Why fracking doesn't have much of a future...
Sure, it produces oil and gas, but not at all efficiently, and probably not for much longer
Amidst the chaos and absurdity of the UK’s ongoing post-Brexit political carnival, fracking has again risen into the public focus. With fuel prices spiking because of the war in Ukraine, the governing UK Conservative party has used the crisis to argue that action on climate change is a luxury the nation can ill afford. They’ve pushed for more drilling in the North Sea, and, recently, temporarily brought back plans for fracking — exploiting the fracturing of shale rock under pressure to allow the extraction of more oil and gas from UK sites.
This idea was an obvious sop to the party’s right-wing extreme, who predictably celebrate any policy which enrages the environmentalists or the “lefty globalists,” this group taken to include anyone who thinks climate change is an important issue. As fracking enthusiasts often argue, look what it did for the US, where oil and gas production surged from 2005 onward, with continued production expected through 2040 or so, making the US more energy independent than it was before.
Since toying with the idea, the UK government under new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has again put fracking plans off. But the issue may well arise again. So it may be worth considering why fracking in the UK is never likely to be anything but a political plaything, and not part of a real energy policy. For one thing, UK shale deposits don’t compare in scale to those present in the US. Geological experts also point out that UK shale isn’t brittle and prone to fracture — a key element in the process — but more malleable like clay.
But there’s another more fundamental problem, which comes down to energy itself. Fracking, even though it does recover oil and gas, does so through a process which is itself highly expensive in terms of energy used. As a result, anyone pursuing fracking is using ever more energy to find and extract fossil fuels, meaning that the net energy gain is dwindling rapidly.
It’s as if, to get to your $100 a day job, you have to take taxis which cost $5 years ago, $30 a day now, with prices set to rise to $75 and more each day in the near future. Clearly, it would be a good idea to find another job. By similar accounting in terms of energy, fracking even in the US looks to have a decidedly short-term future.
A technical term of great help in framing the problem is known as energy return on investment (EROI). This is the ratio of how much energy we get from some energy production process to how much energy we had to put in to run it. If we grow biodiesel, we have to spend energy to manage farmland, grow and harvest plants, then produce the biodiesel. With oil, we need to drill for it, transport what we collect and then refine it, all of which takes energy. For any particular source of energy — wind, tides, nuclear fusion, you name it — the EROI just reflects the energy density and ease of access for that source.
Essentially, easily extracted highly energetic fuels have high EROI, and hard-to-extract low energy fuels have low EROI. Roughly, it’s a measure of energy quality and usefulness. Which brings us to comparing oil and gas captured through “normal” means — the oil and gas production the world has grown used to over the last half century or more — to similar fuels captured through fracking.
Empirically, for any energy source, the EROI may change over time as the resource grows more scarce, or as new discoveries or new technology makes new sources available. For oil and gas, the trend has generally been that EROI at first grows for a time, as the technology for extraction becomes more efficient, before then falling. Just over a decade ago, an exhaustive study by Charles Hall and colleagues of the State University of New York reported historical values in the US and Canada over the past 90 years or so.
As the figure below shows, the EROI for oil and gas in the United States has fallen from more than 100 in 1919 to around 10-15 in the 2010s. Global figures are fairly similar.
This doesn’t show data on the more recent oil and gas extraction from shale. This shows up more clearly in a related figure for extraction in Canada, where the data shown in red corresponding to oil extracted from tar sands.
Now, it is true, as many economists argue, that there’s lots of oil left in the ground, and higher oil prices will tend to encourage its extraction (on this point, see my recent article on recent valuations of fossil fuel assets, which remain very high). This has certainly happened in the past two decades, as the shale oil boom has brought a surge in US oil production. But it is also true that ever more energy is being spent in delivering this fuel.
And this trend will continue. Research published in Nature Energy in 2019 offered an assessment of likely EROI figures for fossil fuels over the next 20-30 years, and predicted that EROI values will dwindle over the period to around 6, meaning roughly 15% of the energy harvested is used up in the processing. This puts the energy availability of fossil fuels at the same level or below that of many renewables, including solar and wind power. Not only are these alternatives becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, they’re also becoming more energy rich.
Not to be alarmist, but before I finish I really should include one poignant figure from this Nature Energy paper, which shows the dramatic effect falling EROI values will have on energy availability in our societies, and the looming threat of something called the “net energy cliff.” The figure below plots the fraction of harvested energy that is left over for society to use after accounting for the energy used in harvesting it. As EROI falls, of course, the energy left over falls. But the process isn’t gradual and linear, but accelerating as EROI gets down to values below 10 or so — the region we’re approaching now.
The EROI figures on the right, with subscript “FIN” for “final” refer to EROI values calculated by including all of the ways that energy gets used up as we go from fuel being taken from the ground to actually be used by people to do something useful. Rigorous estimates put these values now in the range 5-10, which also implies than only 10-20% of the total energy harvested ends up being usable by people. The rest is lost.
As we move into the future, and EROI gets even smaller, it’s clear that the energy we can expect to have left over is going to plummet rapidly. This is what energy experts call the “net energy cliff” and it’s coming soon to a country near you.
Obviously, entering this zone might have some big implications for the ability of our societies to keep on growing, another important and serious issue. And there’s suggestive evidence that energy limits are already beginning to slow economic growth in a fundamental way. But more on that in another newsletter.
In any event, the era of really cheap, easy-to-extract fossil fuel energy is almost certainly coming to a close. Like it or not. Dreams about abundant fuel being made available from fracking aren’t at all likely to pan out — even if, for some, talking about such fantasies remains a great way to irritate the environmentalists!