Is fracking greener than solar power and wind turbines?

Is fracking greener than solar power and wind turbines? An easy one today... I don’t know. From this study it would be improper to draw a conclusion about which energy source causes less environmental damage.

In the end, it’s all about how you define ‘green’. There are some environmental problems that are more closely related to the production of solar panels or wind turbines than shale gas extraction. The reverse is also true. But without proper context this is chalk and cheese.

To make an informed judgement about the best energy sources, these effects need to be quantified. How much land could each fracking well turn toxic and how likely is that to happen? Could solar panels exhaust our resources of silver and tellurium? What would that mean? This study has given us a way of building towards that more informed discussion.

There is an inclination to prioritise climate change as our most pressing concern. In this case, renewables become very attractive. But the shale gas industry argue that you can’t compare shale energy with solar without also factoring in the potential for it to replace coal as a baseload power source.

Overshadowed by the misinformation of the Times were two really key findings about the environmental impacts of fracking. One is that the shale is heavily reliant on effective oversight and good corporate conduct. This is shown by the large uncertainties on the earlier graphs. In other words, fracking can be relatively safe, but things can go badly wrong.

The other is that the renewable industry may have some questions to answer about its own environmental footprint. The impacts of producing panels and turbines, not to mention dams, show there is no such thing as truly ‘green’ energy.

A spokesman for the UK Onshore Oil and Gas, the shale gas industry body, said charaterising the debate as an either-or comparison between shale gas and renewables was “not sensible”.

“It is not a question of whether solar, wind, shale or even nuclear are the greener sources of energy – they are all more environmentally friendly than coal and we need to invest in a mix of all these energy sources to reduce our dependency on the dirtiest fuel of all, coal.”

Karl Harder of renewable energy investors Abundance Generation said:

“This study has clearly been misrepresented. The only way to compare two technologies is by analysis the full lifecycle cost, which is not the case here. Gas creates CO2 and extraction releases methane over the course of its life. While all studies on wind and solar farms show their CO2 emissions are covered in between 1-3 years.”

Correction. This post orginially read: “A spokesman for the UK Onshore Oil and Gas, the shale gas industry body, said the comparison between energy from shale gas and renewable energy was “not sensible”.”

The Times article was “misleading”, says study co-author Laurence Stamford. Particularly the headline, which placed the words “greener than solar panels” in quotation marks.

“That makes it look like we are saying that solar panels are all around worse than shale gas, which... is not really what we’ve said. We are certainly not trying to say that shale gas is greener than renewables.”

He says it would be more accurate to say:

“For certain environmental problems shale is better than solar, whereas for others solar is better than shale.”

“Each option has good points and bad points”, says Stamford. The study never attempted to draw a distinction of which energy source was more ‘green’, partly, he says, because this would involve a value judgement about which impacts we preferred to avoid.

He said that this type of analysis did not only have to rely on judgement, it could be made empirically. This would involve comparing how much pollution was caused compared to the national total. For example, he said, you might find that if the UK’s fracking industry was only small, then its greenhouse gas impact would also remain minor. But such a compasiron was not the purpose of his team’s research.

“What we have not done is to work out whether those environmental impacts are particularly significant in a wider context. We can certainly say that one option is better than another for each impact. But we can’t say than it is generally greener.”

Researchers at Manchester University have found that fracking causes less toxicity to humans and marine ecosystems and uses less resources than solar panels and wind turbines.

Their study, which measured the environmental impacts of fracking and compared it to other energy sources, prompted a story in the Times under the headline: Fracking ‘greener than solar panels’.

“Fracking to extract shale gas can be less environmentally damaging than installing solar panels or offshore wind turbines, a study has found,”

said the Times. The article notes that on greenhouse emissions, solar and wind are five and 37 times less intensive than shale gas, but lists three parameters on which shale can be judged ‘greener’ than renewables.

Adisa Azapagic, professor of sustainable chemical engineering at Manchester, told the Times:

“Some of the impacts of solar power are actually relatively high, so it is not a complete surprise that shale gas is better in a few cases. This is mainly because manufacturing solar panels is very energy and resource-intensive, while their electrical output is quite low in a country like the UK, as we don’t have as much sunshine.”

Could we have it all wrong? Is fracking the green alternative to dirty solar panels? I’ll be kicking the tyres of this one for the next few hours and would like your help.

Join today’s discussion by contributing in the comments below, tweet me or email me. If you are quoting figures or studies, please provide a link to the original source. Follow me on @karlmathiesen for updates throughout the day and later I will return with my own verdict.