Dramatic improvements in technique for extracting oil and gas from deep sandstone and shale rock seams is credited by some with a major recent reversal of fortune for the oil and gas industry in the US. The more ambitious claims are that the US could remove it’s dependence on imported oil in a decade.

Thousands of new fields and wells are being established all over the US to extract oil and gas using horizontal directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing – fracking. Production, particularly of gas, is rising fast. And the gas is cheap.

The benefits are obvious. Without energy our modern economies can’t function as they do. The enormous economic development and rising standard of living of the last century in particular is down to the exploitation of cheap energy, mainly oil.

The world ran out of cheap oil some few years ago. Hereon the energy buried in the earth over eons will generally only come at progressively higher costs of extraction and transport to market. So the benefit of extracting natural gas at manageable cost right across the North American continent is something of a holy grail for an energy hungry economy. The benefit is that simple.

What about the risks?

Gone are the days when Jed Clampett could go punch a hole in the ground, and up the oil would come under natural pressure!

Fracking for gas means drilling down deep into, and then along, rock seams deep underground, then pumping down a cocktail of water, sand and nasty chemicals under such pressure that it fractures the rock and releases the natural gas (and maybe some oil, some methane and some salts of uranium) embedded in the rock. This generates huge volumes of waste “water”: often disposed of by pumping it into other “disposal wells” also under very high pressure.

So what have we got here? Pressure enough to crack enclosed rock. Nasty chemicals. An uncontrolled and invisible environment down there. And often, drill holes close to or “through” fresh water aquifers.

What could possibly go wrong? Here’s one story from the New York Times this week:

Oklahoma has never been known as earthquake country, with a yearly average of about 50 tremors, almost all of them minor. But in the past three years, the state has had thousands of quakes. This year has been the most active, with more than 2,600 so far, including 87 last week.

While most have been too slight to be felt, some, like the quake on Saturday and a smaller one in November … have been sensed over a wide area and caused damage. In 2011, a magnitude 5.6 quake — the biggest ever recorded in the state — injured two people and severely damaged more than a dozen homes, some beyond repair.

… unsettling, in a state where more than 340,000 jobs are tied to the oil and gas industry, is what scientists say may be causing many of the quakes: the widespread industry practice of disposing of billions of gallons of wastewater that is produced along with oil and gas, by injecting it under pressure into wells that reach permeable rock formations.

“Disposal wells pose the biggest risk,” said Austin Holland, a seismologist with the Oklahoma Geological Survey, who is studying the various clusters of quakes around the state.

Oklahoma has more than 4,000 disposal wells for waste from tens of thousands of oil and gas wells. “Could we be looking at some cumulative tipping point? Yes, that’s absolutely possible,” Dr. Holland said.

How’s that for a Rumsfeld known unknown …?

And this is certainly not unique to Oklahoma. The NYT again:

Disposal wells linked to quakes have been shut down in a few states, including Arkansas and Ohio.

The other main risk is to vital water supply from underground aquifers.

This and other environmental risk has been sufficient for France, districts in many European counties, and some US States to ban fracking altogether.

Protection of water resources has, understandably, been the major issue with new CSG projects in Australia. No more so than with the huge Santos Pilliga gas project in NSW right adjacent to the Great Artesian Basin, the lifeblood water supply for a majority of inland Queensland and NSW agriculture. This from the Australian in October:

The CSG industry has been frozen by a moratorium in Victoria, effectively locked down by protests and political review in NSW and frustrated in Queensland to the point that the ability of major companies to deliver against the multi-billion-dollar export contracts they have written has been questioned.

For strategic difficulty, it is hard to think of a tougher challenge. The issues range from xenophobia about local gas supplies being diverted to Asia; home-as-the-castle property rights; food security; water safety; and many environmental concerns. All have combined to build a coalition of dissent that crosses the political divide.

History is full of engineers and scientists saying they have assessed the risks and got them covered. It’s also full of examples of them being wrong. 

Here are just a few. DDT. Thalidomide. Fukushima. …. Hmmmm …

For me, risking our natural water supply is a show stopper.

Are you happy to see us risk unknowable consequences for cheap gas? I think we should get Santos and the others to supply our energy in a less risky way … even if it costs more.