“Fracking” “Fracking” “Freaking, fracking, shagging…” “...is one way energy companies get oil and gas out of the ground if it’s stuck inside rock…” “It’s like giving the Earth an alka seltzer if the alka seltzer shattered your internal organs so oil companies could harvest your juices.” So, in the mid 2000’s, American politicians were just obsessed with this chart. The US was producing way less oil than some of its peers, and they felt this urgent need to “... end the dependence on foreign oil” “Lessen our dependence on foreigh oil” “Most everybody agrees America needs to cut its dependence on foreign oil” At the time, companies around the world mostly slurped fossil fuels like oil and natural gas out of deposits about a mile underground. But deeper down, there’s more, trapped inside harder rock. For American companies, this rock represented energy independence. “The single most important thing we can do is reduce our dependence on foreign oil” So, they perfected technologies to drill into that rock and pump in fluid at high enough pressure to crack it open, allowing the trapped oil and natural gas to escape into their pipes. That process got the nickname… “...fracking!” And it worked. “Since I took office, American dependence on foreign oil…” “…has gone down every single year!” “The US was the top producer of crude oil last year!” Fracking made it possible to get and burn MUCH more oil and natural gas. And that has a cost. One we’re more and more aware that we’re paying. “Climate change is being driven by our use of fossil fuels” “Fire, weather, drought” “We are going to exceed our adaptive capacity as a civilization!” Ok, here’s the hopeful twist: It turns out that this same technology - the one perfected to squeeze every last drop of fossil fuels out of the ground - it might be the key to unlocking an even bigger source of energy. One that’s actually… Clean. If you wanna know about fracking, this is the guy to call. He’s got a nickname... The “Frack King” Yeah. His real name is Professor Mukul Sharma. He got the nickname because he was the person oil and gas companies called to help them frack better. MUKUL SHARMA: “That's precisely what we were doing, was looking at fluid mechanics, chemistry, and so on… and applying all that knowledge to making hydraulic fracturing process better.” “Hydraulic fracturing” is the industry term for fracking. People HATE fracking, and it's for reasons that go beyond climate change. “The EPA linked the oil and gas drilling method called fracking to the pollution of groundwater.” “Water I thought was safe, I drank for a long period of time…” “Right now I don’t know if I’m poisoning my family…” The fluid used to crack rock isn’t just water. It also includes chemicals that are really good for getting out oil and gas but bad for people. Exactly how bad and how exactly they get into people’s water is… controversial. This is the best report I found on that topic. It says, yes, accidents on the surface can pollute drinking water, particularly accidents with the leftover fluids that come up after fracking. Cracks in the pipes that go down could also cause a problem, but this says not if they’re operating correctly. (The most honest thing I can say here, as an independent journalist, is: I’m learning in public, I’m not an expert. So if you are an expert, please tell me in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.) There’s also the concern that... “Fracking may be causing a rise in earthquakes” “We’re doing more fracking, we’re having more earthquakes. The question is, does fracking cause earthquakes?” “This is something that is a real concern and we are well aware of it.” It might seem like the biggest problem is the, you know, busting up rock underground. But actually my understanding is that the biggest problem is with that nasty leftover fluid again. Sometimes they dispose of it by injecting it back into the ground. And that can cause a big problem. “In oil and gas, we have seen earthquakes primarily in the US in two locations, and that was not related to hydraulic fracturing. Most of these were related to a wastewater injection in the basement rock.” If that's where the concern about seismic activity is really coming from, like, isn't there anywhere else we could put it? “Um, the answer is no. It's the best alternative we have, because keeping it on the surface would be much more environmentally problematic.” The thing is though, bigger picture: Even if you manage to brush aside both of these concerns, you’re still working with fossil fuels. Which means that, though much of the world still relies on your product, 1) it’s making the planet harder to live on, pretty inarguably, and 2) the writing is kind of on the wall for your business in the very long term. But... there’s another kind of energy deep inside the Earth… “An almost limitless renewable source...” “... that could sustain all of humanity for the foreseeable future” "It's called geothermal energy..." "Geothermal energy" "Geothermal" “You can clearly see the water pumped from one of the wells and stored in tanks” “But it is still largely untapped..." We all live on a really big hot pocket. And it is really hot. The US agency in charge of researching advanced energy technologies estimates that “just 0.1% of the heat content of Earth could supply humanity’s total energy needs for 2 million years.” That’s HUGE! If that’s true… why don’t I ever hear about it?? DAVID ROBERTS: “Geothermal, like you haven't heard of it yet, but I have a feeling you're going to hear a lot about it in the coming five years. It was one of the sort of hottest areas. Pardon the pun. It's impossible to avoid puns when discussing geothermal…” That’s longtime energy reporter David Roberts. “The reason you haven't heard of it is because it's geographically concentrated in certain areas..." In the US, those areas look like this. I’m here in New York right now, but actually I'm about to go visit my parents for the holidays and they live right here. So, hold that thought... “Ready? Let's go!” “Hi!” "Hi!" We’re headed right THERE, it's a public pool near where my parents live. And it’s all heated by a hot spring. This water is so nice and warm because underneath me there’s a huge reservoir of hot water and steam. The crazy part is this is just the little bit that comes up, there’s a HUGE amount more down there. Until now, getting geothermal energy at scale has mostly meant tapping into places like that. “You're just digging down, finding the hot steam and then sort of channeling the hot steam up through a turbine.” That turbine spins, generating electricity that people nearby can use. You can also just use the heat directly. “So that's more or less where geothermal has been for a long time.” It’s stuck. There’s a HUGE amount more energy down there but we can’t harness it because to do that we'd would have to find a natural reservoir. But what if we didn’t? What if we could make them? You could drill down, inject water, crack the hot rock to let the water pass through, and then collect the heated water and spin the turbine. This is called “enhanced geothermal,” and a bunch of companies are working on it. That middle part though… “That's what fracking is. Conceptually enhanced geothermal is doing the same thing. It's digging down into hot rock, injecting fluids at high pressure to crack the rock and create reservoirs.” One of the people working on how to, basically, frack geothermal? You guessed it! The Frack King. “I felt that this was a technology that would enable geothermal to finally become more commercial.” WAIT. Hold on a sec. Let that sink in. This guy is seen as like a supervillain in some environmental circles. The fact that he is now working on clean energy now is a huge deal. It’s needed. Right now, geothermal doesn’t generate much electricity globally - it’s in the tiny “other renewables” right there. No one really thinks we’re going to be able to do THIS. Instead, as we use fewer fossil fuels, we’re probably going to use more wind and solar but to do that, we need to know we’ll always be able to get energy when we need it during years that are just cloudier or less windy. In a clean energy future, we need options that are extremely reliable. And geothermal could be a big help there… if we can get enough of it. Enhanced geothermal is one way to do that, and there are also systems in development where no fluids leave the pipes at all - a closed system, no fracking. So why not just focus on those? Well… how much energy you get depends on how much the fluids come into contact with the hot surface. In a pipe, that’s a lot less than in tons of little fractures. “So if you were to be in the camp that says, “hydraulic fracturing is unacceptable,” then closed loop is the only option, but it limits you drastically in terms of the energy extraction rate.” Both systems are exciting, but the math shows that fracking might help get a lot more energy out of the ground IF it can be done safely. So… can it? “Most of what's environmentally nightmarish about fracking for natural gas has to do with the composition of the fluids that they inject. With geothermal, it's just water, or close to water. So these are environmentally benign fluids that are being injected. So the main source of objection to fracking does not apply to geothermal.” The earthquake concern does, though less. “If you do this poorly, you can create seismic activity. And especially in older geothermal, you occasionally ran into this. I think the science now has reached a point that that risk is very tiny.” “I believe that we can do it in a safe way. But we should keep this really front and center and make sure that we do everything we can to prevent something like that from happening in geothermal applications.” Some people are very reasonably freaked out about fracking. You can make the case that it has caused too much harm and has the potential to cause more. You can say that we should focus only on closed loop systems, or on other types of renewable energy like wind and solar. But it also seems like we’re gonna need everything we’ve got. And maybe we have an opportunity here. To use something that meaningfully contributed to climate change to help to fix it. If it works, it could be this redemption story. A story about how we can use what we’ve got to make the world better. About how technology isn’t good or bad. It's all about how we use it. That was my first video as an independent YouTuber! I'm feeling really pretty excited. Oh, hello. If you'd like to support me or the show you can subscribe, that's the best thing you can do! And send me questions to answer, I'd love to feature you in an episode. There's a dropbox link for that down below. See you soon!
