by JOYCE NELSON
Antony Benham, Business Development Manager at the British Geological Survey, could smell trouble brewing. As he displayed a map at the Shale Gas World Europe conference in Warsaw, Poland, last November showing sites in Britain earmarked for future gas exploration, he warned his audience: ‘Activists are keen to stir up trouble wherever they can. It’s important that we communicate better with the general public and address their concerns, outline the pluses and the minuses, because if you don’t give them information they’ll be against it from the start.’
According to its website, the Shale Gas World Europe conference ‘was born out of extensive research with key players in the industry, who have expressed an urgent need to formulate strategies, understand technologies and foster relationships that will result in development of this new sector’.
But shale gas has become extremely controversial in Canada and the US where it was first developed. The industry is planning to go global quickly before the controversy spreads.
As conventional natural gas supplies dwindle, resource companies are going after ‘unconventional’ sources that depend on the new technologies of hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) and horizontal drilling to get the gas out of shale rock and coal-bed seams. The number of countries and regions that have been targeted for ‘unconventional’ natural gas development (shale gas, tight gas, and coal-bed methane) reads like a world atlas. Companies are already moving into these countries to buy or lease land where there is shale gas potential.
Tony Hayward – the ex-CEO of BP who fumbled last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster – has been a big supporter of unconventional gas production. In a November 2009 op-ed for The Washington Post, Hayward opined: ‘We can’t afford to wait… BP believes there is the potential to find and develop tight gas and shale gas in North Africa and the Middle East, Europe, China and in the southern cone of Latin America. There’s also potentially high-quality coal-bed methane in Australia and Southeast Asia.’
This January, however, scientists at the Tyndall Centre of the University of Manchester called for the British government to impose an immediate moratorium on shale gas development to allow ‘the wider environmental concerns to be fully exposed and addressed’. In France, where at least 10 companies are vying to drill for shale gas and oil beneath the rich farmland of the Paris Basin, the government has said it will delay test drilling until it has determined the environmental impacts.
Caution: flammable water
I was getting horrible burns and rashes from taking a shower and then my dogs refused to drink the water…
In North America, shale gas has become increasingly controversial because of fracking. Huge volumes of water are mixed with sand and dozens of toxic chemicals like benzene, toluene and xylene, and then injected under extreme pressure to shatter the underground rock reservoir and release gas trapped in the rock pores. Each ‘slick-water frack’ uses nearly 20 million litres of freshwater. The toxic chemicals mixed in the water endanger groundwater aquifers and threaten to pollute nearby water-wells. With horizontal drilling, a well can be fracked more than a dozen times, making the fractures extend several kilometres.
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