Anti-fracking
Meeting in Heathfield
Sorry
to be telling you about this after the event, it was very badly
advertised and I only found out about it at the last minute. Last
week I went to a presentation by Ian Crane, the anti-shale gas
campaigner. Ian is an interesting man, he worked in the drilling
industry for 20 years, becoming a vice-president of Schlumberger and
head of their HR for the Middle East. He resigned after attending the
4th
funeral of a member of staff. Four separate crews, four different
places, all of them members of fracking crews, all of them died of
very aggressive cancers. I can’t easily summarise an hours
presentation and an equally long film, but I can give you a few
choice snippet. Please not very little of this can I substantiate
myself, I am simply passing it on, if you want more evidence go look
for it on the web.
Did
you know that John Browne, the Governments chief advisor on petroleum
matters, with a cabinet post to boot, is also a senior executive of
Cuadrilla? And that he is not the only government advisor involved in
Cuadrilla at a senior level? These people were probably responsible
for the government decision that the tax payer will pay to clean up
any environmental pollution resulting from shale gas extraction, not
the companies responsible for the accident. Isn’t this a carte
blanche to do what they like to get the reserves out? In the USA the
industry is now effectively deregulated, and the scale of surface and
near-surface pollution in parts of Colorado is shocking. Dick Cheyne
introduced what is known as the Haliburton Loop hole; which removes
all responsibility from the oil industry to report, let alone clean
up, and contamination of water as a result of fracking. Apparently
waste water from test-drilling in Lancashire has been pumped into the
Manchester ship canal, so they are pollution right from the very
start of the industry in this country.
The
cement casing used to line boreholes, most importantly to line them
through aquifers is not as a reliable preventer of leakage of
fracking fluids into our aquifers as the oil industry would like us
to believe. 50% of cement casings fail over a period of 30 years, 6%
fail immediately. The oil industry would probably argue that shale
gas wells have a working life rather less than 30 years, but that 6%
value is worrying enough. Cement casing failure resulted in both the
Piper Alpha accident and BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster. The
statistics for cement failure in fracked wells are probably worse
than for conventional drilling because the fracking can trigger
cement failure. Even if the oil companies doing the drilling were not
using any chemicals dangerous to health, cement failure could permit
gas to enter near surface aquifers. Whilst the setting fire to the
tap water incident in the film “Gaslands” has been discredited as
the gas has been tested and is not from shales being fracked, this
does mean that shale gas (“thermogenic” gas) can enter drinking
water. There are reports in the USA of people receiving skin burns
from their tap water.
Our
privatised water companies are very keen to get into bed with the
shale gas explorers as they see them as their big new market, because
they are going to need so much water. Where is that water going to
come from? We don’t have the enormous aquifers or lakes that occur
in the USA, and if we did it would be highly damaging to the
environment to do so, as has been found in the USA.
The
presentation included the film “Dash for Gas” which is a well put
together film with some good solid science. If we could get a
screening of that locally and give it some real publicity it would be
well worth doing. “Gaslands” is not a film I would want to show,
as the participants have all been paid off to keep mum. Why? Too much
exaggeration in order to get the environmental point across? Attempts
by US scientists to reproduce results of events filmed have been
stone walled. This is all a great shame, there was no need for such
manipulation.
Fracking
Leaks - the following I have gleaned from recent scientific articles.
Professor
Peter Styles states, in a recent edition of the newsletter of the
Geological Society, that contrary to claims by the Shale Gas
industry, leakage of methane (the principal gas in shale gas) from
extraction, transportation and elivery infrastructure, means that
shale gas cannot be considered to have a low carbon footprint. In
addition there is now incontrovertible evidence from Duke University
(North Carolina) that fracking wells leak. Which leads me onto one
reason why shale gas in Western Europe is such a poor prospect. The
gas-bearing shales of Western Europe have a higher proportion of
natural fractures than do those of N America. It’s not difficult to
imagine what happens if a well is fracked and the man-made fractures
join up with the natural ones. However this is not deterring the
companies such as Cuadrilla, IGas and 3rd
Energy, who will take note of this problem only if they loose large
amounts of propant fluid and sand. As it is they loose 50% of the
fracking fluid into the surrounding rock, and this is considered an
acceptable loss, though they are working to reduce it, if only to
save money. The other big headache for the Shale Gas industry is
people, legislation, high population density in many of the areas
with shale gas resources and the environmental movement. We should
not underestimate the results of our resistance. I have it straight
from the mouth of a geologist working for a major oil company that
the anti-shale gas movement will drive the industry offshore, at the
moment it is prohibitively expensive, but then so was onshore shale
gas extraction 20 years ago….
Jenny Huggett
