Europe: Why a fracking boom won’t happen here

Europe has awoken to how fracking has re-energized America, said Joachim Wille in the Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany). In the past decade, the hydraulic fracturing method—in which millions of gallons of water are forced at high pressure through fissures underground to free natural gas trapped in layers of shale—has given the U.S. an ocean of cheap gas. The consequences are “dramatic for geopolitics, climate policy, and industry.” Freed from dependence on Middle Eastern oil, the U.S. is pulling back from its role as global cop. With cleaner natural gas replacing coal, greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. have dropped. Best of all, the cheap energy is fueling an industrial boom in a country that has been suffering from the flight of manufacturing jobs. Could it happen here?

Some Europeans “have been fantasizing about a similar boom,” said Anne Feitz in Les Echos (France). Poland is desperate to reduce its energy dependence on Russia, while Britain wants to offset the decline in its North Sea oil output. France has the best prospects, with its massive reserves of more than 137 trillion cubic feet of gas and 4.7 billion barrels of oil—“enough to fuel the country for 80 years.” But alas, Europe is not America. We have none of the “exceptional conditions existing in the U.S.,” including “the presence of a major oil and gas industry, abundant drilling equipment, a network of gas pipelines, and the great empty spaces that have let the Americans drill more than 200,000 wells in just a few years.” The cost of production here would be up to twice as high as it is in the U.S.

Even if it were cost-effective, fracking is too dirty for Europe, said El Diario Montañes (Spain) in an editorial. In the U.S. and Britain, it has already been shown to cause earthquakes. Nobody seems to know exactly what nasty chemicals the companies put into the fracking water, but it’s clear that the pollution will have “serious consequences for aquifers and river basins, as well as the health of people, crops, and livestock.” Europeans are not prepared to “renounce our future food sovereignty” so that foreign investors can sell us cheap oil. That’s why the European Union has recommended new rules to force energy companies to carry out extensive environmental studies before applying for fracking permits.

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What a shortsighted and selfish decision, said Tomasz Bielecki in Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland). Most of the members of the European Parliament who voted last week to approve the new rules come from countries where fracking isn’t even a possibility. They fell victim to an intensive “lobbying effort by the Russian energy giant Gazprom,” which sees Polish shale as a threat to its stranglehold on Europe’s energy market. The U.K. stands with Poland in opposing measures that “threaten to eviscerate” our energy strategy, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). The EU won’t formally adopt these anti-fracking rules until December, so the U.K. has until then to “muster a blocking minority” to stop them. And we must, because without lower energy costs, Europe is headed for what EU Industry Commissioner Antonio Tajani calls a “systemic industrial massacre.”