Bringing the message about resource depletion to the European Parliament

With 24 languages deemed as "official," the European Union shares some characteristics with the ancient Babel Tower (above, the parliament building in Strasbourg). The Babel of languages is one of the problems associated with trying to pass messages to politicians, but not the most important one. Rather, the main problem seems to be a decisional mechanism which favors groupthink.  Here are some notes of a recent experience of mine at a hearing on energy security of the European Parliament in Brussels.

As I walk to the hearing on energy security in Europe, I am struck first of all by the size of the hall. The "Alcide De Gasperi" room in the palace of the European Parliament in Brussels was clearly built for impressing people, in addition to its function as a meeting room. One of its most remarkable features is the long row of windows of the interpreters' rooms. Since there are 24 official languages of the European Union, there have to be some 50 interpreters working in there. Then, I also notice how the screens for projecting one's slides are small and located high up, near the ceiling. This is not a place where you are supposed to support your statements with data and graphs. It is a place built for political debate.

As people collect in the hall, I can see that the atmosphere is rather formal, with several members of the European Parliament sitting in the audience. Most people are dressed in suits and many wear ties. On the podium, there are six invited speakers. And there we go; I immediately sense the mood of the conference: this is not a scientific meeting. None of the speakers seem to be an expert about fossil fuels, intended as markets, production, resources, reserves, and the like. Rather, they seem to be mainly concerned with strategic and political issues. The line that emerges from the presentations and from the reactions of the audience is clear: it is a highly confrontational attitude (to put it mildly) toward Russia, accused to be engaging in an economic war against Western Europe. The gist of what I hear is that the European Union must unite in defense; we must follow the example of the United States and get rid of our silly regulations and of the local resistance against drilling and nuclear plants. Europe can exploit its shale gas and oil resources (and also nuclear energy) and attain energy independence, as the United States did. It is "drill, drill, drill" all over.

This line, in various shades, is the position of four speakers out of six. The bias in favor of fossil fuels is shown also by the fact that the lady charged with defending renewables is given the last time slot of the hearing. The fossil oriented attitude seems to be shared by the majority of the audience. Not that it is not challenged by some of the MEPs in the room. One of them (I know him well, he has been a long time ASPO supporter) stands up and tells to one of the speakers: "it is not true that the United States has attained energy independence. You have to stop getting your data from newspapers!". He is right, (you can look at the data yourself). But it is an isolated reaction, and the overall debate remains based on the idea that the US has become energy independent or that, at least, it will soon become independent.

When it is my turn to speak, I tell a different story. I try to explain that the ultimate origin of the energy security problems in Europe is due to depletion, and that drilling more is not the solution. I keep the message as simple as possible; tailored for people who are not specialists in oil and gas. I show the price trends, I tell them something about energy return, and I make the point that renewable energy is not subjected to depletion. I sense that my talk is well received: the people in the audience listen to what I say, and they look up at my slides (but those screens are too high and too small, dammit!). I also get several questions and comments - mostly favorable ones. After the hearing is over, several people stop me to discuss further about what I said. As a talk, it was a reasonably successful one.

But, on the whole, I think I had a very modest impact, if any. As I noticed many times, it is extremely difficult to pass to decision makers messages which are perceived as out of the ordinary, as the message on resource depletion is. The problem has many facets and it has to do, mainly, with the way politicians think. According to my experience, politicians - especially high level ones - are very smart people. The problem is that they are swamped with information; just as most of us. So, in the great mass of data arriving, how do you decide what is the truth? If you are a scientist - or you are scientifically trained - you have ways to evaluate the data and filter out the bad ones. But politicians are not scientists, they are not scientifically trained, so they use a different method. They maintain a healthy dose of skepticism about everything they hear; they don't pay too much attention on data, and they tend to side with the interpretation that they perceive as the most compatible with the general opinion of the group they belong to.

There are reasons for this "groupthink" syndrome that, probably, affects politicians more than most of us. It is because then main tool in the political struggle, today, is the demonization of adversaries. So, a politician is very careful to avoid to be singled out from the crowd of colleagues and subjected to the standard demonizing treatment. For a politician, there is safety in crowds; a traditional strategy well known also by sheep and fish. In practice, you may see a politician as having a built in opinion detector in his head. He/she will sense the position of the majority and try to avoid straying too far away from it. In general, the way for a politician to obtain power is to occupy the center; to be seen as a moderate. That this is the way to success has been known for a long time; even rigorously modeled (in economics, it is known as the "Hotelling's law"). Scientists are sometimes contrarians, politicians almost never are. 

So, I think I can figure out the reaction of most of the MEPs to the hearing on energy security in Brussels. It was something like, "Well, that Italian guy who spoke about resource depletion might have a point about what the real problem is. I couldn't his slides so well, so high up near the ceiling, but he seemed to have some good data. But, on the other hand, the other speakers saw the problem differently. If most people in the parliament think that Russia is waging an economic war against us and that drilling more is a good idea, then there has to be something in it. For sure, I shouldn't take the risk of siding with a minority option."



Ugo Bardi teaches at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a member of the Club of Rome and the author of "Extracted, how the quest for mineral wealth is plundering the planet" (Chelsea Green 2014)

Shale gas: the problem with EROEI

Carcinogenic chemicals associated with the extraction of shale gas have raised great concern. But perhaps there are worse problems as recent results indicate that gas losses during extraction by "fracking"  may generate great damage in terms if global warming.

The idea that fossil fuel depletion might be a cure for global warming has been around for quite a while. With time, the interaction of climate change and depletion has become a small field of study that I tried to review in a post on TOD titled "Fire or Ice?" Some recent entries in the field are a paper by Chiari and Zecca (in Italian) and one by Ward et al. on "Hydrology and Earth System Science."

In general, one would expect that depletion would ease the climate problem and this is, indeed, the opinion of several (possibly most) of the authors who have studied the question. Of course, depletion doesn't mean "running out" of a resource. Rather, the effect of depletion on production is best understood in terms of energy return on energy invested (EROEI). As a resource is progressively depleted, extraction must move to more expensive (lower EROEI) sources. That increases the price of the resource, lowers the demand and, eventually, causes production to decline. So, lower production means less greenhouse gases emitted and that is good for the atmosphere.

However, there is a problem: EROEI does not measure how "dirty" a fuel is, in particular in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Hence, even depletion may not be a solution to the climate problem (this point was made, among others, by Zecca and Chiari.) A recent paper by Howarth et al. to be published in "Climatic Change" (see also a review on the BBC site) is adding - almost literally - fuel to the fire by examining the emission of shale gas extracted by the fracking process.

As well known, "shale gas" is the new resource that is promising to bring us nothing less than "a new era of abundance" ("unless politicians and environmentalists get their way.") Unfortunately, even if this new era were real (and there are serious doubts about this point) it comes with strings attached; and what strings! The study by Howarth and his coauthors arrives to the conclusion that shale gas might be a true disaster for the environment.

Natural gas is composed mainly of methane (CH4) which is a potent greenhouse gas. Because of the higher ratio of hydrogen to carbon, it is true that natural gas produces less CO2 than other fuels when burned. But the extraction, processing, and transportation of gas is never perfectly tight and a certain amount of gas always is lost into the atmosphere. In time, atmospheric CH4 is transformed into CO2 and its warming effect is reduced; but it never disappears.

After an examination of various sources of losses, Howarth and coauthors conclude that:

Summing all estimated losses, we calculate that during the life cycle of an average shale-gas well, 3.6 to 7.9% of the total production of the well is emitted to the atmosphere as methane (Table 2). This is at least 30% more and perhaps more than twice as great as the life-cycle methane emissions we estimate for conventional gas, 1.7% to 6%.

Here are the results in graphic form for a 20 year time horizon. For a 100 year case, emissions from shale gas look less dramatically higher than the others, but are still very important.

(Note that the scale of the figure says "Grams Carbon per MJ", but it seems clear from the text that the authors are not simply reporting the mass but the warming potential of the gases).

Of course, the data and the assumptions of the study can be criticized; as done in a recent paper on Scientific American.  On the whole, however, its conclusions make sense: the complex operation of "fracking"is much more prone to gas losses than the simpler extraction of conventional gas. This is bound to generate more global warming.

What is striking in the paper by Howarth and the others is that shale gas does not seem to be so expensive in EROEI terms; that is in terms of the higher amount of energy needed for extraction. So, we are facing a fundamental shortcoming in the way we account for costs and benefits of what we are doing. In monetary terms, shale gas seems to be a good deal. In EROEI (energy) terms it is probably less good but it may still provide a positive return. It is in environmental terms - in the so called "external costs" that shale gas is a disaster. We don't have enough data to show that this is a general case - that is, if what is happening with natural gas is happening with all energy resources. But, if this is the case, our problem is not that the EROEIs of fossil fuels are too low; they might be too high!

So, it may be that society is reacting to scarcity in the wrong way by following a path that is perhaps easing the situation in the short term (getting more energy) but horribly worsening the problem in the medium/long term (global warming). If it were true that shale gas will bring a "new era of abundance" in terms of energy, then we risk to move toward a climate disaster: runaway global warming. But we just can't see it coming; we lack the necessary accounting tools, we don't have the appropriate decisional structures. So, we are blithely moving onwards (anyone said "lemmings?")

So, what do we do? Right now, with a wave of rampant climate denialism engulfing about everything in the debate, the idea that we can stop fracking by traditional method of international climate treaties seems to be unthinkable (and that should be clear also from this article on the Weekly Standard). Even more unthinkable is that we could do it by telling people to install high efficiency light bulbs. So, the only hope we have to avoid a climate disaster is to beat shale gas in its own terms: economic ones. Don't forget that shale gas may well be abundant, but it is also expensive in monetary and energy terms. So, if we can deploy renewable technologies that produce electricity at a lower price than gas, then there is a chance that shale gas will stay where it is: underground.