Frack me up, baby

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Hi,

Before we get into it, I want to link out to a piece of flash fiction published by a dope publication I read almost daily. The piece, Telling the Truth by Amber Nuyens, marries two of my favorite things: Climate things and the short story / flash fiction format.

Onwards. Today, we’ll discuss fracking, as it came up during the presidential debate on Tuesday night. Don’t click away just because of that, though. I promise this is more about macro-climate and energy ideas than political theater.

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OPINION

On Tuesday night, U.S. President-hopeful Kamala Harris clearly stated she wouldn’t ban fracking if elected, likely in part to ensure she doesn’t lose votes in Pennsylvania, a pivotal swing state. By unpacking this topic, we can unfurl a web of nested dependencies that reveals even more about 2050 and 2100 than it does about November 2024.

The U.S. presidential election matters significantly to both domestic and global energy and climate dynamics, not just for the next four years but probably for the next forty or four hundred. This is true because the U.S. is an essential player in most of the world’s energy and energy transition dynamics in one way or another and because the things that happen over the next four years, whether legislatively or technologically, will continue to set the tone for the next forty (and four hundred) years.

No, I am not about to assault you with calls to action about how this is “the most important U.S. election of our lifetimes,” even if it may be. No, I’m not going to tell you who to vote for. No, I don’t need to hit on what Trump thinks about solar. You get enough of all that elsewhere.

What I’m going to do first is discuss fracking and Pennsylvania.

For starters, because of how U.S. presidential elections work, there’s a solid chance that the election will be decided disproportionately by a few states in which the margin of victory may well be slim. There’s a chance that ~100,000 (or fewer) Pennsylvanians will disproportionately dictate the winner of the election. If, for instance, the electoral map looks as follows (my own selections made for illustrative purposes), Pennsylvania becomes seminally important. For context, if the map does looks like this, Trump would be projected to win roughly 61% of the time, though new polls post-debate may update those odds. You can do your own prognosticating with 538’s tool here. Whichever way you slice it, Pennsylvanian primacy to this election remains.

Make of all that what you will, but it matters because Pennsylvania is also a major oil and gas producer. While Pennsylvania does have more employees working in renewable energy than it does in natural gas and has benefited significantly from public funding from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, it is still, first and foremost, a powerhouse of natural gas production.

Here’s where fracking comes in. Beginning in the mid-2000s, technological advances made it economically viable for developers to extract hydrocarbons (oil and gas) from previously inaccessible shale rock layers. The tech innovations centered on hydraulic fracturing (i.e., ‘fracking’), a technique where high-pressure fluid is injected into shale formations to create fractures, effectively liberating oil and gas from shale formations, while horizontal drilling advances allowed developers to increase the exposed surface area of a formation to enhance extraction efficiency.

In short, these advances catalyzed a ‘shale boom,’ which allowed the U.S. to produce a lot more natural gas–the main ‘ingredient’ and value of which is methane. Based on an increased ability to effectively ‘mine’ natural gas, U.S. natural gas production (and natural gas production elsewhere) has skyrocketed this century. Long one of the world’s largest natural gas producers, the U.S. now has a more pronounced lead over other countries than ever. Today, the U.S. produces 50% more natural gas than any other country, having more than doubled its natural gas production since the early 2000s to satisfy both growing domestic demand and to serve the global natural gas market.

The U.S. is now also the world’s number one exporter of natural gas in its liquefied form. It has gone whole hog on fracking and natural gas extraction. The U.S. has basically said, “Frack me up, baby!”

Pennsylvania has been a big part of that. A large chunk of the Marcellus Shale gas formation, a massive reservoir of natural gas, runs through Pennsylvania. According to the EPA’s website:

As visualized below, extracting gas from the Marcellus (third layer from the top) has contributed massively to growth in shale natural gas production over the past decade.

Fracking comes with many economic benefits, whether for local communities where it employs people, for states with a lot of production that gain tax revenue from companies that operate there, for the nation as a whole, where cheaper natural gas prices based on more available supply make basically everything produced with electricity or natural gas-fired industrial heat more affordable, (and again, where the nation benefits via taxes, as well as by gaining more sway in global energy markets), or for the world, where, natural gas can be helpful to help wean off coal (and many other things).

Fracking also comes with many harms. For one, burning natural gas isn’t clean in and of itself. While burning it produces about half as many greenhouse gas emissions as burning coal does, it still produces carbon dioxide emissions, which warm the planet. There are also methane gas leaks up and down the natural gas production chain, including from fracking, which add methane into the atmosphere, warming the planet even more rapidly pound-for-pound than carbon dioxide emissions do. Further, methane itself is an air pollutant, as well as an ozone-precursor (and ozone is an air pollutant), and fracking can lead to a whole slew of other local environmental problems, ranging from natural ecosystems loss to contamination of drinking water and more.

It’s also worth noting fracking isn’t all about producing gas. Natural gas and oil are often found together undergroud, so U.S. fracking has also driven a boom in oil production. It’s worth repeating that the U.S. is not just the world’s largest natural gas producer, it’s also the world’s largest oil producer. Thanks in part to additional resources unlocked by fracking, New Mexico (the U.S. state) produces more oil than Mexico (the country) does. The U.S. produces 50% more oil than Saudi Arabia, and more than 50% more natural gas than Russia, though Russia remains the top exporter (by pipeline).

Highly debatable

For all the economic reasons listed above, and given the importance of Pennsylvania on the electoral college map, Kamala Harris has been under scrutiny for previously suggesting she might ban fracking. During the debate, Harris firmly stated that she does not oppose expanding domestic energy production nor that she would ban fracking. Her position is hardly surprising. She knows Pennsylvania is key to her chances of winning the election. So, she said things like (h/t Stephen Stapczynski for pulling these out):

&

Both are unsurprising positions. But both statements will also dismay the most ardent proponents of a full and swift transition off fossil fuels. They will alarm the 'Just Stop Oil' contingent of climate activists. They may dismay and alarm you. That's cool! I hear you.

That said, they don't dismay me, per se. For one, because I interpret them as part of the political gambits being played. Secondly, because I view our country's energy transition, to say nothing of the world's, as a decadal, if not century-long effort. Which brings us back to where we started the conversation, namely to the fact that the next four years matter more for their impact on the next forty and four hundred than they do about things that will transpire between now and 2028 or 2029.

What matters most

What matters less (though it does matter) is the incremental amount of additional greenhouse gasses that a Trump vs. Harris presidency might entail in the U.S. This chart crops up a lot:

I have no beef with the chart, the analysis, or concern about four billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s no small difference between now and 2030. It's comparable to roughly 8% of total emissions across the world in any given year. But those greenhouse gas emissions pale in comparison to the future greenhouse gas emissions that R&D, innovation, and resource deployment unlocked by policy supportive of the energy transition could mitigate, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere, for the rest of eternity. For the rest of all time.

Take, for instance, the work Fervo Energy is doing. Fervo is building a 400 MW geothermal energy project in Utah, which could be one of the world's largest geothermal facilities. Geothermal energy is: 

• Abundant: (even just harnessing 0.1% of the heat under the Earth's surface could meet global energy demands for many, many thousands of years)

• Clean: Quite clean, in fact, from a lifecycle emissions perspective compared to other options

• Non-intermittent: Geothermal's ability to deliver electricity without intermittency lends it advantages over solar and wind, even when solar and wind are paired with batteries. 

• Also based on fracking!!! Fracking is also (perhaps ironically) a big component of the enhanced geothermal energy approach Fervo is working on commercializing.

Geothermal energy isn't deployed today at scale in most places, save for some specific locales like Iceland and Kenya that have easier access to it. Historically, it's been too expensive, too technically challenging to crack elsewhere. But Fervo is making progress. I won't dive into the technical details, though you can explore more of those here and here. The point I'm going to drive home is that Fervo has been helped considerably by federal policies and subsidies. For instance, in February, the DOE selected three projects, one of which is being developed by Fervo, to split up to $60 million to demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of their enhanced geothermal systems.

Fervo is probably not the best example of tech innovation and deployment catalyzed by policies from the Biden administration. It just so happens to also involve fracking. It's fracking for abundant, free heat underground versus fossil fuels. When it comes to geothermal energy, I say frack yeah, baby!! 

I also offered Fervo as a proof point of what really matters, namely continuing to deploy the technologies that we know work (like nuclear, solar and batteries, EVs and more) while investing in R&D to make serious advances in other tech areas where progress is needed. From this month alone, here are five other examples of innovation happening in the U.S.A., in no small part because the entire complex of federal agencies and other R&D organizations have, under the Biden Administration, been directed to orient themselves towards accelerating these types of efforts:

1. Water: Beyond all the energy-related funding coming from the IRA, the EPA also opened up $7.5 billion in funding under the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) funding to help build critical water infrastructure projects.

2. Mining: SLB (fka Schlumberger) announced breakthrough results for direct lithium extraction (DTE) techniques it is using in Nevada that produce lithium faster than conventional methods and use less land while still offering strong recovery rates.

3. Solar + storage: The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved NV Energy's Greenlink West transmission project and Arevia Power's 700 MW solar plus 2.8 GWh storage project. The transmission line will run ~350 miles from Las Vegas to Western Nevada.

4. Transportation: You can lease an EV for ~$20 per month in Colorado, given a slew of incentives.

5. Domestic solar manufacturing: The U.S. now has more than 31 GW of solar module manufacturing capacity, roughly four times more than it did before the IRA's passage.

Said plainly, these are the types of advancements that could help curb many more billions of greenhouse gas emissions out to 2050, 2100, and beyond, in addition to minimizing other environmental harms ranging from water pollution to ecosystem disruption, and more. Even more importantly, as these advances are made and tested domestically, they can eventually be exported globally.

Hence, ensuring that the U.S. maintains its current level of orientation and emphasis on energy transition work—inclusive of everything from early-stage R&D to large-scale infrastructure deployment—and accelerates it all, too, is what's at stake in November. It's what matters most for the country (and perhaps the world) with respect to energy and climate, regardless of where you land on fracking. More on why below.

The net-net

So far, we have covered three things.

1. Fracking is a significant part of why and how the U.S. has maintained and expanded its relevance in global energy and economic dynamics.

2. Given #1, it’s unlikely that fracking will be phased out soon. That would also be politically unfavorable, especially in states that matter most on the electoral map.

3. That said, fracking—insofar as it’s also part of how enhanced geothermal energy works—is also representative of a new wave of technological innovation and federal policy-driven capital expenditure that is helping to accelerate an energy transition in the U.S. (and could eventually become technology and expertise that’s exportable worldwide)

Mind you, in keeping with last week’s newsletter, we shouldn’t get too grandiose about the progress of the U.S. energy transition. Great strides have been made, but the U.S. still produces more oil and gas than ever before (again, in part thanks to fracking), and its greenhouse gas emissions are close to (within 5%) of all-time highs, though they peaked in 2007, according to the EPA.

But, if you asked me what to do with respect to climate change mitigation and accelerating the energy transition, well, I’d point you right back to point #3 above. We need to continue unlocking the type of innovation that advances in fracking did for geothermal energy across countless other areas of the climate and energy landscape. The public sector always has a role in this work:

If the U.S. continues to do this well (and better), then point #2 above becomes moot. If geothermal, solar + storage, more circular, electric steelmaking, hot bricks for industrial heating, and hundreds of other pivotal technologies, practice changes, and more take off and work, then no one will need to or want to frack for gas, and no politician will need to take a position on banning it.

That’s not to say there isn’t an argument to be made for banning fracking and trying to catalyze change sooner that way, too. One could! But that is not the approach to climate action the Biden Administration has taken, nor do I think it is one a Harris Administration will either.

JOBS

Electric Era, one of my favorite climate tech companies, is hiring a Sales Development Representative to report to the Director of Business Development and accelerate new business development across the EV charging ecosystem. This is another great place to make real impact.

Explore the job here, and if you want to learn more about the business, read our deep dive here.

Anywho, here’s a song I like right now. Bye!

— Nick