Natural Gas Is Not the Answer - to Anything

Proponents of natural gas fracking (and extracting natural gas today does require fracking - all the easy-to-reach gas is gone) sound like that old Saturday Night Live parody: "It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!"

Their frantic justifications, however, fall apart on close inspection.

Madeline Ostrander at The Nation:

The question remains, is fracking a climate solution or just a greenwashed version of “drill, baby, drill”? In the last two years, reports, models, and studies of natural gas extraction paint a less rosy picture. A number of think tanks and analysts are cautious, even pessimistic, about natural gas. Following are the main reasons:

—Fracking may not decrease our reliance on coal globally. It just sends the coal somewhere else. Guardian editor and energy researcher Duncan Clark recently crunched some numbers on coal and natural gas extraction. While American coal use has dropped in recent years (letting the United States claim that we’ve reduced our emissions), we are mining more of it than ever—and exporting it. Last year, for instance, Europe imported more American coal, leading to “a corresponding dramatic increase in coal generation” there, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The same report says natural gas may actually be competing with renewables, rather than helping to create a smooth transition to wind and solar. “Preliminary analysis suggests that access to investment capital for renewables may be tighter due to competition from gas,” says the report.

—Investing in natural gas could postpone our transition to renewable energy. The IEA’s Energy Technology Perspective 2012 suggests that spending money on natural-gas infrastructure might actually delay efforts to curb climate change, committing the economy to longer-term dependence on fossil fuels than is necessary:

The specific emissions from a gas-fired power plant will be higher than average global CO2 intensity in electricity generation by 2025, raising questions around the long-term viability of some gas infrastructure investment if climate change objectives are to be met. If near-term infrastructure development does not sufficiently consider technical flexibility, future adaptation to lower-carbon fuels and technologies will be more difficult to achieve.

—Fracking threatens water resources in an increasingly water-scarce world. The toll fracking takes on water supplies makes unconventional natural gas a dubious energy source for a warming world, where droughts are more common in some regions. Fracking uses 70–140 billion gallons of water every year, according to the EPA. Currently, nearly half of fracking industry wells are located in parts of the country facing high water stress, based on a report by the organization CERES.

—It’s not clear whether natural gas is actually as clean as it claims to be. Some analyses suggest that methane emissions at fracking sites make unconventional natural gas more polluting than coal.

Some of fracking’s worst environmental impacts could be reduced. A report by the IEA last year offered guidelines for the fracking industry to curb greenhouse gas emissions, water demand and pollution problems. That, of course, would require new regulations.
 Many analysts, including the IEA, acknowledge that the natural gas economy isn’t going to disappear soon. But full-bore, large-scale investment in natural gas fracking may not lessen our climate change problems (even if the industry stopped fouling or overusing water supplies).

According to economic forecasts by the Canadian think tank Pembina Institute, policies to rein in climate change (such as carbon taxes or fees) might decrease North America’s reliance on natural gas and certainly would not boost it significantly. Moreover, Pembina argues that we don’t need more natural gas to transition to wind and solar. Energy grids can use “smart” technology that manages and integrates different power sources until we build technologies to store energy generated by renewable sources.

 If that weren't enough, natural gas fracking is destroying clean water supplies.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Among the many problems with fracking is how we have prioritized the fossil fuel industry’s access to precious water supplies over that of regular citizens. In Texas, where fracking goes unchallenged and where extraordinary drought has challenged all users of water, towns are losing their water supply while water-intensive fracking operations drive precious water far underground.

I mean, when you are praying for a hurricane to replenish your aquifer, you know you are at the end of the line as a town.