Natural Gas is Not A Solution for Climate Change

It's time for natural gas companies to come clean about the chemicals used in fracking.

Can a fossil fuel help us avoid the harmful effects of other fossil fuels? It’s a question that’s come up lately as natural gas is eyed as a cleaner alternative to oil and coal.

Burning coal and oil causes pollution and emits greenhouse gases that drive climate change. Exploring and drilling for oil and mining coal also come with numerous environmental impacts – especially as easily accessible oil runs out and we have to rely on deep-water drilling and oil sands. Natural gas burns cleaner than oil and coal, and it emits less carbon dioxide for the amount of energy it produces. This has led industry and governments to argue for an increase in natural gas production.

  Canada is the world’s third largest producer of natural gas, behind Russia and the United States. Although overall production has been declining here, new sources and methods for exploiting “unconventional” natural gas reserves, such as shale gas, have led industry and government officials to argue that gas could play a role as a “bridging” fuel to kick-start near-term reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change.

  It’s not that simple, though, especially when we consider the impacts of unconventional natural gas, along with extraction methods such as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”. A report by the David Suzuki Foundation and Pembina Institute, “Is natural gas a climate change solution for Canada?”, examines the key issues around natural gas and reaches surprising conclusions.

  Extracting gas from shale deposits, for example, requires up to 100 times the number of well pads to get the same amount of gas as conventional sources. Imagine the disruption in farm or cottage country of one well pad (comprising multiple wells) roughly every 2.5 square kilometres. Each well pad occupies an area of about one hectare, and also requires access roads and pipeline infrastructure.

  The method known as fracking has also been in the news a lot. Fracking has been used to extract gas since the late 1940s, although producers only began combining it with horizontal drilling to exploit unconventional gas resources in the past decade. With this process, water, sand, and chemicals are pumped at high pressure into rock formations deep in the Earth to fracture the rock, allowing the gas to escape and flow into the wells.