As I sit here typing away, Amazon.Com’s Cloud Player serves up 320 tunes I’ve purchased over the past year and a half. I can play them anywhere, any time, on any computer with Internet access. I don’t have to lug around my laptop or even a flash drive. What’s not to like?

Our greener friends worry about all the power consumed by the data centers that deliver computer services over the Internet. Think of all the emissions!

A year-long New York Times investigation summarized in Saturday’s (Sep. 22) edition (“Pollution, Power, and the Internet“) spotlights the explosive growth of the data storage facilities supporting our PCs, cell phones, and iPods — and the associated surge in energy demand. According to The Times:

• In early 2006, Facebook had 10 million or so users and one main server site. ”Today, the information generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems.”
• “They [Facebook's servers] are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.”
• “To support all that digital activity, there are now more than three million data centers of widely varying sizes worldwide, according to figures from the International Data Corporation.”
• “Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.”
• “Jeremy Burton, an expert in data storage, said that when he worked at a computer technology company 10 years ago, the most data-intensive customer he dealt with had about 50,000 gigabytes in its entire database. (Data storage is measured in bytes. The letter N, for example, takes 1 byte to store. A gigabyte is a billion bytes of information.)”
• “Today, roughly a million gigabytes are processed and stored in a data center during the creation of a single 3-D animated movie, said Mr. Burton, now at EMC, a company focused on the management and storage of data.”
• “Just one of the company’s clients, the New York Stock Exchange, produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored for years, he added.”

The impact of the Internet — or, more broadly, the proliferation of digital technology and networks — on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions has been a contentious topic since 1999, when technology analyst Mark P. Mills published a study provocatively titled “The Internet Begins with Coal” and co-authored with Peter Huber a Forbes column titled “Dig more coal: The PCs are coming.”

Mills and Huber argued that digital networks, server farms, chip manufacture, and information technology had become a new key driver of electricity demand. And, they said, as the digital economy grows, so does demand for super-reliable power — the kind you can’t get from intermittent sources like wind turbines and solar panels.

Huber and Mills touted the policy implications of their analysis. To wire the world, we must electrify the world. For most nations, that means burning more coal. The Kyoto agenda imperils the digital economy, and vice versa.

Others — notably Joe Romm and researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) — argued that the Internet was a minor contributor to electricity demand and potentially a major contributor to energy savings in such areas as supply-chain management, telecommuting, and online purchasing.

Although Mills’s “ballpark” estimates — 8% of the nation’s electric supply absorbed by Internet-related hardware and 13% of U.S. power consumed by the all information technology — were likely much too high in 1999, they may now be close to the mark. On the question of basic trend and direction, Mills was spot on.

Critics scoffed at Mills’s contention that, in 1999, computers and other consumer electronics accounted for a significant share of household electricity consumption. Ten years later, in Gadgets and Gigawatts, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that in many OECD country households, electronic devices — a category that includes televisions, desktop computers, laptops, DVD players and recorders, modems, printers, set-top boxes, cordless telephones, answering machines, game consoles, audio equipment, clocks, battery chargers, mobile phones and children’s games — consumed more electricity than did traditional large appliances. The IEA projected that to operate those devices, households around the world would spend around $200 billion in electricity bills and require the addition of approximately 280 Gigawatts (GW) of new generating capacity by 2030. The agency also projected that even with improvements foreseen in energy efficiency, consumption by electronics in the residential sector would increase 250% by 2030. Saturday’s New York Times article further vindicates Mills’s central insight (even if not his specific estimates).

Jonathan Koomey, one of the authors of the LBNL critique of Mills’s 1999 study, estimates that, nationwide, data centers consumed about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or 2% of U.S. electricity use in that year. In a Forbes column published last year, Mills opined that if we factor in three other components of “digital energy ecosystem” — (1) the energy required to transport the data from storage centers to end users, (2) the “electricity used by all the digital stuff on desks and in closets in millions of homes and businesses,” and (3) the energy required to “manufacture all the hardware for the data centers, networks, and pockets, purses and desktops” — then the digital economy’s total appetite “is north of 10% of national electricity use.”

The Times laments that data centers “waste” vast amounts of power. On a typical day, only about 6% to 12% of a center’s computing power is actually utilized, yet most of the facility’s servers will be kept running around the clock. To call that wasteful, however, is to confuse the engineering concept of efficiency with the economic concept. In economics, what matters is value to the consumer. Consumers demand reliable, uninterrupted access to data. Keeping all the servers humming ensures the center can handle unexpected peaks in demand without crashing. A center that saves energy but bogs down or crashes will lose customers or go out of business. As one industry analyst told The Times, “They [data center managers] don’t get a bonus for saving on the electric bill. They get a bonus for having the data center available 99.999 percent of the time.”

Obviously, it is in a center’s interest to find ways to provide the same (or greater) value to consumers at lower cost, including lower energy cost. But, notes Mills, efficiency tends to increase consumption, not reduce it:

Car engine energy efficiency improved 500 percent pound-for-pound from early years to the late 20th century. Greater efficiency made it possible to make better, more featured, safer, usually heavier and more affordable cars. So rising ownership and utilization lead to 400 percent growth in transportation fuel use since WWII. The flattening of automotive energy growth in the West is a recent phenomenon as we finally see near saturation levels in road-trips per year and cars-per-household. We are a long way from saturation on video ‘trips’ on the information highways.

Efficiency gains are precisely what creates and increases overall traffic and energy demand; more so for data than other service or products. From 1950 to 2010, the energy efficiency of information processing improved ten trillion-fold in terms of computations per kWh. So a whole lot more data-like machines got built and used — consequently the total amount of electricity consumed to perform computations increased over 100-fold since the 1950s – if you count just data centers. Count everything we’re talking about here and the energy growth is beyond 300-fold.

Fundamentally, if it were not for more energy-efficient logic processing, storage and transport, there would be no Google or iPhone. At the efficiency of early computing, just one Google data center would consume more electricity than Manhattan. Efficiency was the driving force behind the growth of Internet 1.0 as it will be for the wireless video-centric Internet 2.0.

So what’s the solution? Where Mills once argued that the “Internet Begins with Coal,” he now argues that “The Cloud Begins with Coal (and Fracking)“:

Some see the energy appetite of the Cloud as a problem. Others amongst us see it as evidence of a new global tech boom that echoes the arrival of the automotive age. We’re back to the future, where the microprocessor today as an engine of growth may not be new, anymore than the internal combustion engine was new in 1958. It’s just that, once more, all the components, features and forces are aligned for enormous growth. With that growth we will find at the bottom of this particular digital well, the need to dig more coal, frack more shale….

You have probably heard or read the talking point many times: The United States consumes nearly one-quarter of the world’s oil but we have only 2-3% of the world’s proved reserves (here, here, here), hence we cannot drill our way out of high gasoline prices (here, here, here), and should instead adopt policies (cap-and-trade, biofuel quota, fuel-efficiency mandates) to accelerate America’s transition to a low-carbon future.

A new report by the Institute for Energy Research (IER), North American Energy Inventory (December 2011), demolishes the gloomy assessment underpinning demands for centralized planning of America’s energy future.

Proved reserve estimates actually tell us relatively little about America’s energy resources. Proved reserves refer to oil and gas deposits that have already been discovered, and which can be economically recovered today. But much larger quantities are technically recoverable, and advances in technology continually make more oil and gas economical to recover. Moreover, new deposits are continually discovered as proved reserves are exploited.

Consequently, proved reserves can — and often do – increase as more oil and gas are consumed. “For example,” notes the IER report, ”in 1980, the U.S. had oil reserves of roughly 30 billion barrels. Yet from 1980 through 2010, we produced over 77 billion barrels of oil. In other words, over the last 30 years, we produced over 150 percent of our proved reserves.”

Just a few short years ago, it was assumed that U.S. reserves of natural gas would decline and we would have to import increasing amounts of high-priced liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Middle East. But the combination of horizontal drilling and hydro-fracturing (“fracking”), which releases gas trapped in shale, has created a boom in the production of this “unconventional” resource, which was once uneconomical to develop. IER notes:

In its Annual Energy Outlook 2010 (AEO 2010), EIA predicted that by 2035, shale gas would account for 26 percent of total U.S. natural gas production. But in 2010, shale gas was already accounting for 23 percent of domestic production. In its latest Annual Energy Outlook (AEO 2011), the EIA projects that by 2035, shale gas will account for an astounding 46 percent of total U.S. natural gas production.

The same technological combo — horizontal drilling and fracking — is also revving up production of “unconventional” oil from shale deposits such as the Bakken formation in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford formation in Texas. IER comments:

 In 2002, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated the [Marcellus] area held about two trillion cubic feet of natural gas and .01 billion barrels of natural gas liquids. By 2011, however, the USGS estimated the area held 84 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 3.4 billion barrels of liquids. Within a span of 9 years, technology increased estimated natural gas supplies in the Marcellus 42-fold, and liquids 340-fold. Similarly, the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana was estimated to have 151 million barrels of oil in 1995, but by 2008, the USGS had increased its estimate to between three and 4.3 billion barrels, 25 times the 1995 estimate. History is rampant with these types of increased estimates of resources as improved technology enables more resources to be produced.

Similarly, technological advances such as steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) have turned Canada’s vast tar sands deposits into a gigantic source of economically recoverable oil. Notes IER:

Oil sands production has allowed Canada to increase its proved reserves of oil from five billion barrels to 170 billion barrels, making its oil reserves third only to those of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

What energy consumers should worry about is not resource depletion but politically-contrived roadblocks to safe and responsible energy production, IER argues. Fortunately, ”The truth that is finally becoming clear is that North America is not only blessed with huge quantities of energy, but also could become the single largest producer in the world, with all of the attendant manufacturing, technological innovation and re-industrialization that would provide generations with good jobs and sustainable futures.”

The IER report offers a tour of North American oil, gas, and coal resources with maps, charts, and data based on U.S. Government and other public sources. Here are the key numbers:

Oil

Total Recoverable Resources: 1.79 trillion barrels.

•  Enough oil to fuel every passenger car in the United States for 30 years
• Almost twice as much as the combined proved reserves of all OPEC nations
• More than six times the proved reserves of Saudi Arabia

Natural Gas

Total Recoverable Resources: 4.244 quadrillion cubic feet.

• Enough natural gas to provide the United States with electricity for 575 years at current
  natural gas generation levels
• Enough natural gas to fuel homes heated by natural gas in the United States for 857 years
• More natural gas than all of the next five largest national proved reserves (more than
  Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkmenistan)

Coal

Total Recoverable Resources: 497 billion short tons.

• Provide enough electricity for approximately 500 years at coal’s current level of
  consumption for electricity generation
• Provide enough electricity for approximately 500 years at coal’s current level of
  consumption for electricity generation
• More coal than any other country in the world
• More than the combined total of the top five non-North American countries’ reserves
  (Russia, China, Australia, India, and Ukraine)
• Almost three times as much coal as Russia, which has the world’s second largest reserves

Arthur Brisbane of the NYT this weekend published an op-ed which reads a bit like a ‘mea culpa’ in response to repeated criticisms of reporter Ian Urbina’s jumbling attack on natural gas hydraulic fracturing published late last month:

I also asked why The Times didn’t include input from the energy giants, like Exxon Mobil, that have invested billions in natural gas recently. If shale gas is a Ponzi scheme, I wondered, why would the nation’s energy leader jump in?

Mr. Urbina and Adam Bryant, a deputy national editor, said the focus was not on the major companies but on the “independents” that focus on shale gas, because these firms have been the most vocal boosters of shale gas, have benefited most from federal rules changes regarding reserves and are most vulnerable to sharp financial swings. The independents, in industry parlance, are a diverse group that are smaller than major companies like Exxon Mobil and don’t operate major-brand gas stations.

This was lost on many readers, including me. Michael Levi, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that the article “repeatedly confuses the fortunes of various risk-hungry independents with the fortunes of the industry as a whole.”

He told me he hadn’t realized that the report was focused on independents and read it more broadly, adding, “If I didn’t know they were talking about certain independents, then Times readers — who don’t know what an independent is — they aren’t going to know what they are talking about either.”

This confusion stems from the language in the article, which near the top referred to “natural gas companies” and “energy companies.” The term “independent” appeared only once, inside a quoted e-mail.

The rest is here. His overall criticism is well founded. The original piece was quite one sided, with only a small section dedicated to those with confidence in the industry. It failed to differentiate between small and large producers, and used scare words such as ‘Enron’ and ‘ponzi scheme’ which were unwarranted. To readers unfamiliar with the natural gas industry, it might have been helpful to point out, as Brisbane notes, that natural gas production has increased from 2% of natural gas production to over 20% in the last 10 years, leading to a steep drop in the price of natural gas.

There is already enough mis-information in the media concerning natural gas, such as the widely touted Gasland, or Stephen Colbert’s recent attack (criticized here). The NYT does a disservice to its readers when misleading criticisms like this are published to support the narrative that hydraulic fracturing is not something Americans should support. Unfortunately, despite the very fair criticisms, the lead author and editor are standing behind their work.

In the worst Spitzerian tradition, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) today announced that he is suing the federal government for failing to conduct an environmental analysis on the impacts to drinking water caused by ‘fracking,’ a.k.a. hydraulic fracturing, the American-made technological miracle in natural gas production that has roughly doubled known North American gas reserves in only the last 5 years.

New York could be a huge beneficiary of fracking, as much of the state is situated above the Marcellus Shale, an enormous gas deposit in the American Northeast that can be tapped only with this new technology. But environmentalist special interest groups oppose the practice, because it would expand America’s supply of hydrocarbon energy, and they have whipped up alarm among Manhattanites by making unfounded claims that fracking would pollute New York City’s water supply.

In fact, these allegations are bunk. Just ask the British Parliament, which recently concluded that fracking is safe for water supplies. Closer to home, AG Schneiderman could have sought counsel from New York State Geologist Dr. Taury Smith, a self-described liberal Democrat, who  told the Albany Times Union that the state’s natural gas deposits are “a huge gift.” Dr. Smith dismissed the environmentalists’ allegations about water contamination as being “exaggerated,” and “the worst spin.”

As I explained in a previous post,

“While there is some evidence that poorly built ‘fracking’ rigs could lead to the escape of methane into local groundwater wells, this isn’t as disturbing as it sounds. Methane (ie, natural gas) does not make water poisonous, and there is no evidence that the fluids used in the process, which could be toxic, have leaked into well water. Much more importantly, there is ZERO evidence that the process affects water tables used for utility scale water supply, although environmentalist special interests are quick to try to conflate well-water methane contamination with water table contamination. The upshot is that hydraulic fracturing has been used in this country for fifty years, without harming public health and environment.”

In any case, AG Schneiderman’s request ignores the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency already is conducting a high-profile, comprehensive study on fracking’s impact on water, due in 2012. As such, his demand is already being met, so there was no reason to litigate. Of course, he knows this, which is why it’s a safe bet that this silly lawsuit was launched just so the AG could have a press conference, à la Spitzer.

As readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I’m a big fan of ‘fracking,’ a.k.a. hydraulic fracturing, the American-made technological miracle in natural gas production that has roughly doubled known North American gas reserves in only the last five years. In previous posts, I’ve defended fracking from nonsensical attacks launched by ill-informed environmentalists. Quite contrary to what the alarmists would have you believe, we’re lucky for the fracking revolution. Not only has it dramatically increased our domestic supply of natural gas, but now it’s being used to extract oil, too, and it could prove just as revolutionary for that industry.

Fracking does, however, have one major drawback: it has caused rampant rent-seeking. While gas supply has exploded, American consumption increased only 9 percent from 2005 to 2010. The sagging economy has further increased this disparity between gas supply and demand. For consumers, this is great, as it should usher in a period of relatively stable, low prices in the historically volatile gas market. For gas producers, it could be great. The low prices should make their product more attractive relative to other forms of energy. In turn, this could lead to whole new sectors of demand.The problem is that a couple major players in the gas industry refuse to wait for market forces to work their magic.  Instead, these impatient industry titans are trying to convince politicians to enact policies that force Americans to use natural gas.

Consider, for example, Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon, who is leading a nationwide charge to force Americans to use more gas for electricity. As I’ve explained, McClendon has been traveling around the country trying to convince eco-friendly governors to switch from “dirty” coal to “clean” gas. So far, he’s scored one major success. In Colorado, Governor Bill Ritter pushed through a law requiring fuel switching from coal to gas for almost 1,000 megawatts of electricity. If McClendon gets his druthers, other states will follow suit. As I understand it, McClendon’s next targets are Texas and Arkansas.

Then there’s natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens. He’s trying to get the Congress to enact H.R. 1380, a.k.a. the “Pickens Your Pocket Boondoggle Bill” or the “T. Boone Pickens Earmark Plan,” which would have taxpayers finance the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel, in particular for the trucking industry.

At the very least, these policies are special interest rip-offs. But they could be much, much worse, due to unintended consequences typically wrought by such massive market manipulations.

It’s a welcome development that fracking has increased gas supply; it’s an equally unwelcome development that it has also increased rent-seeking.

British columnist Johann Hari recently took to the Huffington Post to try to whip up alarm about the supposed dangers posed to drinking water by ‘fracking,’ a.k.a hydraulic fracturing, an American-made technological miracle in natural gas production that has roughly doubled known North American gas reserves in only the last five years. I rebutted Hari’s baseless environmentalist talking points in a previous post, and I am much pleased to report this morning that the British Parliament agrees with my debunking of his nonsensical claims.

According to Public Service Europe (by way of the Global Warming Policy Foundation),

“Shale gas drilling has been given the go-ahead by members of the UK parliament who have insisted that the process is safe. An inquiry by the Energy and Climate Change committee concluded that fracking, the process by which gas is extracted from shale rock, poses no risk to underground water supplies as long as drilling wells are properly constructed.”

Dow Jones NewsWire’s writeup includes this money quote from Tim Yeo, the Conservative member of Parliament who chairs the bipartisan committee,

“There has been a lot of hot air recently about the dangers of shale gas drilling, but our inquiry found no evidence to support the main concern–that UK water supplies would be put at risk. There appears to be nothing inherently dangerous about the process of ‘fracking’ itself and as long as the integrity of the well is maintained shale gas extraction should be safe.”

Hear, hear! Is Hari listening?

London Independent columnist Johann Hari feels betrayed by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s decision to embrace the American-made revolution in natural gas production, known as hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a., ‘fracking’). Recently, he wrote in the Huffington Post,

“When the British Prime Minister David Cameron gazed into the dewy eyes of a husky and promised to lead “the greenest government ever,” what did you think that would involve?… you certainly wouldn’t have expected David Cameron’s latest plan. He has decided to convert us to a new energy source [fracking] that seems, in the US, to have released cancer-causing chemicals and radiation into the water supply…”

“Cancer-causing chemicals” AND “radiation” have been released “into the water supply”….that sounds really scary! Fortunately for this American tap-water enthusiast, Hari is full of it. As I explain here,

“While there is some evidence that poorly built “fracking” rigs could lead to the escape of methane into local groundwater wells, this isn’t as disturbing as it sounds. Methane (ie, natural gas) does not make water poisonous, and there is no evidence that the fluids used in the process, which could be toxic, have leaked into well water. Much more importantly, there is ZERO evidence that the process affects water tables used for utility scale water supply, although environmentalist special interests are quick to try to conflate well-water methane contamination with water table contamination. The upshot is that hydraulic fracturing has been used in this country for fifty years, without harming public health and environment.”

Hari hits a wrongness exacta. His claim that hydraulic fracturing has released “cancer causing chemicals and radiation into the water supply” is bogus, and he also incorrectly conflates methane seepage into local wells and the contamination of utility scale water supply with toxic fluids.

At first I thought Hari was making stuff up, but then I learned he was simply borrowing from someone else who made this stuff up. To lend evidence to his baseless claims, Hari links here, to the Amazon page for “Gasland,” a thoroughly debunked agitprop documentary on the supposed evils of fracking.

Two days ago, the New York Times reported that the French Parliament is “leaning” towards a ban on hydraulic fracturing, the American-made technological revolution in production that has vastly increased the known economically recoverable global reserves of natural gas. According to the article,

French lawmakers opened debate on Tuesday on proposals to ban a method for extracting oil and gas deposits from shale because of environmental concerns, throwing up the first serious stumbling block to firms that want to use the practice.

Looking with alarm at the experience in the United States, where shale gas is booming, even members of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s governing conservative party have come out against the practice, known as hydraulic fracturing, in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped deep underground under high pressure to free scattered pockets of oil and gas from dense rock formations.

The article, while interesting, misses the big picture. For starters, it’s unclear why French lawmakers would look “with alarm” at the U.S. experience. While there is some evidence that poorly built “fracking” rigs could lead to the escape of methane into local groundwater wells, this isn’t as disturbing as it sounds. Methane (ie, natural gas) does not make water poisonous, and there is no evidence that the fluids used in the process, which could be toxic, have leaked into well water. Much more importantly, there is ZERO evidence that the process affects water tables used for utility scale water supply, although environmentalist special interests are quick to try to conflate well-water methane contamination with water table contamination. The upshot is that hydraulic fracturing has been used in this country for fifty years, without harming public health and environment.

The article also omits mention of why France might be inclined to dismiss fracking: namely, because it isn’t needed. Since 1980, the French government has made nuclear electricity generation a policy priority, and, as a result, the country gets more than 75 percent of its juice from atomic power. That’s the most in the world—by far. For comparison, the U.S. generates about 20 percent of its electricity with nuclear, and Japan gets about a quarter of electricity generation from nuclear. In light of the government’s singular promotion of nuclear, France has a much lower incentive for other forms of electricity generation, like gas. It can afford to pass on the fracking revolution.

The situation is very much different in the rest of Europe. Spain, for example, uses much imported liquid natural gas for electricity generation, so it is more amenable to domestic hydraulic fracturing. About seven months ago, I had breakfast with a representative from an American gas company that was working closely with Spanish energy companies to develop the technology there.

Then there’s Germany. In that country, the Green Party is anomalously powerful, and their influence renders new nuclear and coal verboten. That’s a problem, because the only alternative to coal and nuclear is Russian natural gas. I won’t review 150 years of European history, but suffice it to say, many Germans aren’t keen on being increasingly dependent on the Russian Bear. The two countries have quite a past.

This applies to much of Central and Eastern Europe. Thanks to the European Union’s climate policies, new coal power is difficult. And thanks to the Japanese nuclear crisis, nuclear is out of favor, too. But for these countries, for whom the Russian yoke is all too fresh on the mind, dependence on Gazprom is out of the question. They are very much amenable to hydraulic fracturing technology.

I rarely sing the Obama Administration’s praises on energy policy, but I must give the President props for identifying the geopolitical opportunity inherent to fracking. The State Department has been actively promoting the technology in Europe, no doubt as a counter to the prospect of European reliance on Russian gas.

To be sure, I hate the way politicians in this country use “energy independence” to justify myriad stupid energy policies, but the gas market is very different from the oil market. Whereas the latter is a global market, the former is bound by the logistical infrastructure (ie, pipes). As a result, it’s relatively easy for Russia to play hardball and use gas deliveries as a diplomatic bargaining chip. It has done so with the Ukraine and Belarus.

France doesn’t need fracking; the rest of Europe does, because it’s much more attractive an option than the alternative, reliance on Gazprom or imported LNG. These geopolitical concerns will drive a European turn to the practice.

As was widely reported this week,  a new study has just come out concluding that, compared to coal, shale gas fracking is anywhere from just as bad to much worse in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the holy-grail of peer-revision, there appear to be some very obvious methodological problems and reliance on very poor data (which the researchers have admitted, and wish they had access to better information).

Here is a piece of a review from Matt Ridley, entitled “Black Propaganda.” (Read the whole thing):

So, in other words, shale gas has greater global warming potential than coal only if you rely on lousy data, misunderstood accounting categories, quadrupled assumptions about methane’s relative greenhouse potential — and then only in the short term, when people like Black are always telling us it is the long term we should worry about.

A review from Michael Levi of CFR (again, the whole thing is worth reading):

First, the data for leakage from well completions and pipelines, which is where he’s finding most of his methane leaks, is really bad. Howarth used what he could get – figures for well completion leakage from a few isolated cases reported in industry magazines, and numbers for pipeline leakage from long-distance pipelines in Russia – but what he could get was very thin. There is simply no way to know (without access to much more data) if the numbers he uses are at all representative of reality.

Second, Howarth’s gas-to-coal comparisons are all done on a per energy unit basis. That means that he compares the amount of emissions involved in producing a gigajoule of coal with the amount involved in producing a gigajoule of gas. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what a gigajoule is – it doesn’t really matter.) Here’s the thing: modern gas power generation technology is a lot more efficient than modern coal generation, so a gigajoule of gas produces a lot more electricity than a gigajoule of coal. The per kWh comparison is the correct one, but Howarth doesn’t do it. This is an unforgivable methodological flaw; correcting for it strongly tilts Howarth’s calculations back toward gas, even if you accept everything else he says.

…

One last comment: I worry about what this paper says about the peer review process and the way the press treats it. This article was published in a peer-reviewed journal that’s edited by talented academics. It presumably got a couple good reviews, since its time from submission to publication was quite short. These reviewers don’t appear to have been on the ball. Alas, this sort of thing is inevitable in academic publishing. It’s a useful caution, though, against treating peer review as a mark of infallibility, as too many in the climate debate – both media and advocates – have done.

The weak data and unorthodox methodology should make one question its ultimate conclusion, and it doesn’t help that the author is apparently an anti-fracking advocate. The EPA has already called this study an “important piece of information” and it has been reported on without mentioning the critiques in a number of media outlets (and here). Some outlets were better:

Mark D. Whitley, a senior vice president for engineering and technology with Range Resources, a gas drilling company with operations in several regions of the country, said the losses suggested by Mr. Howarth’s study were simply too high.

“These are huge numbers,” he said. “That the industry would let what amounts to trillions of cubic feet of gas get away from us doesn’t make any sense. That’s not the business that we’re in.”

Most business models don’t include plans to allow billions of dollars of your product to escape into the atmosphere.

CEI’s Iain Murray has an op-ed in The Washington Times today explaining what can be learned from the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan.

Here’s an excerpt:

Without this vigorous defense of nuclear, the Obama energy plan will have a massive hole at its core – one that cannot be filled by wind and solar power any more than it can be filled by fairy dust. The obvious answer is for the administration to stop its war on coal, but that is unlikely. The only other plausible choice is natural gas, derived by hydraulic fracturing – a procedure that environmentalists are already trying to ban. If they want to keep their plan going in any workable form, the president and Mr. Chu need to tell Americans unequivocally where their future power is going to come from, and push back against ideological environmentalists who are trying to ban practical sources of energy.

Read the rest here.