The Revolution That Wasn’t: Why the Fracking Phenomenon Will Leave Us High and Dry - by Post Carbon Institute

A new, landmark report shows that hopes of a long-term golden era in American oil & gas production are unfounded.

America’s energy landscape has undergone a dramatic shift over the last decade—literally and figuratively—as a result of the widespread use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). Whole areas of the country have been transformed in a matter of months, while the fossil fuel industry has reversed the decades-long decline in crude oil production and increased natural gas production to record highs.  Thanks to shale gas and tight oil (“shale oil”), by 2013 annual crude oil production was 24% higher and natural gas was 20% higher compared to just ten years earlier.

While this achievement is impressive, it pales in comparison to the sea change that has been triggered in “conventional wisdom” about our energy future.  In a few short years we have gone from President Bush warning that the U.S. was addicted to oil and dangerously reliant on Middle East imports to fears of a production glut.
...
Considering the EIA’s poor track record and the enormous implications that result from its forecasts, we at Post Carbon Institute felt it critical to closely examine the EIA’s most recent Annual Energy Outlook.  Using actual production data from over 80,000 wells, and coupled with an understanding of geology and trends in technological advances, we analyzed the production potential of the top twelve shale gas and tight oil plays in the U.S. Together these plays account for 89% and 88%, respectively, of current shale gas and tight oil production.  (These same twelve plays also account for 82% and 88% of the EIA’s reference case forecasts.)

The result of our analysis—Drilling Deeper: A Reality Check on the US Government’s Forecasts for a Lasting Shale Boom—was just released.

What did we find?  That the so-called “shale revolution” has more in common with the California Gold Rush and the Dot-Com Bubble than a new golden age of energy abundance.  The implications of this are profound.  If the “shale revolution” is nothing more than a temporary respite from the inevitable decline in US oil and gas production, then why are we rushing to rewrite our domestic and foreign policy as if we’re going to be “Saudi America” for the rest of the century?

And it raises painful questions about whether all of this—the tens (potentially hundreds) of thousands of wells drilled across the landscape; the billons of tons of fresh water used and contaminated; the millions of truck trips and damaged infrastructure; the NOx pollution and methane emissions; the flaring wells in North Dakota that can be seen as brightly at night as Minneapolis from space; the social impacts of booms and busts on communities across the country; the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in fracking rather than renewables; etc.—is worth it.

It’s not too late to choose a different path, but first we have to recognize that the yellow brick road we’ve been walking isn’t what it’s fracked up to be.

Read More at The Revolution That Wasn’t:  Why the Fracking Phenomenon Will Leave Us High and Dry