The Fracking Future Is a Big Myth

The United States' bright fracking future is a lie. Or a myth. Or at least, not as as advertised.

That's essentially the conclusion of a new investigation described in today's issue of Nature. The bullish natural gas estimates that in 2012 led President Obama to declare, "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years," were wildly overoptimistic.

According to the new analysis, which comes courtesy of a team based at the University of Texas-Austin, by 2030 actual gas production will have missed the US Energy Information Administration's estimates by over 100 billion cubic-meters per year, offering the market just over half of what was expected.

While the EIA forecasts predict a steady growth in natural gas production through 2040, the UT analysis finds it peaking within a decade and then dropping off dramatically.

The reason for the overestimate, generally, is that the "government's predictions rely on coarse-grained studies of major shale formations, or plays," Mason Inman reports in Nature. "Now, researchers are analysing those formations in much greater detail and are issuing more-conservative forecasts. They calculate that such formations have relatively small 'sweet spots' where it will be profitable to extract gas."

The new estimates aren't actually all that new. As recently as 2008, the EIA was forecasting flat natural gas production for the foreseeable future. Natural gas was not the next big thing so much as a small but sizable constant. The fracking boom changed that in a blink as old, expensive extraction methods suddenly became cost-effective. Gas got more expensive, and so fracking became a lot more reasonable.

In just a few years time, energy firms managed to sink some 8,000 gas wells into the Marcellus shale formation alone, adding 100 or so every month. That's around 385 million cubic metres of gas pulled out of the ground per day.

The UT analysis is the product of a dozen researchers' three years of work. It's been released in a steady stream via individual journal articles and conference presentations. This week's Nature spotlight makes for the first wide-angle, unified summary.

The difference between the UT findings and the EIA's own estimates is a matter of resolution. The EIA creates forecast county by county, a methodology that sometimes lumps together vast tracts of land, in some cases larger than 1,000 square-kilometers, and thousands of wells. The UT team, however, looked at individual square-mile tracts of land, a resolution "at least" 20 times finer than that offered by the EIA. The distinction is critical.

"Resolution matters because each play has sweet spots that yield a lot of gas, and large areas where wells are less productive," Inman writes. "Companies try to target the sweet spots first, so wells drilled in the future may be less productive than current ones. The EIA's model so far has assumed that future wells will be at least as productive as past wells in the same county."

The result of this model is clear overoptimism.

One particular report from the UT team, published this year in the AAPG Bulletin, found that for 2,133 wells, we can expect an exponential decline within the next decade. Once pressure within the shale formation begins to be depleted, it's a quick downward spiral into obsolescence.

Tad Patzec, the lead author of the AAPG study, suggests that the UT findings might even themselves be overoptimistic. Production could turn out to be still lower.

So: quite suddenly, in the very near future, the United States will be left with a vast natural gas infrastructure without enough actual gas to support it: that means idling power plants and cars, and empty pipelines. "The bottom line is, no matter what happens and how it unfolds," he told Nature, "it cannot be good for the US economy." Suffice it to say, it won't be good for the world economy either.

If the UT findings seem anomalous, deviating severely from not only the EIA but most industry estimates, it's not. The same basic thing is occurring in Poland. The nation was once considered a promised land of Eastern European natural gas; the gas-positive consultancy firm Advanced Resources International estimated it held a potential 3,000 barrels per cubic-meter per year of production. But more recent estimates suggest it's got less than a tenth of that.

Gas seems to be drying up all over.