Cornucopia or curse? Reviewing the costs and benefits of shale gas hydraulic fracturing (fracking)
By Benjamin Sovacool. 2014
267 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This study assesses the overall technical, economic, environmental, and social costs and benefits of the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of natural gas. Drawn from a review of more than 100 studies looking at shale gas in the past 10 years, most of them peer-reviewed, this article begins by briefly explaining the process of hydrofracking and summarizing recent market trends up until late 2013. Then, the study discusses a series of advantages and disadvantages to hydrofracking. It notes that done properly, shale gas development can enhance energy security and the availability of energy fuels, lower natural gas prices, offer a cleaner environmental footprint than some other fossil fuels, and enable local economic development. However, done poorly production can be prone to accidents and leakage, contribute to environmental degradation, induce earthquakes, and, when externalities are accounted for, produce more net economic losses than profits. The study concludes that the pursuit and utilization of shale gas thus presents policymakers, planners, and investors with a series of pernicious tradeoffs and tough choices.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7531974ec884434484b71f61261ba62da579a91
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- A review of the technical and economic evaluation techniques for shale gas development (2015, background): “Naturally, these benefits are accompanied by numerous potential environmental concerns primarily involving water, air, land and community during the development process, which may generate opposition to developing the shale gas industry [1,3].”