The Seventh Fold

Fellow Folders,

According to the Financial Times (article),  Saudi Arabia just announced the discovery of huge unconventional gas reserves.  Yes, that is correct, Saudi Arabia is getting into the shale gas industry.  As the FT puts it, “The announcement signals a potential opportunity for Saudi Arabia, but also confirms that Riyadh has not found as much conventional gas as it had hoped.”

The FT goes on to say that “International companies, which have been shut out of Saudi Arabia’s oil production for decades, have been looking over the past five years for natural gas in the kingdom’s Empty Quarter desert, with largely disappointing results.”

This is, of course, another way of saying that like conventional crude, conventional gas has reached the seventh fold of production not just in the U.S. but in Saudi Arabia.  Peak production is not far behind, nor is peak net energy, and as I’ve shown in a previous post, a peak has already been reached in net oil exports – the amount of oil made available for purchase by net importers like the U.S., China, Germany, etc. This means that net importers (a group which includes 9 of the 10 largest economies) have been competing for a declining resource since 2005/6.

These seventh fold problems pose serious challenges to a business-as-usual approach to running the economy, and these seventh fold problems are especially challenging from an environmental perspective.

The impacts on the global climate of the shift to unconventional oil and gas are profound.  Unconventional oil and gas production pumps ever more carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and other GHG emissions into the atmosphere per gallon/cubic foot of fuel produced.  Using measures of EROEI, we see in fact, that GHG’s per gallon of gas have increased at least 10-fold over the last 40 years, and this trend has been accelerating and will continue to accelerate into the future as unconventional production replaces conventional production at ever increasing rates.

Unconventional production of oil and gas also threatens freshwater resources (rivers and river ecosystems, and aquifers, respectively)… see here and here.  Dangerous, often carcinogenic chemicals are either used in the production of  unconventional oil and gas or are released during the process.

Proponents of unconventional shale gas production argue that there has never been a verified case of fracking fluids seeping into reservoirs, but this is not the truth.  But even if this were the case, this mantra, which was shared and loudly expounded by the proponents of deep offshore oil production, is logically flawed. Just because something has not yet happened does not mean that it cannot happen; and just because numerous errors of judgement and execution allowed the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent spill does not mean that the same type of event cannot occur for less complex reasons.

Unfortunately we have not learned these lessons, and so long as we continue to organize world-national-local economies around the misguided concept that ‘more is better’ we will need to continue to expand energy consumption.  So long as all of the negative impacts of fossil fuel production and consumption are externalized – put off on others and sent off to future generations – these sources will continue to out-compete renewable energy sources in the competition for investment.  We may not be able to grow renewable energy industries as quickly as we can grow the unconventional fuels industry, but this truth does not justify the taking of ever greater risks with the global commons.

While the Saudi announcement is yet another piece of evidence that the world has reached the seventh fold for fossil fuel production, there is great room for hope.  All across the world, transition communities are springing up and forging a better future.  These groups have a pervasive message, and they are increasingly getting their message across to local policy makers.

We have the power to decide how we want to confront the various seventh fold challenges.  We can continue to push for business-as-usual by doing such things as hydrofracking shale gas plays.  We can fight for deregulation so that marginal costs of regulation won’t be passed along to consumers of fossil fuel.  We can grant corporations rights as if they were human beings and allow them to continue to buy the government that they want. For that matter, we can continue to compile ever greater amounts of debt in a quest to return to business-as-usual, and in doing so, we can decide to force our debt onto the younger cohorts of today’s society (this is no longer an idea of passing our debt to future generations… we are now the future generation).

In short, we can continue to squander the resources we have today in pursuit of consumerist dreams that don’t improve happiness or wellbeing.

Alternatively, we can decide to take a different course.  We can decide to change our wasteful behavior and actively seek ways to re-localize and reconnect with friends, family, and community.  We can choose to conserve energy today, and that is the right thing to do.  And in doing so, all that natural gas can remain in the ground trapped in the best carbon capture and sequestration device ever invented – shale.

Thanks for reading.