NPR ran a story this morning about the divide growing in environmental groups like the Sierra Club over natural gas extraction in places like the Marcellus Shale. I didn't listen.
This divide has been going on for some time now. If you're not up on it, the national Sierra Club has been touting the use of natural gas as a fuel over less clean fossils like coal. Local Sierra Club groups in places like New York, where members believe that if they keep saying the gas process has caused drinking water contamination somewhere it will have, disagree. Thats not the interesting part.
The interesting part isthe collection of comments from all kinds of anti-drilling folks on the NPR Web site. The number of missed points here on general energy issues is incredible coming from people who seem to be somewhat informed.
Many talk about the National Sierra Club's "lesser of two evils" approach. But that's not what the approach is at all.
The National group has apparently put the puzzle together -- the daily growing demand for energy, plus the need to reduce carbon emissions and still provide reliable energy for mission critical needs adds up to a world in which all viable energy sources are vital.
They must also know that the water contamination issue is overblown -- over a million wells, many more shallow than shale wells, have been fraced over a period of more than 60 years. Together with horizontal drilling, fracing can now make our untapped shale reserves an abundant home-grown supply of energy.
Water pollution incidents have been reported. Real scientists have studied them all -- not one has ever been attributed to a natural gas well. Even in incidents where there have been surface spills, drinking water has never been contaminated. Sure, for a time during cleanup, frac fluids may have been in a surface waterway -- but contamination dangerous to humans has never occurred. No matter how many newspaper and television reporters and "citizen" journalists tells us drinking water has been contaminated, its just not.
Anyway, having worked with environmental groups throughout the majority of my career I've seen them fail in pursuits over and over again for one reason: the inability to compromise to make things better, rather than perfect. Like it or not, humans live on this planet. We've developed a pattern of living it would take our absence to truly eliminate. Earth can most certainly be better -- we can all do things better, but we can't make Earth what it was before we got here. (And no I don't mean we continue to haphazardly pollute because its too late anyway. Neither does the industry -- current drilling techniques are more earth friendly than ever before, but thats a topic for another day.)
Here's where someone starts telling me the virtues of wind, and solar. Maybe nuclear. All great fuels. Like natural gas, all have serious problems.
Wind and solar both take massive tracts of land (but a gas well footprint goes from 7 acres to about 1 or so after reclaimation). They also take massive amount of pipeline to get energy where sun shines and wind blows to places where it doesn't. On the trip to the end user, a good portion of the energy it generates is lost (gas loses the least value in travel by the way). Also, both require a backup fuel more reliable than they, like natural gas. And gas is also a feed stock for making the materials necessary to build those towers and panels.
Solar panels need to be washed daily, due to dust build up that impacts their ability to channel the sun. In the western US where water is terribly scarce to begin with, there will have to be some way to ration the water needed for this. In the eastern part of the country -- and likely in other colder places where wind turbines have been installed, there are ice problems. Ice builds up on blades in cooler times, as it melts and loosens as blades that have stopped spinning start up again, huge chunks on ice become flying projectiles.
And nuclear. Probably don't have to tell anyone about the problems realted to that one. There's a town not far from where I live that once produced nuclear fuel rods -- recently enough that some of people who did so are still living, and the community is still dealing with an amazing cancer cluster and the notoriety of having a major contamination problem -- even AFTER the site has been reclaimed and cleaned up. Nuclear energy isn't just the plant itself. The manufacturing is also problematic.
Bottom line here folks is this: No energy is all good or all bad. Our world needs energy like never before if we're going to sustain long happy lives and continue to build those kinds of lives for others in our world. Energy is as big a need in poor countries as is clean water and sanitation. For Americans, if we want to see how Apple is going to improve the ipad or have perscription medications, or use the net to communicate this way -- we need reliable energy. All we can get.
Regardless of all the fighting and bellyaching about water contamination that hasn't occured and our societal instinct to use everything we term "Big Oil" as a whipping boy, natural gas is necessary and won't go away.
The real question is, will we allow baseless fear mongering to make this necessary fuel more expensive than it needs to be, and limit the number of jobs it can provide? Let's hope not.
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