Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The dramatic decision by the British government to ban the disruptive technology of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) is just one of two volatile storms now shaking the industry.
And both have ramifications for the governments of British Columbia and Alberta, which actively subsidize the uneconomic industry with tax breaks, royalty credits, free water and taxpayer-funded seismic research and monitoring.
After seven years of promoting fracking, Conservative ministers have withdrawn their support and blocked the prospects of a shale gas industry.
The UK government has issued an immediate moratorium in England because of the risk of earth tremors. Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have already issued measures that amount to moratoriums on fracking.
In a significant development, the Alberta Energy Regulator has acknowledged that hydraulic fracturing operations can impose high risks to critical infrastructure such as dams, an issue of growing concern at British Columbia’s Site C mega-project on the Peace River.
Despite the U.S. fracking industry’s history of “capital destruction,” one of the top investors in the world has bet big that Occidental holds the secret to Permian profits. But perhaps this time really will be different, or perhaps Occidental will follow in the footsteps of Halcón and others who bet it all on the Permian and lost.
Why would major oil companies choose to invest in an industry that has failed to turn profits in the past decade?
Although a government-commissioned scientific review of fracking in British Columbia released earlier this month occupies some 232 pages, the word “concerns,” as in “concerns regarding environmental impact,” pops up more than 130 times.
Scientists can’t say when fracking will cause earthquakes due to a “paucity of validated predictive models to forecast site-specific seismic hazard.” But the quakes not only pose threats to nearby communities, they can make further fracking more difficult and dangerous.
And the solution to fracking’s profits problem — according to the likes of ExxonMobil — is Microsoft. Apparently cloud technology has been the missing ingredient in the Permian.
The main problems with tech mirages: 1) They destroy or undermine existing businesses, weakening them to the point where they collapse and then those tech mirages collapse themselves leaving society without the service supplied by the businesses they destroyed and/or 2) they distract from what we really need to do to adapt to the twin crises of climate change and resource depletion.
2018 was the year the oil and gas industry promised that its darling, the shale fracking revolution, would stop focusing on endless production and instead turn a profit for its investors. But as the year winds to a close, it’s clear that hasn’t happened.
But because shale drilling is relatively new, even the experts are left guessing about how much oil will be flowing from the wells 10, 20, or 30 years after fracking — and investors have become frustrated as shale drillers have largely failed to turn the corner and start racking up profits instead of continuing to operate in the red.
The rapid rise in U.S. oil production from so-called shale oil deposits has resulted in forecasts of oil abundance far into the future. The financial indicators and simple logic tell us that these forecasts are almost certainly wrong.
