The shale divide

While some member states forge ahead with exploiting reserves of shale gas, others are banning the practice

Over the past 20 years, possibilities to exploit reserves of hydrocarbon have been transformed by a combination of technological advances and altered economic circumstances.

Just as old reserves of traditional oil and gas have been exhausted, or rendered uneconomic, new reserves of hydrocarbons have been identified.

Shale gas, a type of ‘tight gas’ of poor quality trapped between layers of underground rock, was for many decades considered of little interest as a fuel. But because of the imperative (both political and economic) to find new sources of fuel and the attractive prices for doing so, a ‘shale-gas revolution’ has begun in north America. The recent and rapid exploitation of shale gas in the United States has fundamentally transformed that country’s energy market, with some analysts predicting that within ten years shale gas will make up half of all gas produced in north America. Could the same change be possible in Europe?

Conventional gas is extracted from fairly porous rock, but to extract gas from shale deposits, the rock has to be opened up, by opening fractures with a water-chemical mixture – a process known as hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’. The most effective way to do this is to bore ‘horizontal wells’. The wells are sunk deep underground, and then turned horizontally. The fracking mixture is forced into the shale rock through tiny holes.

How great the potential is for fracking in Europe is still uncertain. “We really don’t know very much about the exact commercial potential,” says Tristan Aspray, European exploration operations manager at ExxonMobil. “We know from the geology of these basins that they have encouraging characteristics.”

Oil companies want to begin exploration to determine the potential, while many environmental campaigners want to stop the process before it starts. They say the shale-gas boom in north America has resulted in disturbing environmental and health problems. The public concern has resulted in moratoriums on shale gas drilling in France and Bulgaria. But other countries are pressing ahead. Poland has even asked for its explorations to be exempt from European Union requirements for environmental impact assessments.

The concern about fracking is mostly about the possibility that the chemicals used might contaminate groundwater. “We still don’t know what happens to these fracking fluids when they are left underground. We have no idea what can happen in the longer term,” says Antoine Simon, a campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe.

The contamination issue was most memorably explored in the 2010 US documentary film ‘Gasland’,

which contained pictures of a man setting his tap water on fire by lighting a match next to it. The Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission later found that the contamination had nothing to do with hydraulic fracturing. Yet the image and its association with shale gas persists in the minds of the public.

Energy companies insist that the fracking process is safe and occurs too far underground to contaminate drinking water, which is located closer to the surface. They say the documentary has unfairly tarnished the practice. “We had drilled some exploration wells in 2008 and 2009 in Germany, and we encountered no opposition – in fact we encountered local support,” says Aspray. But he says everything changed in Europe after the release of the documentary. “That’s a very evocative image, which captured a lot of attention in Europe.”

Richard Davies, director of the Durham Energy Institute, believes it is unlikely that fracking would contaminate water supplies. “We find it hard to conceive that hydraulic fracking is causing contamination to water supplies,” he said.

But he also says that the prospects of shale gas transforming the energy market in Europe may be being exaggerated. “We have to have an honest discussion,” he says. “For shale gas to make any difference in Europe, you will need to drill thousands of wells, you will need to make a decent recovery of gas.

“The industry needs a social licence to operate. If this is going to make a difference we need an honest discussion about the issues, because otherwise there won’t be hundreds and thousands of wells and this will be a cottage industry.”

The EU’s response

The European Commission is treading a delicate line while the controversy simmers. It has commissioned research studies, but they have been inconclusive.

By the end of the year the Commission is expected to assemble these various reports into one “assessment framework”, which might take a firm position on whether member states should proceed with shale-gas exploration. In the longer term, the Commission might next year propose specific licensing procedures for hydraulic fracturing. For the moment, however, the Commission is adopting a wait-and-see approach.

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The European Parliament has had trouble coming up with a cohesive stance on shale gas. Last year MEPs adopted two seemingly contradictory reports on the subject, one from the environment committee emphasising the dangers that fracking might pose to water supplies, and one from the industry committee emphasising the potential for shale gas to reduce Europe’s dependency on imports of energy.

The energy industry says that the continued uncertainty about the regulatory framework for shale-gas exploration in Europe is creating uncertainty for the longer term. Given the long time-scale needed for energy exploitation, this could be postponing to the distant future the successful use of this source of energy. But with the European public still deeply sceptical about fracking, the energy industry first has to win an argument about safety.