The New Oil Era for 18 Years

SPRING BOOKS COMMENT

ENERGY The second story that Gold details is of a secretive partnership between McClendon and Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, the United States’ largest environmental group, The new oil era for 18 years. The two had a mutual interest in fighting coal power, but very different moti- vations: Pope’s, to combat climate change; Chris Nelder relishes a lively history of fracking that McClendon’s, to secure natural gas as the delves into the complexities. nation’s power-grid fuel of choice. Without the knowledge of the Sierra Club board, Gold alleges, Pope allowed McClendon to espite its title, The Boom is no sales “We can’t do that three underwrite the organization’s Beyond Coal pitch for fracking. Wall Street Jour- times in a row … If campaign, even as its New York chapter was nal energy reporter Russell Gold has we don’t do this right, fighting fracking over water contamination. Dproduced a thoughtful piece of journalism, what the hell have we Gold describes how tension within the Sierra exploring the complex landscape of drilling, done?” Despite the Club grew. Pope was ousted in 2011. finance and politics that brought a gusher of doubts, the lease was That the costs and benefits of fracking are oil and gas to a country convinced that its signed. complex is never fudged. The rapid decline hydrocarbon heyday was over. Gold offers no Along with his hard- rates of wells for shale gas and ‘tight’, or pat answers to the challenges that this new hitting analysis of the fracked, oil condemn frackers to increase abundance poses, but reminds us starkly of disruptive nature of The Boom: How the pace of drilling continually just to keep Fracking Ignited the “unforeseen costs and necessary evils”. fracking, Gold offers American Energy overall production flat. Embedded in the Skilfully interweaving hard data about US deep reportage on Revolution and unfettered, market-driven US approach to energy with an engaging narrative, Gold cov- two previously untold Changed the World energy development is the risk of depend- ers previous oil booms in Texas, Oklahoma, stories. The first con- RUSSELL GOLD ence on finite resources. The US Energy the Niger Delta, the Bakken shale in North cerns the close rela- Simon & Schuster: Information Administration forecasts that Dakota (which saw its first oil well drilled in tionship between 2014. tight oil will peak by 2021, although some 1953), and Pennsylvania. He also relates the McClendon and his think this optimistic. biography of businessman George Mitchell, best friend since university, Ralph Eads. Start- The Boom carefully explores technical ‘the father of fracking’; the fundamentals of ing in 2004, Gold says, McClendon talked to issues around water contamination and the petroleum geology; and the long evolution of Eads regularly about how to round up more failure to develop solutions. The inability of technology for oil and gas production. Much capital. Eads “set out to create a new financial regulators to keep up with entrepreneurs’ of The Boom focuses on Aubrey McClendon, ecosystem to find money to drill shale”, pitch- advances — a problem as old as the oil indus- founder of the Chesapeake Energy company. ing Chesapeake’s opportunities to institu- try itself — opens up scenarios of irreversible Describing him as “part pied piper, part early tional investors globally. The company raised damage. And drilling has “thrown a lifeline adopter, and part rapacious capitalist”, Gold $33.7 billion, with Eads serving as financial to fossil fuels” just when dependence on duly credits McClendon for seeing the poten- adviser for nearly all of the deals. Chesapeake them, and the risks of climate change, are tial in shale gas and driving its production, but also bet heavily on the future price of gas. more dangerous than ever. gives equal weight to his rise and downfall. By 2008, Gold writes, “McClendon and Gold points out that over the 150-year As a lens on the conflicts between ethics Chesapeake were whales in the futures mar- history of oil and gas exploitation, we have and raw need that characterize today’s energy ket”. But as competitors arrived, a gas glut worked our way down from vast accumula- industry, Gold uses a personal experience. developed and prices plummeted. “With its tions of cheap, high-quality hydrocarbons to His parents had co-owned land in Pennsyl- heavy debt and drilling commitments, this poor-quality shales. “Source rock is where vania since the 1970s. In 2009, Chesapeake price decline was a recipe for trouble,” Gold plankton turned into hydrocarbons,” he Energy was snapping up leases there to drill explains. He writes that during the stock- muses. “There is no further back.” We “fossil- for natural gas in the Marcellus shale forma- market crash of 2008, Chesapeake’s shares lost fuel addicts”, he suggests, should think of tion underneath. As he advised his parents on 59% of their value; subsequently, there were shale gas as methadone, a stepping stone on Chesapeake’s US$400,000 offer, Gold was torn revelations that McClendon had taken out the way to a renewably powered future. ■ between their desire to prevent groundwater large personal loans from EIG Global Energy contamination, and his certainty that frack- Partners (an investor Eads had connected Chris Nelder is an independent energy ing would proceed around them, driven by with Chesapeake) without the knowledge analyst and journalist. He wrote Profit the need for domestic gas, income and jobs. of his company’s board. Large sharehold- from the Peak and Investing in Renewable As one farmer told him, local exploitation ers became increasingly restive, he writes. Energy, and he blogs at GetREALList.com. of forests and coal had been unsustainable: McClendon’s job was terminated in 2013. e-mail: [email protected]

The Serpent’s Promise: The Bible Retold My Beloved Brontosaurus as Science Brian Switek (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) Steve Jones (Little, Brown, 2014) The film Jurassic Park aside, velociraptors were With sensitivity towards religion and sardonic wit, turkey-sized, reveals Brian Switek in this paean to geneticist Steve Jones delivers a masterful scientific palaeontology. He joins the scales-versus-feathers take on biblical events such as the Deluge — which debate, and mourns the ‘second extinction’ of the he attributes to the end of an ice age. (See Tim brontosaurus, now called apatosaurus. (See Xu Radford’s review: Nature 496, 432–433; 2013.) Xing’s review: Nature 496, 30; 2013.) Emily Banham