I am writing you urgently just a day after a House Committee voted to approve legislation that will fast track exports of fracked natural gas. Articles out today report that the Senate may attach similar provisions to a bill slated to be heard as early as next week. Hence, time is of the essence, and I urge you to take action. Our speed must match that of the ever-changing gas-rush rhetoric itself.
First, we were told that fracking was the path to U.S. energy independence. But, out on the shale play, bust has followed boom very closely. According to Bloomberg News, drilling and fracking operations must spend $1.50 on oil extraction for every dollar they get back. And productivity is not living up to the hype. In North Dakota’s Bakken shale, 2,500 new wells a year must be drilled and fracked just to maintain a steady output of a million barrels of oil a day. (In Iraq, to get the same amount, you need only 60 wells.)
Then, we were told that fracking was the bridge to a low carbon future. But that promise met death by a thousand leaks. According the latest science, shale gas wells, when drilled, release 100 to 1,000 times more climate-killing methane than previously estimated. And the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear that, precisely because of system-wide fugitive methane emissions, widespread expansion of shale gas extraction will only lead to runaway planetary warming.
Now we’re told that liquefying the results of fracking, and shipping it across the oceans will help with the current crisis in Ukraine. But exported Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) will not be sent in spherical tanks from the United States to Ukraine as a kind of special aid package. Instead, it will be sold on the global market – counties in Asia currently pay the highest price – and even in the rosiest of oil and gas industry concocted scenarios, could not arrive in Ukraine in time to have any impact there.
Now consider that LNG must be chilled and stored at minus 259 degrees Fahrenheit—a cryogenic feat that requires immense amounts of fossil-fuel energy and makes LNG 30 percent worse for the climate than good old, room-temperature gas.
Proposals for 29 U.S. LNG export terminals are now in the works. Each one will cost several billion dollars, take years to construct—and lead to more fracking.
Oh, and then there’s this: LNG facilities are known terrorist targets. Little wonder. LNG is famously explosive and the fires so created burn hotter than other fuels and are not extinguishable by any firefighting tactic.
If evidence and common sense were driving our energy policy, we wouldn’t need to educate our neighbors and elected officials about all these terrifying facts…
Click here for the LNG Fact Sheet.
To that end, we need you to help get folks to write and call their members of Congress—in both the Senate and the House—and urge them to stop the export of fracked gas in the form of LNG. Click here to see how our friends at the Center for Biological Diversity are doing the same.
…it’s critical that we tell our elected representatives to oppose existing legislation which expedites the approval of a slew of liquefied natural gas exports. In the U.S. House of Representatives, this GOP-backed legislation takes the form of H.R. 6, the “Domestic Property and Global Freedom Act.” In the Senate, it’s S.B. 2083, the “American Job Creation and Strategic Alliances LNG Act.”
And if you want talking points above and beyond what you find on the AAF LNG fact sheet, consider these from our friend, Naomi Klein.
Here’s a number for your Senator: 866-661-3342
Go tell it on the mountain.
To the unfractured future,
Sandra Steingraber, PhD
Science Advisor, Americans Against Fracking