In the debate over how shale gas drilling should be regulated, Albert Appleton, an infrastructure and environmental consultant, says one aspect of the issue is being overlooked: Who will pay the environmental costs?
"Over the next 10 years, it will become ever more apparent that the existing hydrocarbon-based energy industry will be playing a game of last-man-standing in which the prize will go to the industry or the components of particular industries that are more efficient and more sustainable," he said in testimony offered on June 4 to the House Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee.
The billions of dollars involved in extracting shale gas using hydraulic fracturing fluids that can pollute groundwater supplies have "externalized environmental costs" that will be paid by a public that is struggling both with the costs of "transitioning to a green economy and with the steadily accelerating costs of unprecedented climate change," he said.
So far, only the coal industry seems to recognize that fact, largely because "it has not been sheltered, as shale gas extraction has been, from the upsurge of public opposition to unsustainable energy generation," Appleton said.
The coal industry "is now developing a serious commitment to clean coal and trying to make deep subsurface CO2 injection work. It is far too early to assess whether they will be successful in these efforts, but the fact they are starting to face their future in this manner is a welcome development."
The gas industry, which uses the controversial hydraulic fracturing technique to extract gas from shale formations, "needs a similar epiphany if it is not to enjoy a brief burst of publicly subsidized splendor followed by a decline that leaves much of the American countryside an industrialized sacrifice zone," he remarked.
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