Peak Oil and the Race to Frack

By George Payne

Admittedly the hard science involved in hydrofracking is beyond my primary area of competency. As a philosopher and theologian, I am not qualified to speak with the perspicacity of a degreed ecologist, geologist, or mechanical engineer. Furthermore, I have absolutely no technical experience working in the oil and gas industry although it is a dangerous fallacy to argue that professional credentials matter if one’s position is accurate. In the words of Leonardo Da Vinci: “Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his or her intelligence, they are just using their memory.” So I do not need to be a trained chemist to know that cigarettes contain carcinogens that tear holes through the fabric of our lungs. Nor do I need to be a biologist to know that all animals depend on delicately manufactured cells that require clean air and clean water to survive. I also know that hydrofracking is wrong. Wherever it has been tried, the threat of water contamination, noise pollution, wildlife habitat destruction, and human disease has followed like a dark shadow. Hydrofracking batters the visible skin of our land and stains the invisible layers of our skies.

Hydrofracking is a short term solution to a long term problem. The problem is peak oil. No one in the media or government wants to talk about peak oil. I predict that 75% of Americans have no clue what the term even means. Peak oil is a very simple problem with unimaginably complex consequences. Societies all over the world are reaching a tipping point where the cost of oil and gas extraction is becoming more expensive than it is worth to commercially distribute the finished product.  Soon, because of the law of supply and demand, Americans will face a post-petroleum scenario in which every facet of their lifestyle will be cataclysmically shifted.  Everything from transportation patterns to sleeping patterns will be altered by the disappearance of constant, cheap, and controlled oil. In light of this looming energy crisis, hydrofracking represents a last ditch effort to get what is left before the public catches on to the severity of the problem.

Again, I readily confess that I am not a scholarly geologist; but I have heard many experts in the field of geology argue that the shale gas being fracked in the Marcellus is an inferior product compared to the oil that is close to depletion in places like Kuwait, Venezuela, and Texas. Companies are even drilling for gas in Western New York State which is a clear sign of desperation rather than opportunism. Major corporations such as Halliburton are trying to scrape what they can from the bottom of the barrel while they still have the energy to keep their motors roaring and the pipelines flowing. Eventually the derricks will come to a halt; and the tractors and cranes, they, too, will cease working. In the end, these machines will lay littered across the once bejeweled valleys and hills of the Southern Tier like giant steel monuments to our stupidity.

 I do not have a comprehensive solution other than to say that in terms of hydrofracking Mother Earth should be left alone.  This is not a utopian plea for our species to resort back to a distant time in the past, but an invitation to be better than the people we have allowed ourselves to become. We have allowed ourselves to become suspicious and ungrateful of the home that births and sustains us. We have allowed ourselves to become the offspring of a nonrenewable life source that is dying faster than we can understand.