Hydrofracturing: the real cause of recent global temperature spikes
Climate scientists are not telling us the whole truth.
Today, a lot is understood about climate change, and everyone from the CEOs of multinational companies to the heads of major economies are focusing intently on the challenges (and opportunities) that a rapidly warming planet presents. However, the cause of climate change is often simply accepted to be whatever a casual understanding of the science offers us: it’s transport, power generation and industry emitting carbon dioxide, warming the planet— there is not much more to know.
Unfortunately, the general consensus today is incorrect. It’s a bit more complicated than that.
If we look at the dramatic temperature increase that has occurred over the past 10–15 years, we can see the anomaly has been quite erratic, and doesn’t follow the steady, iterative climb that the rate of carbon dioxide increase implies.
In fact, temperatures have started to rapidly increase over the past decade — the big jump began around 2014, after which 9 out of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred, often by a significant margin. Concurrently, methane levels beyond this point have also jumped significantly, following what was in fact a decadal plateau that scientists are still attempting to explain. So we can quickly see that while CO2 increases are fairly consistent, methane has jumped significantly and there has been a corresponding increase in the global temperature anomaly. This would seem to make sense — the remaining question being where this methane is coming from.
As NOAA researchers Rebecca Lindsey and Michon Scott write,
“The post-2007 uptick in global methane levels roughly coincides with the rapid deployment of natural gas ‘fracking’ in the United States, making fugitive emissions a logical suspect…”
They then they cast off this assumption based on fairly poor evidence (from an email received from independent researcher Stefan Schwietzke)
“And yet, he explained via email, methane derived from fossil fuels is enriched with carbon-13 — a rare, heavy isotope of carbon — and air samples show that the amount of carbon-13-flavored methane is dropping worldwide.”
However, this isn’t the whole picture. The fact is, most methane in the atmosphere is made up of the carbon-12 variety of methane, which is usually derived from biogenic sources; such as microorganisms when they break down living matter. The problem that has been discovered is that shale gas also carries this carbon-12 signature.
So it is now quite logical to assume that the increase in methane is attributable to shale gas, and in fact a large proportion of the science community hold the view that indeed, the methane uptick is directly attributable to hydrofracturing.
The question then becomes; how much, and where from, specifically?
And this is where things get tricky— certainly if we consider the element of politics in climate science; which might be expected when oil and gas are such large components of our economies.
It is at this point that the quality of the data becomes a critical determinant of how we can assess claims that the origin of the methane is from a certain source, or that the methane has a precise effect depending on the volume emitted.
Unfortunately, this is where things also become difficult — the data on methane has been notoriously patchy, as the methane record has been formulated via air samples at marine surface sites over a period of decades, and satellites to monitor methane have only been in existence since the end of 2017. So the methane data is not 100% reliable, and on top of this the EPA (the US Environmental Protection Agency) — who have been quite opaque regarding regulations for hydrofracturing generally — support the view that the global uptick identified by NOAA is in fact not from shale drilling but from biogenic sources.
It may also be useful to note at this point that the US has become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas via the hydrofracture of shale basins, and depend on the many hydrofracturing wells that are drilled to support their economy, following the 2009 financial crisis — meaning attempts to limit the volume of hydrofracturing occurring may be advised against, considering the economic impacts this would have.
So the scene is now set: we know that the temperature and methane uptick correlate, and that hydrofracturing is a very likely cause. What we don’t know is how much methane has been released, and what the precise effects of this methane will be. We also know that the climate science community is very averse to identifying any specific cause; with only a few individuals such as Robert Howarth of Cornell University in the US speaking out about the dramatic effect this methane was likely to have on our planet.
My personal journey to understand these causal events began many years ago when I started reading about climate change, and the various inconsistencies which exist regarding conventional approaches to the climate issue by fossil fuel companies and others.
As the connection became more obvious, and the effects of climate change more pronounced, I started to research the role of hydrofracturing more closely, and discovered how the drilling method had been fast-tracked following the global financial crisis by President Obama. The rapid increase in drilling rigs that occurred during this period can now be attributed to the sharp increase in methane levels recorded globally — and we know this because when President Obama’s term of office ended in 2016, the global temperature anomaly associated with these methane emissions also dropped dramatically. Unfortunately, when President Trump was elected, the sequence started again, where the drilling rig count increased, and with it a corresponding rise in methane emissions. This is unmistakable as the increase in the hydrofracturing rig count matches precisely with the temperature data.
This is relevant, because it changes our entire global perspective of the causes and effects of methane within the climate system, compared to carbon dioxide, and gives us a much better idea of how much time we might have available given tipping points and other variables (eg permafrost thaw).
It also poses the question (which in fact was my initial motivation, independent of the scale of the effects) — what is going to replace this oil and gas?
Again, to actually deal with the problem, it may not always be helpful to listen to those involved with the mainstream energy research and analysis community. Funding models and constraints have led to a situation where there is significant politicisation, where sometimes basic research or technical forecasts cannot be fully trusted.
What we find is that in the confusion that exists surrounding possible alternatives (specifically to hydrofracturing), obvious choices again become sidelined for various reasons. I will propose emphatically that the direct replacement of shale oil and gas is hydrogen — for the exact reasons we use fossil fuel today; it is cheap to transport, it is storable, it is usable in nearly all applications, and in this case it can be produced from a very diverse array of sources — making it an energy product with vast opportunities to scale rapidly.
Trying to ban hydrogen and curtail investment in hydrogen values chains, as most policy groups in the EU are attempting, is precisely the wrong answer. Hydrogen will replace much of the fossil energy consumed globally, and trying to thwart this effort is hugely damaging.
So we can study the root cause of the climate problem — fracking — but it is just as important if not more so to think about what can replace it. Electricity grids take many years to construct, whereas pipelines can be built immediately at much lower cost. The fact that the energy community is so against hydrogen shows how slow to move some mindsets can be, and this is a massive problem considering the very small window of opportunity we have left to figure this one out.
I’ve spent quite a few years studying this, and obviously there is a lot more data to include; but the problem today is obvious. What if the US continues hydrofracturing for decades, or other countries pursue hydrofracturing themselves as the UK is hinting today? This is a critical juncture, as Europe is relying heavily on LNG imports following the Russian war in Ukraine. We should not allow our understanding of what is happening to slip out of reach: hydrofracturing is having a very significant, direct effect on our planet’s temperature.
