Energy: Fracking

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2014 Grand Committee

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in various forms of energy as detailed in the register, especially in coal. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Borwick on this extremely timely debate. As he probably knew, today is the 65th birthday of fracking. Through the wonders of Twitter, I found out this afternoon that it was on 17 March 1949 in Archer County, Texas, and Stephens County, Oklahoma, that the first commercial hydraulic fracturing operation happened. During those 65 years, there have been extraordinarily few environmental problems. Ken Salazar, who was Secretary of the Interior in the first Obama term, recently said that,

“there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone”.

He continued:

“We need to make sure that story is told”.

Obviously, the oil industry and the gas industry cause problems but hydraulic fracturing itself has not produced a single environmental problem.

This is a very good topic for a debate. Professor Muller’s report goes straight to the heart of an issue that is central to the environmental debate and it needs more attention. The issue is harm reduction and choosing the lesser of two evils rather than being frightened by a small risk, thereby allowing a larger risk to happen, or allowing the best to be the enemy of the good, as Voltaire put it. For example, the environmental opponents of genetic modification have, in effect, left us using more pesticides than other countries. That has been the effect of that campaign. The environmental opponents of nuclear power have left us using more coal than other countries, as well as particularly in Germany, Japan and other places.

The question is: what would happen if we do not develop shale gas? What would be the environmental impact of not developing shale gas? I ask the Minister to press her officials to take this approach to some of the questions; namely, to weigh up not just the risks of fracking but the risks of not fracking. In this case, as Professor Muller makes clear in the paper for the Centre for Policy Studies, it would mean both more air pollution, with damaging effects on people’s health, and more carbon dioxide emissions. There is no question about that. We have several years of experience and it is clear that the environmental benefits of shale gas development that were thought about a few years ago have been drastically underestimated, whereas the environmental risks have been greatly exaggerated.

As I have mentioned, the benefits include carbon dioxide reduction. As a result of the shale gas revolution, America’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are now back to 1994 levels and, in per capita terms, are back to 1964 levels. That is an extraordinary change, which is much faster than in any other country on the planet. We have mentioned urban air pollution. There is also an enormous opportunity now for natural gas vehicles, which are much cheaper to run, in the United States. Many commercial fleets are turning to natural gas vehicles, which can reduce urban air pollution. Not just the displacement of coal but the displacement of diesel is a great opportunity as well.

However, there is an enormous other potential benefit from shale gas: land-sparing; that is, using less land to produce energy. As we know, renewables, as a way of trying to do without carbon dioxide emissions, need an awful lot of land. To put this in perspective, if we were to use wind power alone to try to not just reduce but prevent an increase in global carbon dioxide emissions, we would have to build a wind farm the size of the British Isles every year. That is an extraordinary number.

It is not just land but the wildlife that goes with that land. There is a recent estimate that 82,000 birds of prey are killed every year by wind turbines in the United States. If you scale that back to the size of the UK wind industry, that means 16,000 birds of prey in this country. I suspect that the number is lower than that because we do not have migration corridors of the kind they have in the USA. There are also 150,000 bats. These are some of the creatures that could survive if we decided to stop building wind turbines and started working on shale gas instead. I mentioned in another debate this afternoon the possibility that we would not have to cut down forests, and all the pollution that goes with that.

As for the environmental risks and problems of fracking, I have found over the past few years that it is like chopping the heads off a hydra: every time you meet one objection, people come up with another. We have heard things like radioactivity might be coming out of fracked wells; that has now been buried. Most people now accept that the earthquakes are extremely small; much smaller, incidentally, than the earthquakes you get from hydropower, for example. As for water contamination, the myth has been well buried now that there has been serious aquifer contamination as a result of hydraulic fracturing, and if you have seen “GasLand”, you should also make a big effort to watch “FrackNation”, the film that answers it and puts it in perspective. The methane leakage question is very interesting. A recent study from the University of Texas puts the number at about 0.4%, which is extremely low. We should remember that coal mines leak more methane than that, so using and transporting coal actually generates a lot more methane and anyway methane levels in the atmosphere are not actually rising very fast; they are rising slower than predicted by the IPCC over the past two decades.

As for the issue of using chemicals in hydraulic fracturing, we put 99.5% water and sand down the hole, with a few kitchen sink chemicals, extremely diluted. This is put into rocks that are absolutely riddled with organic toxic chemicals. That is why we are going there: to get those toxic chemicals out. So it is a bit ridiculous to worry about that aspect of things.

Above all, it is worth bearing in mind that affordable energy is itself good for the environment. As McKinsey pointed out, America has had probably $250 billion of benefit from the shale gas revolution in the past three years. Think what you can spend $250 billion on—think how much environmental benefit you can buy with that.