure, it may be one factor that may make the sustainability-picture questionable.
As many of the potential shale-gas source-fields are in the middle of natural environment, a country can be sure that promoting shale-gas will irreversibly destroy until-then untouched areas. If shale-gas is expected in the vicinity of population-centres, it may be a quick way to value-destruction of neighbourhoods and houses and possibly lead to social unrest.
But the hardest thing of all is that, to be able to force the gas out of the rocks, it needs to be split open with great force, lots of water and some chemicals: the fracking.
This is where the real problems begin, as with the fracking lots of water with an unknown mix of chemicals, amongst which apparently lighter oilproducts, are forced at great pressure into the underground. The chemicals are company-secrets and hardly regulated and to anyone asking further it is said that it all happens deep underground and that there are no problems.
But there are.
From the motherland of the fracking, slowly ever more stories are surfacing that people that lived in hitherto very beautiful and especially quiet areas far from 'civilisation', are now finding themselves surrounded by noisy machinery, pipes everywhere, destroyed nature and above all, their water-wells being contaminated. After many years of using their own water from their own wells on their own grounds, these people now find their water-wells irreversibly contaminated and in need to lorry in bottled water. The value of their property, measured in feeling and in money, is of course also irreversibly damaged.
And apart from the damage to the land and the people, there is the question whether a nation, any nation, can allow itself to contaminate its underground and possibly its ground-water, in such a way that there is no way back. In times of ever greater water-scarcity, this may be a factor to play in the decision-making whether to allow shale-gas extraction or not.
As has been seen quite often over the last decades; it is easy to dream up gigantic potentials for certain energy-sources, but have the consequences been taken into consideration? Not only how much money can be made, or how possibly more independence can be achieved, but also the real costs for the country in the form of, in this case, destroyed nature and contaminated soil and water?
And everything that follows from that?
We can only hope that the people deciding on the possible allowances are well informed and are able to take balanced decision, as the consequences of their decisions may reach far into the future.
Looking forward,
Alexander
