Today’s report is co-authored by the Royal Academy of Engineers. Cuadrilla Chairman Lord Browne was president of the RAE until last year
The report on fracking released today by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) & the Royal Society omits a key consideration: the RAE’s ex-President is Lord Browne, Chairman of Cuadrilla, the UK’s leading fracker.
Lord Browne was head of the RAE – co-author of the report – until last year. Browne owns 30% of Cuadrilla and works inside government as a non-executive director to the Cabinet Office.
The RAE is also part funded by the oil and gas industry. In the last three years the RAE has taken £601,000 from ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Petrofac (an oil services company) – all of whom have links to fracking (see the RAE’s financial reports here). Robert Mair, the Chairman of the report, is a fellow of the RAE.
In 1992 the RAE awarded a £50,000 prize to 2 BP engineers for their advances in hydraulic fracturing (see p5 here).
The influence of the oil and gas industry on the RAE has not decreased with Lord Browne’s departure. His successor – Sir John Parker – is also a scion of the fracking industry. Before taking over at the RAE, Parker headed Anglo American, which has fracking interests in in South Africa. Parker is a gas man through and through – some of his previous positions include non-executive director at British Gas, Chairman of National Grid Transco (gas & electricity distribution) and non-executive of BG Group (which has coal bed methane interests in Scotland).
The UK government is following a familiar path of dressing up vested interests as impartial advice. In April a government-named panel of ‘experts’ recommended fracking continue – despite concerns over earthquakes. One of the panel was a member of the British Geological Survey, which is partly funded by companies involved in the hydraulic fracturing industry, including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, BG Group and Schlumberger.
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I have read the RAE and Royal Society Report on the dangours of fracking and have the following comments on it:
1) I disagree with the statement that fracking will be safe if the correct safety regulations are to be followed. The answer to the question Will the well annulus (cement between the steel casing and adjacent rock) fails is YES it will fail with time (see dr Barry Stevens comments to the same question).
2) The travel time along a fracture with an aperture of 1 mm from a depth of 3 km to the surface given a hydraulic gradient of 0.1 will be less than 5 hours. For a gradient of 0.01 the travel time will still be less than 1 day. Even if we decrease the aperture to 0.1 mm with a gradient of 0.01, the travel time will be less than 1 year to reach the surface. Scary indeed and one must remember that the chemical dilution that will happen can be disregarded. Even without the fracking chemicals included, the existing brackish water at a depth of 3 km will pollute the fresh water aquifer.
3) Scale of the problem: For a typical well pad consisting of 10 horisontal fracking wells, an area of between 400 – 700 acres will be de-gassed over a period of between 10 to 20 years. During the production phase of the wells, the wells are the preferential pathways for gas and water migration. It is only after the production phase that the real pollutant dangours regarding fresh water pollution will become a reality. Now the brackish water which could contain nasty fracking chemicals and NORMs is looking gor other preferential flow paths like cracked well annuli, faults and fractures. And even weak eartquakes can cause the cement annulus to form small cracks. Just imagine all the massive “aquifers” that contain bad water lying underneath the gas sites and there could be thousands of it! And a typical thickness of such a man-mad aquifer will be between 100 – 400 ft.
Prof Gerrit van Tonder, Institute for Groundwater Studies, Free State University, Bloemfontein, South Africa