Film Review: Gasland (2010) and Gasland: Part II (2014)

Film Review from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gasland (2010) and Gasland: Part II (2013). Directed by Josh Fox.

Gasland is an Oscar-nominated film about America’s frenzied drilling for natural gas using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) with more wells planned in the next decade than in the last hundred years. Rural residents (and workers) of Pennsylvania are suffering irreversible brain damage and excruciating pain due to neurotoxins in newly contaminated water and air following drilling. The response of the fracking industry has been a hundred million dollar lobbying campaign, in part to suppress criticism. Some lobbyists have even gone so far as to recommend the use of military manuals on psychological operations and treating critics as ‘insurgents’. Secrecy plays an important part too. No spokesperson from the industry agreed to interviews with director Josh Fox, and companies in the industry have been buying off contaminated land with confidentiality agreements. In public the argument has been made that there is no alternative, in private, industry figures refuse to drink the contaminated water and provide bottled water to residents. One resident commented, ‘you want me to shut my mouth? I ain’t gonna’ and ‘I ain’t no tree-hugger.’

Despite dismissal of environmental critics as unscientific, industry efforts have ensured actual science is hard to come by. Leaked internal industry memos report no way of completely fixing or preventing cement well-casing from fracturing, so perhaps it’s not just cowboy practices. Environmental scientist Bob Howarth comments ‘we tested shale gas [claims] as a transitional fuel and a better fossil fuel for global warming and it is neither.’ Satirist Stephen Colbert asked one industry figure if he could feed his toddler chemicals used in fracking, ‘because they’re perfectly safe, right?’ Fox’s Emmy-award winning sequel is even better than the first. Films about fracking such as the earlier Split Estate (2009), like many social justice films, can tend towards a glum tone. Josh Fox as an investigative film-maker avoids this and is as warm and hopeful as early Michael Moore in covering ‘the last gasp of the fossil fuel era.’

DJW

Promised Land (2013)

Film Review from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Promised Land by Gus Van Sant, director of Elephant and Milk, is a morality tale about corporate capitalist Machiavellianism written by Matt Damon, Academy Award winner for Good Will Hunting (directed by Van Sant) and John Krasinski. With Matt Damon's effortless naturalism and the wonderful Frances McDormand, Academy Award winner for Fargo, as sales people for a global energy company, Van Sant directs a Capraesque film about the contemporary issue of natural gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking.’ Promised Land is an earnest version of the Bill Forsyth comedy Local Hero.

Promised Land was filmed in Pennsylvania where ‘fracking’ is widespread. The 2010 Academy nominated documentary Gasland directed by Josh Fox publicised the methane contamination of thirteen water wells due to ‘fracking’ in 2009 in Dimock, Pa where one well exploded. Cabot Oil & Gas were required to financially compensate residents. The US Environmental Protection Agency is currently investigating five cases of groundwater contamination. Another 2010 documentary Burning Water looked at ‘fracking’ in Alberta, Canada, the film's title a reference to the fact that water from faucetscan be lit on fire. The capitalist lobby have countered with their own ‘pro-fracking’ documentary FrackNation released in January 2013.

‘Fracking’ is the pumping of a pressurised mix of millions of gallons of water, millions of pounds of sand and thousands of gallons of chemicals including toxins and carcinogens into deep wells to break up layers of shale rock to release the natural gas inside. But poorly lined wells, contaminated flow-back water coming back up and causing earth tremors or seeping into the water table, and the storage of flow-back water in unlined or leaky storage pits are serious concerns. Terry Engelder, a ‘fracking’ expert at Penn State University: ‘This is not a risk-free industry.’ Robert B Jackson at Duke University believes the likeliest cause of contamination is faulty cementing and casing of wells but also that ‘fracking’ may create cracks upward in rocks that could link up with pre-existing fissures, allowing gas to travel far upward.

The ‘fracking’ of natural gas is seen as a solution to the global energy crisis in the post-Fukushima era where oil is peaking, tar sand oil extraction is polluting, gas reserves are limited and although coal is still plentiful it is a ‘bête noire,’ and not enough development is taking place in ‘clean coal’ technology. Shale gas extraction is seen as a solution to rising energy prices, the way out of the economic recession and bringing prosperity to struggling rural communities as portrayed in Promised Land. In February 2013 PricewaterhouseCoopers said that shale gas reserves could push down oil prices by 40 per cent and boost the world economy by $2.7 trillion.

In April 2013 the WWF-UK said ‘It's simply impossible to keep global warming below 20C and burn all known fossil fuel reserves – let alone exploit unconventional reserves like shale gas.’ Socialists argue that ‘fracking is a mining technology, and if it can be made safe, and if we need it, we may use it in socialism.’

Steve Clayton

Pathfinders: Farron, Fossils and Fire Ice (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

One claim that raised eyebrows during the recent general election was Tim Farron's assertion that the UK could be completely self-sufficient in renewable energy, this despite the Lib Dems' own manifesto pledge of reaching just 60 percent renewable by 2030 (Link). Team Tim promptly issued a qualifying statement (aka rebuttal) describing his claim as 'visionary as opposed to completely literal'.

Yet Farron has not completely fallen out of his chimney. The UK recently passed an important milestone with its first coal-free day since the 1880s (Link) and just last month the National Grid tweeted news of a further milestone, that on one particularly sunny and windy day in June just over half of UK energy was supplied by renewables for the first time (Link).

Things have changed in the past ten years or so, with renewables becoming steadily cheaper and more efficient, while international consensus on climate change, as well as the economic recession, have exerted a downward pressure on fossil usage. From a thirty-year flatline, renewable production has turned sharply upwards since 2010, crossing the spasmodic free-fall of coal in 2015 to reach 26 percent of the grid, more than any other source except gas (see Graph 3, Link). However, just as Germany plugs the dropouts in its renewable supply by strip-mining and burning brown coal, the UK props itself up by importing a third of its energy in the form of natural gas, mostly from Norway.

Meanwhile, the much-vaunted new nuclear renaissance has largely failed to materialise, with old power stations being kept running beyond their use-by dates and virtually all new building projects cancelled or mothballed, not just in the UK but across the world (New Scientist, 17 May). Blame the recession, and the Fukushima effect.

But it's not all green sunlit pastures for the renewable industry. Capitalist money-chasing gets in the way and renewable investment tends to founder whenever oil and gas prices plummet, as has been the case in the last few years thanks to OPEC price wars and the fracking bonanza. And renewable energy has built-in problems, notably its poor conversion ratio. UK renewable production for 2015 including wind, wave & tidal, biomass and other gas sources, hydro and solar, amounted to the equivalent of just over 7 million tonnes of oil. However conversion losses amounted to a further 6 million tonnes, giving overall a roughly 45 percent conversion loss. Why so much? Because power is rarely used where it is produced, and wastage through pipe bleed multiplies with distance. Meanwhile wind and solar, being sporadic, need buffering to smooth out the bumps, but large-scale efficient batteries do not yet exist, so power is steadily lost in storage. There are various systems which store power by converting it to something else and then reconverting it for later use, but power is lost in these bi-directional conversions. Meanwhile a plan to sell renewable power abroad when in surplus and buy it back when in deficit – known as an interconnector deal - may offset some storage losses while incurring greater transport loss, as well as being prey to the vagaries of the market and, of course, the weather. Just because the wind stops blowing in the UK doesn't mean it will obligingly start blowing in France.

Socialists have said this so often it's hardly worth repeating, but socialism would start addressing energy by looking at ways of not wasting it in the first place. For instance, instead of building extra capacity, it would be more sensible to insulate and double-glaze houses, a task at present left to cash-strapped householders. But the biggest consumer of energy in the UK is not the domestic sector, or even industry, as you might think, but transport, and much of this energy is coughed out of exhaust pipes while miserable commuters sit in twice-daily traffic jams and motorway tailbacks, forced by capitalist economics to chase jobs in other cities. In socialism, where people would only work on a voluntary basis and mostly close to home, there would be no need for regular long-distance commuting. Put freight back on rails too, and the roads may become almost empty, thus reducing energy consumption, not to mention improving air quality.

However, socialists also take a pragmatic view of energy as with other technologies. It makes no sense to come out today against a technology you might need tomorrow. If, for example, socialism were obliged to rely on frack gas deposits, then of course it would use them. A similar rationale applies to nuclear power, GM crops and others which today inspire protest among those who seem keener to oppose than propose.

One technology, though, might give us pause. If you haven't heard of methane hydrates yet, you're going to soon, and probably from the publicity of a colossal 'anti-hydrate' movement which is no doubt gestating even now. If you think fracking is bad, you're about to be horrified.

Methane hydrates, or 'fire ice', are burnable deposits of frozen methane which lie under the world's oceans, most of them close to continental shelves, and between them may offer more energy than all the world's coal, oil and gas combined, or up to 800 years' worth at current gas usage rates. Discovered in the 1960s, fire ice has largely been overlooked because of the difficulties of mining and extracting it, and because fracking is easier for now. However things have changed, and China recently announced a breakthrough in extraction technology which could lead to a new energy gold rush (phys.org, 19 May). So what's not to love? Well, it's methane for a start, like frack gas, and when you burn it, it releases carbon the same way. But it's concentrated, so a cubic metre of fire ice translates to 160m3 of airborne methane gas. There are two problems with this. One is that methane, while being relatively short-lived and in short supply compared to carbon in the atmosphere, is around 86 times more potent for global warming (Link). The other problem is that ocean floor drilling is still at the very edge of what mining companies can do, and a submarine blowout at depth would be like Deepwater Horizon all over again, except spewing millions of tonnes of the worst possible climate gas into the atmosphere. 'If all the methane gets out', said an International Energy Agency spokesman in 2014, 'we're looking at a Mad Max movie' (Link). Added to this, the proximity to continental shelves is predicted by some to cause large-scale underwater landslides which may trigger coastal tsunamis. So, not an energy technology likely to be warmly received in many quarters, especially considering capitalism's ability to promise the moon on a stick and then balls it up and stick us with the consequences.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Fracking – A Bridge Too Far? (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earthquakes in Blackpool, flaming faucets in New York State. The hot new single issue of this year is surely fracking. Barely anyone even understands what it is yet but already the Greens are against it, and after the Chancellor gave the provisional thumbs-up including tax breaks to the new ‘unconventional gas’ industry in his December budget speech, right-thinking citizens everywhere will know in their hearts that fracking is definitely a ‘very bad thing’.

Fracking, or methane gas extraction through shale rock fracturing, is a text-book example of how capitalism periodically gets itself out of a fix by finding new commodities or techniques to replace old or unprofitable ones. The technique of fracturing rock with explosives and high-pressure water is being billed as new, but it isn’t. Nor is horizontal drilling, which is necessary because shale deposits are spread wide but thinly. The thing that is new is that getting gas this way is now economically and politically viable. Economical because ‘conventional’ gas is unevenly distributed and getting harder to extract, while it looks like everyone apart from Poland has got oodles of this unconventional shale stuff. And politically? Well, we all remember what happened when Russia spitefully turned off Ukraine’s taps in the middle of winter, and we don’t want to go down that unlit alleyway.

Fracking seems almost to have come out of nowhere. As is common in capitalism, and especially the USA, the smart money was straight down the well-heads before anybody thought to ask any awkward questions about regulation. And of course, first thing you know, cows are dropping dead after drinking poisoned water, flames are coming out of kitchen taps, and earthquakes are spilling cups of tea in northern England. Panic duly set in. The UK imposed a moratorium. Sarkozy banned fracking in France. Quebec and Poland followed suit. The main performance may yet turn out to be a success but the overture was certainly a disaster.

There can’t be many people who don’t know that the world is hitting an energy crisis. Oil is peaking, and tar sand oil extraction is a filthy, polluting alternative. Gas reserves are limited, and coal though plentiful is the dirtiest carbon culprit of the lot. Now after Fukushima nobody wants nuclear. Along comes shale gas, like a rabbit out of a hat, and hey presto, the opposition lobby is immediately in business. Protesters in Balcombe, one UK fracking site, insist that it is ‘a very, very short term choice. We really should be putting money into renewables’. Caroline Lucas of the Greens complains of the government’s ‘irrational obsession with hard-to-reach shale and with keeping the UK addicted to fossil fuels’ (BBC Online, 6 December).

These people don’t know what they’re talking about. If the Greens think that this or any government is going to be able to turn renewables, currently just 3.8 percent of the national grid, into a major energy source right in the middle of a depression, they are up a tree. What’s needed is a practical solution to an existing energy problem, and fracking looks like being it.

It’s not clean, but it’s 50 percent less carbon-belching than coal. It’s not easy to get but it’s getting easier. The much publicised fire faucets and poisoned water were almost certainly preventable accidents and cowboy carelessness at the well-head, rather than leaks from the kilometres-deep seams.

Although it’s still early days and nobody’s really sure how big the deposits are, the current global estimate is of around 250 years worth of shale gas at current usage, with the likelihood of revision upward not downward. This changes the whole energy debate at a stroke. Now the talk is of a bridging fuel to a low-carbon future, ie renewables, that could be a more realistic century away. The Greens are aghast. Their whole strategy relied on states having no get-out clause, and this doable solution is the last thing they want. They believe, not without justification, that ‘realistic’ is politician-code for ‘never’, and that fracking will allow governments to ignore any investment in renewables for the foreseeable future. They are no doubt entirely correct in this appraisal, but that’s an argument against capitalist politicians, not an argument against fracking.

This being capitalism, one would hardly expect the development of fracking to be straightforward and problem-free. One must remember that it is not a matter of answering the call of global need, which is fairly steady and predictable, but rather the call of profit, which certainly is not. Thus the US fracking bonanza has already depressed local gas prices, causing a minor energy slump and shareholder panic, but worse, investment has also slumped in conventional drilling and liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology. Since there is a decade-long lead time in the energy business between investment and return, we get the ludicrous situation, which only capitalism could create, that 10 years from now there could be a global shortage of gas due to its very abundance deterring current investors. If you want an example of capitalist absurdity you could do worse than this one.

Beyond this, it’s not really for socialists to take a position on fracking, either pro or con. It’s not a class issue, after all. If regulated properly, which is a big ‘if’ in some countries, there doesn’t at present seem to be much of a case against it. It’s true that methane produces 25 times more global heating than carbon, and there is some early and tentative evidence that it might leak up through the soil (New Scientist, 24 November), but it’s not a long-stay gas so its effect is not likely to be as severe. If every new technology was abandoned directly there was a small accident, we would not have cars, planes, electricity or even steam power. Fracking is new, and the idea of blowing up the ground under our feet may seem intuitively alarming, but geologically speaking it’s fairly insignificant unless some fool drills into an existing fault, and besides, what other immediate alternative is there? If the world miraculously mined its invaluable seam of common sense and abolished the real disaster  of private capital accumulation through the market system, we’d still have an energy problem and fracking would still look like a good bridging solution. Only in that case the world’s people might take the question of renewables with rather more seriousness than short-term capitalist politicians will. If the Greens ever want their arguments to carry any force, they should get real and support workers to abolish capitalism first.

PJS

Material World: The Price of Oil and Fracking (2015)

The Material World Column from the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Revealing developments are going on at the moment on the world energy market. Coal has seen its price halved in the past year. The price of oil has fallen, by more than 40 percent since June, when it was $115 a barrel. It is now below $70. This comes after nearly five years of stability and some oil-producing countries want the OPEC cartel to restrict production so as to put up prices. The question being asked is why Saudi Arabia hasn’t cut back production as they have done in the past. There are, of course, a number of conspiracy theories. 

According to the Economist, curbing output to once again raise its price would benefit Iran and Russia, which Saudi Arabia does not want to happen. More likely, but not necessarily solely, the reason this is being opposed by Saudi Arabia is that it wants to keep the price low so as to discourage fracking. Saudi Arabia can tolerate lower oil prices quite easily for quite a while. It has $900 billion in reserves. Its own oil costs very little (around $5-6 per barrel) to get out of the ground. Low prices stem investment in other sources of oil, such as Canada’s tar sands or America’s shale, and this means more demand for low-cost ‘dirtier’ coal in future.

The US is producing over 3 million barrels a day more than it did several years ago. And it is fracking that is doing it. According to the Institute for Energy Research ‘Nearly every barrel of new U.S. oil production can be attributed to the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies.’

In fact, the International Energy Agency has predicted that the United States will produce more oil next year than Saudi Arabia; the US might even pass Russia, which, at ten million barrels a day, is the world’s biggest producer. The US already produces more natural gas than Russia.

Over the past four years, as the price hovered around $110 a barrel, US corporations set about extracting oil from shale formations previously considered unviable. Their manic drilling—they have completed perhaps 20,000 new wells since 2010, more than ten times Saudi Arabia’s tally—has boosted America’s oil production by a third, to nearly 9m barrels a day, just a 1m b/d short of Saudi Arabia’s output. US domestic demand has apparently plateaued so this extra production is going on to the world market.

The boss of Continental Resources, Harold Hamm (whose fortune has dropped by $11 billion since July), has said he can cope as long as the oil price is above $50. Stephen Chazen, who runs Occidental Petroleum, has said the industry is ‘not healthy’ below $70.

The pain of this competition will be borne more by those new players who wish to enter the industry as many companies in the UK seek to do. Wells that are already producing oil or gas are extraordinarily profitable, because most of the costs are sunk. But the output of shale wells declines rapidly, by 60-70 percent in their first year, so within a couple of years this oil will stop flowing. It is far less clear if the industry can profitably invest in new wells to maintain or boost production. With their revenues now dropping fast, they will find themselves overstretched. A rash of bankruptcies is likely.

Nevertheless, the global oil economy, despite the ‘green’ goals, will be around for several decades. As two green pundits note pertinently:

‘The largest companies in the energy industry have concluded that policymakers are unlikely to act quickly enough to strand their current fossil fuel assets or make it unprofitable for them to continue exploring for new reserves. The oil and gas sector, in particular, is gambling on a business-as-usual model that projects out to a roughly $14 trillion investment in new reserves by 2035. This investment would correspond to a staggering amount of wasted capital should policymakers decide that these reserves cannot be burned’ (thehill.com, 9 December).

What this shows is the impossibility of a rational energy policy under capitalism as energy use under it reflects the relative prices of the various sources (coal, oil, gas, shale oil, etc) and changes as they vary. It highlights the utopianism of those environmentalists who think that shaping the market is a solution. There are just too many variables, most of them market-driven. Prices of fossil fuels collapse, demand for them then starts to rise and the market need for alternative sources such as renewables falls. But when prices for fossil fuels rise other fossil fuel sources then become profitable. Either way there is no significant reduction in the burning of fossil fuels and so no reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

There's also a lesson for those who want to campaign against the use of fracking under capitalism. They should be careful what they wish for. They may get fracking slowed but not replaced by renewable sources as these are too costly, with a movement instead towards  . . . oil and coal.

We can concede that the present oil price war poses more questions than answers as the game is played. In the end, who knows how it will pan out? But, unlike those green economists, we never claimed that capitalism can be predictable or offer the solutions to climate change. We were never delusional enough to believe capitalism had the answers. 

ALJO