Speaker 1:	Check, check. Oh good, it actually works. So I originally titled this talk, "To Frack or not to Frack," and that may have been what you saw, but I'm going to give you the punchline now. It's here. It's not going away. It's a fait accompli. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. But I'm a student of the history of technology as well as a technologist, and I'm very interested in looking to see the arc through which technologies move during their course through their lifespans, and there are technologies that have come into being, that still exist, but we did kind of put the genie back in the bottle or we did say, "No," to. And so one interesting issue: is fracking going to be one of those or not? 
	And so my job today, then, is to sort of put it in context rather than to say, "Do it or not do it." And it fact, it should really say, "Fracking in contexts," plural, because this is such a complicated issue with so many layers. I'll try to address some of them and leave the rest for question-and-answer period. I think people know a lot about this already, but they don't have all the context. So let me just see what I can do in the time that we have to do this. 
	So this is a cartoon. These are slaves pulling an Egyptian pyramid block and they say, "The trouble with these pyramid schemes is that the only ones who benefit are the guys who dream them up." So this is a way for me to think back to before fossil fuels. Not just before fracking, but before fossil fuels, what were the ways that we lived? What energy sources did we use? What did we do? How did we manage? We did this for millions of years, okay? So the number one thing was: human labor. Slavery. That was the number one way which things got done in this world, including the pyramids. They were not built by anyone else, really, other than slaves and some slave masters. Arguably, slavery in the United States ended not so much because of moral outrage and the victory of the North, but by the arrival of fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible for them to do all of the things that needed to be done using petroleum-driven and other kinds of mechanized devices that we have to this day. 
	Slavery still exists everywhere in the world, but another fact that's interesting about this is that a slave working as hard as a slave can work put out pretty much continuously 100 watts. Now you think of watts as a light bulb, like a bright 100-watt light bulb, but if you had to generate that electricity, you would be working very, very hard. Maximum physical labor that a human being can do, continuously, is about 100 watts. I should tell you that the Tour de France riders, when they're riding up the steep inclines, they can do more than 100 watts, but they can't sustain it for very much longer. I think the peak is 1,000 watts, but more than likely just 100 watts. Every one of those slaves is essentially consuming about 100 watts, so get back to that in a second.
	Second thing is ... Let's see if you can help me with what these are. Animal power okay? So we used animals: oxen, horses later, and other animals to do our labor. While I'm showing you these preindustrial things, think about how many of these are still in use today? How many places can you go to see animal labor pulling something in the United States, in the developed world, or in the developing world? And also think about the future of that. These are technologies that existed. Water. Water wheels. Water Wheels for the purpose of doing something mechanical like grinding grain. This is a medieval horizontal water wheel from the 15th Century, a little sketch. Let's see. Wind power. This is not windmills for generating electricity, but windmills for grinding grain and pumping water. This is a 14th Century windmill woodcut. What does this suggest to you? Fire, but ... ?
Audience:	[inaudible 00:03:56]
Speaker 1:	Right, this is actually charcoal, making charcoal by partial burning of wood. So this stands in for both wood and its wood derivatives. Interestingly, people sometimes say, "Well, burning wood would add to global warming, because you're putting carbon in the air by burning it."
	But you ask people, "Well where do the carbon come from that's in the wood that you're burning?"
	The answer is, "It came from the air. It came from the carbon dioxide in the air that was pulled out and made ... " You know that heavy log that hits you on the head, that's carbon dioxide. It was pulled out of the air, turned into wood, and it falls on you. 
	So essentially, it's an even exchange with wood. So burning wood should not be thought of as ... I mean, it does add carbon locally, and it adds soot and smoke to your environment, but in terms of global it's not so much an issue. 
	This is a depiction, a painting of the Foolish Virgins from the parable of Jesus, Matthew 45. Yeah, Matthew 15. Anyway, it's meant to suggest lighting by burning olive oil, by burning oil. So, what were the technologies for light? We see the technologies for moving things, lifting things. Well, it was burning plant oils like olive oil, it was whale oil, animal-derived oils, and then animal-derived ... They have a picture here. This is candle making, and this is tallow, so using animal fat. So basically taking parts of animals or plants and burning them for light. All of these have been subsumed by fossil fuels. The light that's generated today is almost entirely derived from fossil fuels. 
	This rather poor graph ... because I couldn't find it in a higher resolution, but it's very useful ... shows the average energy consumption of individuals per capita in the United States, starting 1800 and going until today, basically. What you find is that for millennia or generations earlier, firewood and other fuel consumption had us burning a certain number of kilowatts, this is if you could do it continuously over time. What I want you to notice is that once electricity came in, we ended up per capita all using more energy in the developed world. Then, after World War II, we came up until ... here's the OPEC crunch of the early '70s, and it's been very flat since then. The amount of energy we use per person is about 11.5 kilowatts per person, and that's a continuous measure. 
	So let me go back to the fact that a human being can put out about 100 watts at peak labor, and even slaves need to rest, okay? But power sources we have today fueled by fossil fuels don't need to rest. So we're each using ... What that works out to is 11,500 watts, 100 of which is equivalent of having a slave working for us. That's 115 slaves for each of us, not ones that can sleep at night or that take the weekends off or something, but that are working for us continuously in a round robin. So there's always 115 slaves working for every one of us, and that's the developed world, and that's the amount of energy use that each of us is responsible for. You get to these numbers by looking at the total energy consumption divided by the population. 
	The other interesting aspect about energy use ... I know we'll get to fracking in a second ... is that it depends how old you are. Young people actually do not put out much CO2. They don't use as much energy as old people do. If you look at the resources they need. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the people in this room are probably nearer the top of that curve than they are the bottom, and it's something for us to think about that it's our lifestyle choices that lead us to this energy use. It's not really our fault because we live in the era we live in, and we may want to find other alternatives, but they just don't exist, or they're very expensive, or they're troublesome. This is what we wrestle with every day.
	Now we're going to talk about fracking. Fracking is a process that uses water, sand, chemicals, and invasiveness and produces natural gas. It's a complicated process. I'm going to give you a short version of the sort of mechanical physical side, but I'm also more interested in the other dimensions, the context for this. So the basic idea is as shown. I think this laser pointer is not very bright, but you can sort of get the idea. So, essentially a vertical well is dug. This is important. There is a shield around the outside of it that allows it to pass through drinking water areas of groundwater so that by the time you get down, this is a mile down or more, you can see over here on the side, this is feet, 7,000 feet, 5,000 feet. That's a mile further down. 
	You get down at past where water sources are to the deep Marcellus Shale. I'll say more in a moment about the Marcellus Shale. The Marcellus Shale is in Pennsylvania and some of New York State and Ohio. The Utica Shale ... There are other shale formations that have this gas, and they were always previously inaccessible because A) they're deep and B) the gas is not in one place. It used to be that conventional natural gas looks for a void, a space under the ground that is filled with natural gas, a dome, a bubble. Then it pulls that out. This is different. This gas is mixed in, in a tiny interstices of the porous rock. It's very difficult to get out but for fracking. 
	Fracking was essentially patented in 1947, and in 1971 all the patents on it were bought and controlled by Halliburton, so they are essentially the leasers of all the fracking technologies to anyone who want to do fracking. It's one of the many reasons why they're getting very rich very fast. Anyway, the idea here ... Most of the patents involve this, that after you go down very far and when you get to the shale that you want, you turn horizontal. This technology for turning sideways is relatively new, because before you had steel bits that could just go straight down and that's that. It was a question of sinking a hole here or there and trying to find those domes of gas. Now you don't care. All you need to do is know that you're in the shale, then you turn horizontal by means of a bending tip and you keep drilling until you get to a horizontal shelf. 
	Once you're sure you're in it, you do the following. You load this with essentially explosives. The actual fracking process is an explosive process by which an explosion happens and drives a shockwave to the end. There are little holes in the pipe. This pipe is a solid metal pipe and it has little holes in the side. Out of each hole essentially a shockwave, a blast wave, comes out, and it forms fissures in the sandstoney-like porous material. If you just did that, those little holes would open up during a shockwave and then would close right up and you'd get no gas out. So they use something called proppants, which is to prop open something like propping open a door. 
	Proppants are very, very fine sand particles called silica dust. If you have some silica dust, it looks like flour. It looks exactly like flour you'd make muffins out of. It's that fine. Silica dust is mined from one place in the United States. In the upper peninsula of Michigan, it's the main sort of place where it occurs naturally in large quantities. So it's extensively being mined for fracking operations. There are other technologies will probably replace that once that runs out. These proppants are mixed in with the chemicals that go down the tube. So after these cracks are formed, the little silica dust grains wedge themselves in. In the moment of the explosion they're shoved in there, and they hold the gaps open so that then the gas comes out.
	It could take years, maybe decades, maybe even hundreds of years for all the gas to leak out through the little cracks and make it into the pipe and come back up. Wells are typically productive for 10 years, but no one's really sure because this is a relatively recent thing. There are many fracking wells which have tapped out already, but there are other ones that are still being produced. There's a lot of uncertainty about what happens down here and what formation looks like, but you can see the picture here shows that the sand keeps the fissures open, natural gas flows out and up the pipe. There, in order to do all this, lots and lots of water has to be used. Something like 100 times as much water as a conventional well is used. 
	It's mixed with these chemicals, which are not just the sand but also chemicals to retard the growth of bacteria, chemicals to make ... this is called a slick-water process, so they want to water to be slippery, so there's essentially soaps and detergents and other things. So its really a very complicated chemical mixture that goes into the hole with the explosion. Almost all the water that's in there gets pushed back out. There is some that stays in the ground forever. One interesting estimate is that I think something like 20% of the water ... I guess it varies ... 20% of the water stays in the hole and the other 80% comes out. That 80% is pretty nasty stuff. Not only does it have chemicals in it, but it also has radioactivity. The radioactivity came out of the ground, because this stuff down here is radioactive. Radioactivity is hard to treat. Regular wastewater treatment plants don't remove it, so there are issues having to do with that.
	I think that's all I really wanted to say. Just that it uses a lot of water, the gas comes out and is either put in trucks to be trucked away or taken to a pipeline, or connected to a pipeline. So now that means that in fracking sites you have to have a pipeline nearby or actually at the site, so now you have lots and lots of pipelines. One of the consequences of this is that the price of natural gas has been dropping like a rock because this natural gas, which we used to have to find these relatively rare domes, it's now plentiful because these shales exist all over the place. It turns out to be very lucrative for companies to do. This only goes through October 11, but the price has stayed below two dollars per million BTU for this. Notice that in Europe and Japan it's going up, up, up. 
	What do you think the companies that are making this really cheap gas are doing with it? Would they like to sell it to us for $2, or would they like to sell it to Japan for $16? Export terminals are popping up on the coasts all over because there's this huge incentive for people who are creating natural gas to find an export market for it. So right now, natural gas is cheap. The college is looking at its future and how it's going to power itself for the next 50 or 100 years, and it's betting mostly that natural gas is going to be a good way to go. Why spend a lot of money for something else when you've got really cheap natural gas? 
	My question is how long is it going to stay cheap? How long is this process going to take before it's a world market? You probably know that petroleum is a world market. A barrel of oil, it doesn't orally matter precisely where it comes from, it's sold at prices that are really governed by international market. Natural gas has traditionally been segregated into small pieces, but that's starting to change. As natural gas is used, export terminals and other techniques arise, it's starting to become like everything else.
	Now I want to go back in time to the Devonian period on the planet Earth. In the Devonian period, you are here. You are here. This is you right here in Pennsylvania. So the entire United States is located here at the end of a continent called Laurentia. This is 350 million years ago to be precise, those of you who know this stuff. I'm going to try and say it right. The Devonian lasted 150 million years but it took place about 350 million years ago. I think it says that there somewhere. Yeah, 385 million. Sorry. That's a picture of it. Let's see if I can get it.
	Gondwana became Africa. We're talking so far back that it's unrecognizable as the planet we know. There were essentially three large continents and they were all equatorial. Here's the equator. Who knew that Pennsylvania was just south of the equator? The critical for the Marcellus Shale and the Utica Shale is that it wasn't on the land and it wasn't in the sea, it was in this little pocket here that was shallow. What happened is, you'll see in the slide soon to come, that organic material sloughed off of the land and into the shallows where it slowly formed the shale and trapped the methane that we're extracting now. Subtropical climate and plate tectonics.
	These are artist sketches of what the Devonian looked like. The Devonian was the age when fish started to walk, okay? We're not talking the dinosaurs. We're not even talking four-legged creatures. We're talking about thins that are just pulling themselves out of the sand. It's really the great age of fish. Sometimes the Devonian is called the Age of Fish because in the oceans that's when sharks developed. Sharks haven't changed much since the Devonian. These are beautiful pictures of it. Basically the whole world was covered in plant material. That's what it was. It was fish and plants and almost nothing on land. Even insects were hardly known at this time.
	This cross-section shows what I was trying to say before, that you had volcanism on land and you had a lot of things growing on land that would slough off and get trapped in the little pocket in the shallows over here. This is in the middle Devonian period, 385, 390 million years ago, the Marcellus Shale formed out of this stuff. The reason is it wasn't buried so deeply that it became coal, and it wasn't so shallow that it dissolved, it stayed in this intermediate stage where the carbon was locked into the mud. Basically, the Marcellus Shale is old mud, and that's why it's porous and that's why it has this organic material mixed into it. 
	This is a modern picture of the Eastern United States showing the Marcellus Shale in a gray color. You see it extends all the way up here into Central New York, extends all the way down into West Virginia, little piece of Ohio, Maryland, Virginia. This is the whole are of it. Again, it's because this was in that little pocket I showed you before. The little red dots are shale well gas sites, and there are a lot more of them now, but you can see that they're essentially filling in the spaces and there are even some now that are closer to us. We're down here. Notice that in the southeastern Pennsylvania, you don't really see any. That's why we don't have frack sites in Delaware county or anywhere around here. They're north. They're north of us. They're starting to fill in the counties that are north of us. This shows state parks and forests. 
	There's another shale formation called the Utica Shale, which also extends up in New York state, and it's actually underneath the Marcellus Shale. Now this picture is very complicated, but it basically makes the point that starting millions of years ago, so going out to more than 500 million years ago, we have a pretty good idea of what the relationship is between the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, this is carbon dioxide in parts-per-million in the atmosphere and what the temperatures were at the time. The global temperatures, which is on the right here. This is a measure of the relative temperature change in degrees C. 
	There are climate deniers who say, "How could we know that putting carbon into the air is going to cause global warming?"
	I'd just like to say that the set of inferences that scientists make to determine everything that science does, are exactly the same inferences that allow your car to start in the morning or your airplane to stay in the sky. There's really nothing different about those, and those inferences are such that we know what the carbon content of these ancient times by digging into the ice cores in Antarctica and looking at the bubbles there and how much carbon is in them. Most scientists think that's a reasonably good way of knowing what the air that was trapped back then, what its carbon content was. We have various proxies for the temperatures and that's what all these various curves are. These are different estimates and other stuff. But the critical thing is that the correlation between carbon dioxide and global mean temperatures is really, to a scientist, it's an established relationship. Doesn't mean that we know everything about what's going to happen.
	Now the previous slide goes back 500 million years ago or more, but I'm going to zoom in only on the last 10,000 since the glaciers. So you know that this area was all glaciated and that the Northern United States was pretty well covered in glaciers, and the mean temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were quite low then. On this chart it's down. The heavy black line is the average of all kinds of different proxy descriptors of the global temperature. The temperature anomaly here ... The point I want to make here is this is called the Holocene. It is the period in the Earth's history over millions of years that the temperature has been the coolest and the most stable for about ... What does that look? 10,000 years? So for 10,000 years or so, we've lived on a planet that had relatively cool and relatively stable mean temperatures, and that is precisely the time in which humanity developed, developed agriculture, developed civilizations. Most of our world is for the Holocene period.
	It's been said that the biblical story of the Garden of Eden is this. It's the Holocene. It was the period of time when humanity actually had relatively stable temperatures. Crops and things naturally developed that humans could eat, or they developed those crops, but it all worked because of this temperature sort of even-keel. This is of course going away. That's the same slide. This is the picture, you've probably seen this before, the hockey stick picture. It causes people palpitations. This is global mean temperatures since 1,000 years ago, from about the year 1000 forward. These are proxy measures, and they're averaged, and you'll notice that for the past thousand years, there's little ups and downs, little ice age here, little European warming there, but it's essentially amazingly consistent. This is us here. Already this is temperature in degrees C from the average from 1961 to 1990. That's where they drew the line.
	You can see already we're warmer than we've ever been. You probably know this, that anyone who's under 27 years old has never had a year that they did not live a warmer year than this long-term average, okay? So everyone who's a young person basically has grown up in times that are hotter than they ever been. How far back do you have to go to get to temperatures warmer than we have now? Way before the last ice age. In fact, you have to go out at least 100 thousand years and maybe more. The last time the carbon in the atmosphere has been as high as it is right now is about three million years ago. So why am I going into all this? This of course is the future, which is uncertain. It will depend entirely on what we do and the choices we make. 
	The reason why I'm banging on about global climate change is because fracking and natural gas has been proposed as a path forward, a way to get off of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum, and to shift to something better. That's just an inset showing the temperature rise system. I showed this slide at a faculty talk once, "Our extended forecast includes global warming and the catastrophic end of the human race, but for the weekend it's looking like sunny skies, mild temperatures, and a general apathy towards environmental concerns. Back to you Jim."
	The problem here isn't so much a general apathy. Almost anyone who sees that hockey stick graph or who knows about this says, "You know, we really should be doing something, but what can we do?"
	So people are grasping at straws, and they're thinking, "Well we can't go all to renewables because it's too costly. It's not even clear there are enough renewables to satisfy all our needs. We can't be any less energy-intensive or wasteful than we are without giving up our nice lifestyle. Do we really want to do without all the creature comforts that we worked so hard to build? And even if we do, someone else won't. It'll be China, or India, or Brazil." So hey, it's the tragedy of the commons, if you know that term. It basically means that everyone is taking a free resource, like grazing their cows on the common pasture, until the pasture's so overgrazed that all the cows starve. That doesn't do anyone any good, but it's up to each cow owner to want to take advantage of this free resource, and so that's what happens. Thesis a concern with regards to global climate change.
	I think fracking has really two big issues, and I want to put those on the table. You've seen these in context from what I said. The first is the big picture global warming change. Is fracking a path forward? The second is the local stuff. Do people get poisoned by the bad stuff they put in the ground? Does it mess up the groundwater? What about the radioactivity? What about just the fact that it uses a lot of water? I attended a wonderful session downtown at the College of Physicians on the potential health effects of hydraulic fracking that was given by a bunch of doctors that looked specifically at each aspect of this. It's not a surprise. People who live near, or are exposed to the fracking operation are very severely harmed by a whole bunch of things. Those include chemicals, radioactivity, diesel exhaust because there are a lot of trucks and stuff that do this operation, noise. 
	Noise is actually in some ways the worst because it's a broad stressor. If you have a frack operation near you, it's running 24/7 and it's noisy and you're going to have a hard time sleeping. It's hard. Whosever had a noise issue in your life, in some ways it's worse than these other ones. Roads and traffic, crime, and stress, stress being sort of a big picture. Now the Pennsylvania PTA, I gave a talk to them about this. They have a very interesting take. They're not going to talk about the global warming stuff, but they are going to talk about kids in Pennsylvania now. They're take on fracking is this. They want to make sure ... It says, "Pennsylvania PTA places a high value on a safe environment for children and youth. There is concern with the ability to monitor the activity of fracking." 
	They go on to say that the PTA advocates for research for a safer, cleaner method of extracting natural gas. They support local associations to become involved in their areas. They support agencies to take remedial steps to protect children, and everyone else, and encourage communities to educate themselves especially about disposal of waste and other aspects.
	I think this makes perfect sense. I had mentioned early that I'm a student of the arc of technology, and fracking is in the Wild West stage. All technologies start off in a stage where they're hardly noticed. They're not licensed, regulated, taxed. People just do whatever they want for a while, and eventually it rises to the level that the organs of society begin to act upon it. That's where we are with fracking, so I absolutely agree that these kind of efforts are necessary. But what about the global climate change issue? I mean, does fracking have any benefit there? Maybe as long as we do it really well and cleanly, locally, then in the end this is a good thing for us because it may get us through the climate change. I'm an optimistic person. That's what I want to find out, and I'd like to believe that. 
	So this is US carbon dioxide emissions 1992 to 2012, and you see that in the United States, carbon emissions have been falling since 2008. Why do you think so?
Audience:	The recession.
Speaker 1:	The recession. Right, but also fracking. Fracking has been responsible for cleaning up, and coal plants are closing right, left, and center now. Coal is a much more high-intensity carbon fuel. Coal plants are being driven out not because fracking is lower carbon, per se, but because it's cheaper and it's cheaper to buy frack gas than it is to buy coal now.
	Now, this is a graph showing carbon intensity, which is the amount of carbon for each unit of GDP produced. So for each unit of economic activity, it's the amount of carbon produced. The gray line is the past. What's interesting to me about this is that it's nearly horizontal. It dipped a little bit after the 1970s. Here's the world embargo and all that kind of stuff. From 1980 to now it's been just about constant, which means that we're using more, and more, and more fossil fuels but we're also getting more economic activity out of it. So the ratio is pretty much constant. 
	These next things are the different scenarios planned out depending on whether global climates rise two degrees, four degrees, or six degrees, and what would be necessary in reducing the amount of carbon per GDP in order for that to happen. So there's a bunch of assumptions built into this, but I just want to show you that the odds are that we're going to probably not decarbonize our energy sources enough to achieve these lower ones. I would like to think so, but I think it's unlikely. 
	In order to do so, we have to decrease our carbon intensity by more than half, which is to say half the carbon we're putting out now needs to be renewable or less carbon. What happens when US is running itself on methane, on natural gas, instead of coal? Well, coal gets really cheap. Right, economists? So coal is being burned like gangbusters in other countries, including the UK and other places. So you actually have the carbon in the United States going down but the carbon going up of other nations because coal is cheap now. So do you see that there's really no hope, because whatever anyone does, you get the opposite. So does it matter if we love fracking? It might give us energy independence from foreign oil, that's what people always say, and that's great, but what does that say about this other issue? Nothing.
	Okay, this is a paper, and I'm not going to dwell on it. These guys did a very, very excellent study. If anyone wants to get this, I can send it to you. They basically look at all the possible scenarios that we could reduce. What are the best-case situations? What are the optimistic situations for reducing our carbon? How, if we really wanted not to have these huge climate effects, how could we get there, and what effect would they have? The problem is, even if it's wind turbines, you've got to build them, and to build them takes carbon. So you've got to pay a little carbon to build the infrastructure that gets you to lower carbon later. 
	What they have is a bunch of curves, where the black curve is our current trajectory, which is basically burning coal world-wide, and other gases. Then these colored bands are different technologies: natural gas, coal with carbon capture, hydroelectric. You can see which ones eventually get us ... This is a hundred years from present, so if you go out 100 years, well after you start shifting over to this, you realize that the renewables do a pretty good job eventually. But hydroelectric you have to build a lot of dams, and you actually cost you a lot of carbon. Coal with carbon capture does, but it's not as effective. And natural gas, just this blue line, barely makes a dent in it.
	The vertical axis here is, "Additional temperate change caused by transition from coal-generation to alternative technology." Their conclusion is that natural gas is not going to save us for that reason I mentioned before. Natural gas is going to displace coal, it's going to be burned elsewhere. It's a world-wide. Natural gas is not going to save us from this. 
	These guys, different team, did a whole analysis of, "Could you make New York state run entirely on renewables?" And you might argue Pennsylvania or any other state. They concluded that yes, you could make it entirely if you went to the max on wind turbines, photovoltaics, and everything. You could satisfy all the current and anticipated needs of energy, based upon some assumptions, in New York state, but what they propose when you read this is such a huge magnitude build-out of renewables that it would completely be different than anything we've seen. Not just a few wind turbines here or there or a few photovoltaics, this means covering New York state with wind turbines and photovoltaics. But it could be done, and they even argue that it's cost-effective. 
	This paper actually shows, it does two things to me. On the one hand it says, "It is still possible for us to save our butts." But it also says, "And not we're not going to do it because it's just too much."
	I read that and I say, "I just can't imagine Legislators and Congress and stuff going for this." It's just too big an enchilada and too different from what we're used to. 
	Then you have New York Times Op-Ed saying, "China must exploit its shale gas," and it says specifically, "It's good because it will help global warming. Instead of fighting hydraulic fracturing, environmental activists should recognize that the technique is vital to the broader effort to contain climate change and should be pushed for stronger standards and controls over the process."
	In the end, I think I've come to believe after my study on this that this is probably not correct. It's not that we're going to stop fracking or even that it should be stopped. I think it's inevitable. Rather, we should not think of it as a solution. What we're doing, at most, is giving ourselves a longer fuse before disaster. We're giving ourselves a little bit of time, and maybe something else will come along or maybe not. The idea that we're going to go soon, in our lifetimes ... I mean it would have to be really soon ... to start to address the carbon issues by decarbonizing not just the United States but the world, because the atmosphere doesn't care if it comes from the United States, China, or anywhere else, right? It's really the atmosphere.
	In the end, these are my pros and cons for fracking. I said I'd put it in context. It can displace coal. I loved, on NPR this morning, you may have heard this. I heard, "Learn how Los Angeles reduced emissions from its entire bus fleet by switching to natural gas. ThinkAboutIt.Org, America's Natural Gas Alliance." How Los Angeles reduced emissions from its entire bus fleet. Well, yeah it did, but it doesn't matter. I mean, who cares if Los Angeles reduced emissions, it's not about Los Angeles. It's about the planet and in the end that may not matter.
	It can create jobs. This is the reason our governor is so nuts for fracking. Bridge fuel to biomethane, maybe, maybe not. The idea is that eventually you can maybe, after everyone's using natural gas for everything including transportation, and heating and air conditioning, and everything else, maybe you can slowly transition from fossil methane, or natural gas, to biomethane that's produced somehow by bacteria. There are various techniques by which you could take carbon out of the air and turn it into methane and then use it, but this is really speculative. If you think that turning New York state into photovoltaics and wind farms is speculative, in order to scale that up is enormous.
	Oh the other hand, we're going to be pretty desperate in a hundred years, so it's possible that may happen. I'm currently saying that may be like ... 
	Finally, its use for plastics and fertilizers, that's the methane. You probably know that all your credit cards and most of the plastics you ever use in life, that comes right from natural gas production. So in fact, plastics are getting cheaper, and fertilizer is getting cheaper.
	The cons are that it's used for plastics and fertilizer, local health effects, we've talked about those, silicosis. The mining of that fine silica dust causes in anybody who breathes the dust exactly the same thing, or something very similar, to the black lung disease of coal miners or of the asbestosis. The little particles get in the lungs and they don't come out, and they cause problems. That's called silicosis, and it's a rising problem. Leakage. I didn't even mention the fact that once you get the stuff out of the ground, two things. First of all, the well continues to leak forever.
	People have said, "But they plug the wells, don't they? They pour cement down the hole. That plugs it."
	You have made a hole in a geologic, in a series of layers, which has been around for 385 million years. So on the geologic timescale that has been plugged, and now you've made a hole in it. Do you think your steel pipe with cement filling it is going to last for 350 million years or even 10,000 years, or even 1,000 years? Pipes rust. Cement cracks, right? So there's a concern that even in the long run, all of these well are going to be putting out methane. In the short run, even after you get the gas out, you got to put it into a pipeline. Pipelines leak. We would have to have a completely different attitude towards our infrastructure to avoid all the methane leaks. Right now, methane is leaking all over the place, including when they produce it.
	Water used and removed from the water cycle. I was mentioning before that some fraction of the water stays in the hole, and it stays there for another 385 million years unless someone pumps it out or finds it again. Once the water that goes in the hole, it's lost. It's lost to the planet, it's not coming back out again. It's not just the fact that the stuff that comes out is polluted. At least some of that evaporates and we get it back in rain, but you don't get the water that stays in the hole back.
	Polluting aquifers. I mentioned that when they drill the holes, they put in a sleeve around it so that it can go through the aquifers. Well, those are known to leak, to fail, to have cracks that follow up and around and connect in unusual ways. Try to avoid having a crack go through some rock that you're not sure what it is. It's really hard. I think there's always going to be an actuarial likelihood of polluted aquifers. How long will they be polluted? Thousands, tens of thousands of years. The pollution doesn't go away. It's coming up from these deep things, so these are polluted forever for all of human kind.
	Roads and crops ... To frack or not to frack ... In conclusion, hydraulic fracking is here to stay, if not in the US, even if we banned it here. I have a lot of students who are going around, "Anti-fracking, stop fracking, lie down in front of the bull dozers. Stop fracking." To my mind, Spain is starting to frack, Russia is getting into it. It's going to happen because of the economics and the societal contexts. It's all about the context, right? That's what we learn at Swarthmore. All technologies mature and go through similar stages of evolution. Fracking is just leaving the Wild West phase and needs to be licensed, regulated, taxed, scrutinized, and improved. This technology could be a lot better than it is, but can it be good enough to really save us? No. 
	I think it's okay to go into it with eyes wide open. When I talk to people about it, I say, "Don't bother protesting against it, and yes, we should try to avoid harming people locally. But don't count on it to save our butts." We're going to have to do something else to save our butts, it's not going to be fracking. The idea that it's a transition, it may be a transition or it may be a transition to nowhere. In some ways, it's actually keeping us addicted to fossil fuels and not getting us off on other tacks, because it's so cheap now. Why pay extra money for photovoltaics and wind turbines when you can buy cheap natural gas? Right? It's actually slowing us down.
	All costs, including making all those who are harmed, must be included in the market price. Why is it so cheap? Why is frack gas so cheap? Because it's not really including the externalities of all the cost that everyone else has to pay, including the whole world, but the local folks. The only help for global warming is a combination of renewables, conservation, which means changing our lifestyle. Hah, good luck with that, and try to convince the poorer countries that they should still keep being poor and not act like us. 
	Nuclear. I'm not a big fan of nuclear, but in this context I'll go for it. 
	New technologies. Don't know what those are yet. People have this abiding belief that somehow some Edison's going to come along and invent something that's going to save us all, or that space aliens are going to come down and solve all our problems, or, and I'm not joking about all this, that because God gave Noah the rainbow that global climate change will not happen because God said he wasn't going to do it to us a second time. A large fraction of the people who are climate deniers take a theological argument. They have no quibble with anything about the physics. They'll say, "Yes, it looks dismal, but don't worry. It says here in the bible that it won't happen."
	That is their basis for fracking or whatever else. Amazing.
	The only way that we can save our own butts, the only way, and this is a shocking thought but I have thought about it now for a decade, is this: we must make all fossil fuels obsolete. In other words, why are we still hunting whales for the whale oil? Think about the past technologies. The only time we abandon a technology is when there's something better, like the slavery to fossil fuels. We've got to make fossil fuels obsolete, meaning there's no point in digging it out of the ground anymore. We could. It's there, but we've got a better solution. It's cheaper. It's easier. That doesn't exist yet.
	Okay, so that's the end of my talk. Any questions from staff first?
	Sorry to give you doom and gloom at lunch time.
	Yes?
Audience:	What's fracking like around the rest of the world? What other countries are using it and what is used [inaudible 00:41:12]?
Speaker 1:	Well I mentioned fracking is starting to come in big-time in those countries that have the geological formations that allow it to be effective. Spain has just announced a new open season on fracking. For a long time it was potentially banned. Germany had banned it, Green Party, but now they're starting to release. I think it's coming in. Russia is very into it, and there are all kinds of fracking formations in Russia. I don't know about south of the equator. I'm not aware of things happening. It may be that those formations are just not there. I don't think there's any fracking in Australia that I've heard about. There's other kinds of things, but the question was worldwide. I think it's a technology that now that it exists, now that people know how to do it, it's not going away any time soon, so the prospect is it's going to be an ever ... In fact, China, I think has formations that are appropriate for fracking and that's going to be a next big ...
	Yeah?
Audience:	[inaudible 00:42:12]
Speaker 1:	Honestly, it's not even the safety, because we could ... Look, we drive vehicles full of explosive liquids around and they very rarely form a conflagration. Sometimes, but not often. We have natural gas in our homes, and they rarely burn to the ground. I mean, we do a pretty good job, but it's more of an existential concern that the waste products of nuclear last tens of thousands of years, and it's just bad to make something that you can't get rid of on a scale of civilization. On the other hand, we're screwing things up on a scale of tens of thousands of years climate-wise. It's not going to go away. Even if we act precipitously, which we're not going to, we're going to have thousands of years of hot temperatures. 
	We have left the Holocene, that time where global temperatures were relatively constant and relatively cool. We've entered what they're calling the Anthropocene, or the human dominated era, where the global climate is dominated by human actions. We've already gotten far enough into that, that it's starting to form one of those epochs, or eras that they're talking about in geological time. It's going to last tens of thousands of years. Society is only 10,000 years old, really. Most civilizations go back 10,000 years, and we're talking about something that's going to take place over that time.
	So anyway, getting back to nuclear, in an even exchange, I'd say, "We gotta go for nuclear as much as we can because it doesn't have the greenhouse gas footprints." If I could displace fossil fuels with nuclear, I'd do it in a heartbeat not, even though we'd have nasty waste that lasts tens of thousands of years we'd have to sequester and deal with. I'm not sure how we'd do it. There'd be people hurt, no question, but people are going to be hurt horribly by climate change.
	Yeah.
Audience:	So it's two questions. What are they doing with the wastewater after they use fracking, and the water that they put in there I understand is treated and whatnot. Are they starting with clean water?
Speaker 1:	Yes.
Audience:	Why?
Speaker 1:	They have to start with clean water because the characteristics by which the frack water have to be within very tight tolerances, and if you started with natural streams or rivers or that water, there's a wide variation in the chemical properties, the various pH and other things, and it's very hard to adjust that on the go. They have to start with clean water to begin with and then add all of their stuff in. So that's water that we don't get to drink, or bathe in, or use for other things. What they do with the water that comes out is right now it's put into ponds and kind of concentrated. So there is some evaporated. Much of it is taken to conventional wastewater treatment plants, like the wastewater treatment plant that cleans our sewage, and added in, kind of mixed into the regular wastewater stream flow. 
	There's concerns about that, because, as I mentioned, radioactivity is not taken out. That means that frack water that goes through conventional wastewater treatment plants, the output of that wastewater treatment plant for us is the Delaware River. All of our toilet flushing ends up, after being cleaned, goes into the Delaware River. But that could get radioactive, or more radioactive, if frack water is put in there. So honestly, there's not a good answer to this. There is not a good answer to what should be done with all of that water that has all these chemicals and radioactive in it, and the regulations are few and far between to enforce that.
	You would think that the Clean Water Act, which says you cannot pollute rivers and streams, would kick in, but guess what? Congress in 2005 exempted fracking from the Clean Water Act. Completely exempted it, 2005.
	Let's hear more. Anybody else? Yeah.
Audience:	Has there been any reports regarding leakage in some of the smaller areas you mentioned? Possibility of leakage?
Speaker 1:	Absolutely. You've seen the famous video of methane coming out of people's faucets and taps. You've seen people complaining about their drinking water becoming polluted. Very interestingly, it would be a very easy technology to ask each fracking site to use a tracer chemical, which is benign but unique, and mix it in with their water so that if it did get into the local water supply, you would know for sure that it came from that. And guess what? They won't do it. Why won't thy do it? Obvious, but then they should. They should be made to do that. And if they do it, they should make everyone whole who can't use their well anymore. They really should, and to me there's no reason not to other than all the politics and economics, which is of course very important. From an engineer's point of view, that would be the first thing I would do.
	Yeah.
Audience:	Are of these [inaudible 00:46:37] ?
Speaker 1:	Okay, that's a very good question, yes. So you could pump the nasty water back into other holes, or even to the same holes potentially. Maybe you need more than this, but the idea of using it for carbon sequestration or even sequestration of bad stuff, whatever the bad stuff is. This is a mature research are. There are people who are working on carbon sequestration technologies. Coal mines haven't gone away. All those coal mines that were dug are still there, and they might be a good place to put bad stuff, whether carbon in some form to get out of the atmosphere, or fracked fluid or other things. You probably know that when they inject frack water or other things into the ground, sometimes they cause earthquakes. 
	Actually, it's very interesting seismologically, what is the relationship between the high pressure injection into these deep wells and earth quakes? It may be one of those things that it's still worth doing, even if you get an earthquake from time to time, you still have to make the people whole whose homes fall down or whatever. You've got to compensate for that, because it's not their fault. But yet, we're all getting the advantage of the cheap natural gas, so we probably should pay for the people who are harmed in society. That's what a society does. If some people get hurt, we all should chip in.
	It's 1 o'clock. Is there a last question I could take before we close down? At least I put it in context for you. I don't know that I've answered any question, but now you understand the pros, cons, the dimensions. That's the reality. That's the truth of it.
	Last question or comment?
Audience:	[inaudible 00:48:14] What's your assessment of that?
Speaker 1:	I believe that's not true, I mean from the evidence. I think what is adequate ... People draw the line at different places ... I would say it's not adequate. I think the most important thing is not the state of Pennsylvania. Why should this be a state-by-state thing? It really shouldn't. It should be federal, and there should be very strong controls. 
	When the Industrial Revolution hit, think of all the changes that it made, but it mostly made those changes in the cities. This is a technology that's hitting the countryside. These wells are not in cities, they're out in farmlands, and so the people who are now being hurt and who are dealing with this, the locals, are people in rural America. It's industrializing rural America, and that's a new thing in a way that hasn't really happened before. So we really need to have federal regulation. That's my opinion. 
	Thank you all for coming.