South Africa has recently seen a tide of negative sentiment about Shell extracting natural gas from the Karoo. People are justifiably very concerned about the environmental impact of this extraction. Personally, I love the Karoo and would hate to see it ruined by Big Oil but, as is usually the case when the Green Hysteria takes hold, all is not what it seems.
First, lets take some time to understand what “fracking” is. As it turns out, it is a term that has been mangled by the environmental lobby. Within the oil industry, “fracing,” without the emotive extra k, is a contraction of “hydraulic fracturing“. It seems that when you drill a deep hole to extract natural gas, you eventually hit a small pocket of gas that is separated from other small pockets by sheets of rock. From this small pocket, the gas dribbles out of the well in a manner that is not really impressive or economically useful. What you do to solve this problem is pump a vast amount of water into the well at very high pressure. This causes the rock sheets to crack, or fracture. Sand or ceramic particles are often pumped down with the water as these help to keep the resulting cracks open. Sometimes, small amounts of chemicals are added to allow the water to penetrate certain kinds of soil or rock more readily. Once this has been done, the gas squirts out of the well in a most satisfactory and profitable manner.
Some years back, a chap named Josh Fox made a documentary movie called Gasland, in which he documented the environmental degradation of areas of the United States due to natural gas extraction. He blamed “fracking” for all of the trouble. Now everybody hates fracing.
The problem with this is that fracing turns out to be harmless.
Yeah. Fracing turns out to be harmless. The problem is not the fracing, but the act of drilling for natural gas in the first place. This involves serious environmental risks if wells are not constructed properly. Considerable pollution is also produced when the natural gas is extracted and purified on the surface. These downsides have almost nothing to do with fracing itself.
Why do you think that the environmentalists have lied to us again? Well, most of environmentalism seems to be based on marketing. Telling people that drilling for gas is bad is nowhere nearly as effective as telling them that fracking is bad. Most people have seen boreholes being drilled without the sky falling, so they are unlikely to experience any real alarm about gas wells. Fracking, however, is something most people didn’t know anything about until 2010. It is new, mysterious and in the hands of The Corporations! It is easy to make something like that seem like a really bad idea. Also, “frak” is used as an expletive in the excellent Battlestar Galactica series, which makes it possible to construct such pithy slogans as, “What the frack?”, “No fracking way” and “Don’t frack with our future!”
Starbuck and Starbuck at Starbucks: this isn't their fracking problem!
Now, when actual scientific studies prove that fracing is harmless, environmentalists become outraged. They assert that the oil industry is guilty of linguistic trickery by using “fracing” to refer to the process of pumping high pressure water into gas wells. They proclaim that “fracking” means the entire process of drilling for gas. It doesn’t. It is a specific term with a fixed meaning that has been turned into a marketing vehicle for environmentalism. When caught in their lie, they redefine it to cover everything that they oppose.
I find that really sad. The danger here is that the oil companies will actually give in and say, “Oh, OK. We won’t frack.” Then they will go ahead and unleash the full ambit of environmental damage on the Karoo without accountability or any way of stopping them. If this happens, it will be the fault of the environmentalists who chose to defend their marketing slogan rather than our actual environment.
Compare the Greenpeace article about fracing to the others I have posted here. It is emotive, seemingly inaccurate and contains no references to actual evidence that fracing is bad. Greenpeace makes its money by publishing documents like that, and that money funds a life of adventure for the Greenpeace activists that has very little, if any, direct contribution to saving our environment. Truly, we are in the grip of Big Enviro.
Saving the Karoo is really important to me. So is the economic survival of South Africa. I really hope that, if it is economically viable to extract natural gas from the Karoo, it is done in a way that is environmentally unassailable and that the area is left in pristine condition.
If you want to ensure this, you need to educate yourself properly about the risks, the rewards and the actual process that will be used. This isn’t something you are going to get from Greenpeace or by going on marches.
