Will fracking make a comeback in Germany in face of gas crunch?
Temperatures might be soaring across Germany but staying warm this winter without Russian gas — which until the start of the Ukraine war supplied over 50% of annual demand — is already a pressing concern.
If Russian supplies run dry, plans to make up the shortfall are already in place: Higher liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports, restarting dormant coal plants, and even delaying the nuclear power phaseout.
But most surprising is talk of exploiting domestic shale gas deposits through fracking, a practice banned in Germany and in a number of European countries due to its potential environmental and climate impacts.
Yet members of Germany's coalition government want fracking to be reconsidered as a potential solution to the coming gas crunch.
Germany loves gas, but fracking is banned
Germany is already building infrastructure and terminals to facilitate the flow of LNG from the United States that comes primarily from fracked sources, which is the result of an EU-US gas deal struck in March. But Europe's largest economy banned shale gas fracking at home in 2017.
The ban, which was due to be reviewed in 2021 but remains in place, extends to deep-lying "unconventional" shale gas deposits that can only be extracted through hydraulic fracturing.
Here fracking fluid made up of water, sand and chemicals is injected up to 5 kilometers (3 miles) under the earth to break up the bedrock and extract gas. The process uses vast amounts of water and could contaminate groundwater that is already receding due to persistent drought in Germany.
Fracking also leaks the greenhouse gas methane — the global heating impacts of which are over 80 times higher than CO2 over a 20-year period, noted Sascha Boden, an energy and climate advisor at NGO, Environmental Action Germany.
Methane leakage from tens of thousand of wells in the Permian Basin in the US states of Texas and New Mexico, for example, has helped create a "climate bomb" that is nullifying mitigation measures.
Yet drilling for gas in "conventional" and more accessible sandstone gas seams is permitted under strict regulations in Germany, and currently provides around 5% of supply — even if critics say the extraction method is akin to fracking and was simply labeled conventional to imply "good" fracking is possible.
German shale gas is primarily found in the northwestern states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia and has the potential to provide 3 to 20 times (between 320 and 2,030 billion cubic meters) the amount of conventional gas, according to the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).
Shale deposits could cover 20% of current demand, as estimated by German Federal Association of Natural Gas, Petroleum and Geoenergy (BVEG). But for Sascha Boden, only half might be economically viable due to the high drilling infrastructure costs, for example.
"This is hardly enough to make Germany independent of Russian gas," he said.
Fracking divides Germany's coalition
A recent German poll showed that just 27% of respondents embraced fracking as a short-term energy solution — compared to 81% support for an expansion of wind energy.
Amazing, I would have thought that decades of green (and Green) indoctrination against #nulcear would have been stronger.
— Christian Odendahl (@COdendahl) August 4, 2022
(Extending nuclear does not help much, but helps a little, if you look at the power market as European, not German.)
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