By Janet M Eaton, PhD
Introduction:
Much has been written about the environmental, geological, social, cultural, health, and small scale local economic concerns related to hydraulic fracturing for shale gas. At the same time there is growing awareness of the difficulties of regulating and even researching an industry where complexity of the systems involved leads to what the Wheeler Commission called ‘wicked’ problems. There is however another subject area and issue that has received little if any attention during the Wheeler Commission’s investigation, one that heralds warnings about the financial risks of investing in the fracking industry; risks that could leave Nova Scotians with significant financial losses.
The following paper provides insight into the nature and extent of the fracking industry’s misinformation and hype that led to the massive investment in the industry; examines studies and reports that have recently emerged to counter industry misinformation particularly around quantities of the recoverable resource; and exposes financial risks being taken by both the Industry and Big Banks to create a favourable environment for investing in fracking. It also warns of other external financial risks to investors. Finally, it examines the concept of ‘risk blindness’ in the fracking industry comparing it to the related concept of ‘paradigm paralysis’. It warns that ‘paradigm paralysis’ and ‘risk blindness’ in decision makers, at a time when old paradigms are collapsing and paradigm shifts are occurring , are threats to not only Nova Scotia but to our ecosystems, planetary cycles and global civilization itself. Within that framework and given the probability of collapse of the fracking industry, this paper challenges the notion of fracking as a revenue generator for Nova Scotia.
1) Industry Misinformation and Hype
Misinformation is defined by the Oxford dictionary as inaccurate information especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive. Hype, on the other hand, is defined as extravagant or intensive publicity and promotion or a deception carried out for the sake of publicity. For critics of fracking be they professors, researchers, or journalists, the term industry hype is widely used to point out not only industry’s intensive marketing of shale gas but also the errors in the assumptions leading to their predictions. Anthony R Ingraffea, renowned Cornell professor, and former fracking industry consultant and engineer, also refers to parallel concepts of myths, falsehoods, missing information, outright lies and uncomfortable science about fracking for methane. [1]
The hyped narrative of the fracking industry and its supporters around the North American shale gas boom has been that it will continue to grow for years, turning America into the new Saudi Arabia; that we are entering a new golden era of US energy independence by fracking unconventional oil and gas; that we will break the stranglehold of imported oil using domestic gas; that we are at the beginning of a production boom and everyone who invests will get rich; and that we have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years.
Examples of the pervasiveness of the use of the term industry hype can be gleaned from a sampling of quotes from reputable researchers, journalists and Professors.
David Hughes, noted Canadian geologist retired from the Federal Department of Natural Resources, in a 2013 report for the Post Carbon Institute, entitled Drill Baby Drill: Can Unconventional Fuels Usher in a new Era of Energy Abundance, referred to B.C.’s embrace of shale gas production as a shining star of hype. [2]
The British newspaper, the Guardian, noted that, in the near future, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) would publish a new estimate of US shale deposits set to deal a death-blow to industry hype about a new golden era of US energy independence by fracking for unconventional oil and gas. [3]
Jeremy Leggett, former advisor to the British government, and author of the recent book Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance, 2014 speaking to a reporter before his speech to the Davos World Economic Forum [WEF] 2014 referred to industry hype as follows:
“The WEF likes to deal in big ideas, and last year one of its ideas was to argue that the world can frack its way to prosperity. There are large numbers of would-be frackers in Davos. I’m a squeaky wheel within the system. I’m in Davos to put the counter-arguments to Big Energy, and I’ll tell them: ‘You’re in grave danger of repeating mistakes of the financial services industry in pushing a hyped narrative. [4]
British author and contributor to The Telegraph, Tim Morgan, in an article Shale Gas: The Dotcom bubble of Our time wrote:
We now have enough data to know what has really happened in America. Shale has been hyped (Saudi America) and investors poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the shale sector. [5]
Even Shell’s chief executive, Peter Voser, stated that a shale revolution spreading from the US across the world is “a little bit overhyped”. [6]
Richard Heinberg, well known peak oil expert and author of The Party’s Over, The End of Growth, and Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promises of Plenty Imperils Our Future, wrote in an August 11th, 2014 article, that although CEOs of companies engaged in shale gas and tight oil drilling are undoubtedly aware of what’s going on in their own balance sheets, hype is an essential part of their business model which he summarizes succinctly as follows: Step i) Borrow money and use it to lease thousands of acres for drilling; Step ii) Borrow more money and drill as many wells as you can , as quickly as you can; Step iii) Tell everyone within shouting distance that this is just the beginning of a production boom that will continue for the remainder of our lives and lives of our children and that everyone who invests will get rich; Step iv) sell drilling leases to other gullible companies at a profit , raise funds through initial Public Offerings or bond sales, and use proceeds to hide financial losses from your drilling and production operations. [7]
Origins of Industry Hype
Richard Heinberg, in his latest book on fracking, identifies some of the better known early hypesters [my term] including Aubrey McClendon, and Daniel Yergin. He points out that what he terms the hurricane of hype began in shale gas fields of Texas, stirred by the charismatic “early bird’ investor Aubrey McClendon, then CEO of Chesapeake Energy, who hammered home the same overly optimistic and opportunistic message on every possible occasion, and became incredibly rich while building financial structures packed with risk. [8] Jeff Goodall, reporting in Rolling Stone Magazine, after an interview with McClendon, noted that his company’s primary profit came not from selling the gas itself, but from buying and flipping the land that contains the gas. He also wrote that McClendon owns some 25 million acres which he has financed with junk bonds, complex partnerships and future production deals, creating a highly leveraged deeply- indebted company that has a lot in common with Enron. [9]
Another highly visible and audible shale gas booster whom Heinberg chronicles is Daniel Yergin, chair of the Cambridge Energy Research Association and oil and gas industry consultant who wrote in The Wall St Journal in 2011 that estimates of the entire natural gas resource base, taking shale gas into account are as high as 3000 trillion cubic feet which amounts to a 100 year supply of natural gas. Yergin’s projections leave one with the impression that it’s all good news in the oil and gas world which is far from an accurate portrayal as we shall see herein. [10] His ‘century of natural gas’ number came to be repeated frequently even by President Obama, who claimed in his January 2012 State of the Union Address to Congress, that, largely owing to the shale gas revolution, We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. [11]
BP in their Energy Outlook to 2030 sounded similar upbeat projections of shale gas and oil that would make North American energy independent of the Middle East, noting that a large swath of the world including North and South America would see its dependence on oil imports, from potentially volatile countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, disappear. [12]
2) Unmasking the Hype – Critical Oversight
Geological Survey of Canada veteran, David Hughes, has conducted the most detailed analysis of North American shale of anyone outside the oil and gas companies. He examined data on 63,000 shale gas and tight oil wells and calculated production decline rates in each active play. His data show that shale and oil fields deplete so quickly that they resemble financial treadmills where, in order to maintain constant flows from a play, industry must replace 30 to 50% of declining production with more wells. Hughes also notes that recovery rates are dismal compared to recovery of conventional gas which uses less energy, and captures up to 70% of the gas in the ground whereas shale gas barely averages 10% and employs more horsepower and more water over a greater area of landscapes. Hughes concludes: the Achilles heel of shale gas is that you need a lot of wells and environmental collateral damage and infrastructure to grow supply. [13]
Hughes shows, that in spite of the heralding of a new age of energy abundance and independence for the US, they will inevitably fall short of such expectations for two main reasons i) shale gas and shale oil wells have proven to deplete quickly, the best fields have already been tapped, and no new major field discoveries are expected. Therefore with average well productivity declining and ever-more wells (and fields) required simply to maintain production, an ‘exploration treadmill” limits the long term potential for shale ii) secondly, although tar sands, deep water oil, oil shales , coal bed methane, and other non-conventional fossil fuels exist in vast deposits, their exploitation continues to require such enormous expenditures of resources and logistical effort that rapid scaling up of production to market –transforming levels is all but impossible . [14]
Richard Heinberg notes that the work of Arthur Berman, David Hughes and other analysts provides a more realistic picture of the actual potential of shale gas and concludes that taking into account decline rates, potential drilling locations, and the variability of the regions within resource plays, the industry’s claims for how much oil and gas can be extracted, at what rate, and how profitably, is wildly overblown. [15]
Andrew Nikiforuk has also noted that David Hughes’ analysis in his report for the Post Carbon Institute, Drill Baby Drill, confirms and supports the work of Texas oil analyst and geologist Arthur Berman who has questioned the growth rate claims of the shale gas industry for years and has offered the most reliable forecasts for the industry to date. [16]
Veteran Nova Scotia journalist and regular contributor to the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Ralph Surette, revealed in his weekend opinion piece Fracking is Fool’s Gold that the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania, first hyped as containing 500 trillion cubic feet [tcf] of recoverable gas, had been reduced by the U.S. Geological Survey to perhaps as little as 80 tcf. He also reported that the California government, which according to early estimates was assuming $25 billion in tax revenue from its Monterrey formation by 2020, had recently learned that geologists had found quantities too low to warrant development. [17] British researcher and author Tim Morgan put it this way: Recoverable reserves estimates for the Monterey shale, have been revised downward by 96 percent. [18]
Other evidence of the decline in the shale gas boom that refutes the Industry hype includes the write-downs engulfing the Industry.
The Financial Times’ Guy Chazan reported that Shell, after bad drilling results, wrote off US $ 2 billion invested in US shale gas and issued its first profit warning in 10 years. [19]
William Engdahl, researcher and author writing for the Centre for Global Research reviewed large scale gas producers in the US that were forced to announce major write-downs of the value of their shale gas assets including BP’s write-down of more than $1 billion in the value of its American shale gas assets; England’s BG Group’s $1.3 billion write-down of its US shale gas interests; and Encana, a large Canadian shale gas operator’s 1.7 billion write-down on shale assets in the US and Canada, accompanied by a warning that more were likely if gas prices did not recover. He also referred to the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton as being hard hit and noted that by far the worst hit was once- super-star of shale gas, McClendon’s Oklahoma based Chesapeake Energy which, at the time of writing, was in midst of a major asset sale of an estimated $6.9 billion to lower debt, including oil and gas fields covering roughly 2.4 million acres. [20]
The Peak Oil review from January 2014, in a shale gas update, noted that the large deficits being run by the US shale oil and gas industry were starting to be reported in the financial press citing in particular the Financial Post’s reporting of large foreign investments in US shale oil and gas leases drying up rapidly. The Peak Oil Review went on to suggest:” With losses like these it is no wonder that foreign investors are bailing and staying out of the US shale market. It concluded: while it is too early to declare an end to the great US shale oil boom, there are clear signs of troubles just ahead. [21]
Arthur Berman, referred to above as one of industry’s most respected critics of industry hype, has concluded, along with others, that gas industry players and their Wall St bankers backing the shale boom have grossly inflated the volumes of recoverable shale gas reserves and hence its expected supply duration. He notes that reserves and economics depend on ‘estimated ultimate recoveries’ (EUR) based on decline profiles that predict decades of commercial production. Berman’s analysis of shale gas well decline trends indicates that the EUR per well is approximately one- half the values presented by operators. In other words, he says that the gas producers have built the illusion that their conventional and increasingly costly shale gas will last for decades. [22]
David Hughes in his Drill Baby Drill Report also explains that while the most commonly cited metric to suggest a new age of fossil fuels is the estimate of in situ unconventional resources and the purported fraction that can be recovered, there are two other metrics that are critically important in determining viability of energy resources: i) The rate of energy supply and ii) The net energy yield or ‘energy returned on energy invested’ [EROEI]. In the case of the former, a large sized in situ resource does little good if it cannot be produced consistently and in large enough quantities, which we have seen to be a problem with shale gas. In the latter case, EROEI is, for unconventional energy resources, generally much lower than for conventional resources and lower EROEI translates to higher production costs, lower production rates and usually more collateral damage in extraction. [23]
3) Financial Risk in the Shale Gas Industry .
Jeremy Leggett, in his book Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance recounts the histories of four systemic risks in energy markets. (1) first and biggest being climate change (2) the second being the risk of creating a carbon bubble in the capital markets akin to the bubble created by Wall Street prior to the Financial crash of 2007 (3) the third being the so-called shale boom in gas and oil production and (4) the fourth being the oil shock risk.
In reference to financial risk of a shale gas bubble, Leggett recounts that oil and gas companies drilling American shale today spend a collective dollar and a half for every dollar of oil and gas income suggesting that their collective losses may mean that the ‘boom’ may prove to be another of the bubbles they are so good at creating. [24]
Ralph Surette also spoke of the financial risk in his December 2013 article noting that while protests over the environment were one concern, a deeper source of trouble was afoot for the fracking industry from the heart of the financial world where billions of dollars were being lost and the sense of having been suckered by hype was starting to settle in. He cited the conservative business magazine, Forbes, which argued that the profitability of fracking was a fantasy and that we can expect some staggering investment errors because what it’s all about is some very stupid money chasing an illusion that will surely end in tears. [25]
Canadian Geologist, David Hughes, also believes that shale gas and shale oil represent a temporary bubble in production that will soon burst due to rapid depletion rates that have only recently been tallied and concludes that this latest shale gas panacea, championed by industry and media talking heads, is too expensive and will deplete too rapidly to provide either energy security or independence for the United States. Hughes also says that shale gas production has already peaked in every shale gas region except the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. [26]
Richard Heinberg asks the important question who really benefits from shale gas production? and after reviewing the impact on communities, the nation, industry and Wall Street he suggests that in the final analysis the nation and the impacted communities within it lose more from fracking than they gain, and the oil industry is seeing diminishing returns on its burgeoning investments; therefore his answer is: it is Wall Street that benefits.
Further to the Wall Street involvement, Heinberg quotes a New York Times investigative article by Krauss and Lipton who state, that like the recent credit bubble, in the housing industry, the boom and bust in gas was driven in large part by tens of billions of dollars in creative financing engineered by investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Jeffries and companies that forced drillers to keep drilling even when each new well represented financial loss.
Heinberg also refers to the analysis of Deborah Rogers, a former Wall St financial consultant and member of the Advisory council for Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from 2008 – 20011, who further traced the toxic connections between major investment banks and shale gas in her report Shale and Wall Street : Was the Decline in Natural Gas prices Orchestrated. Rogers cites two sets of economics for the Industry, (i) field economics which is concerned with the day to day operations of the company and (ii) Wall Street economics which entails keeping a company attractive to financial analysts and investors so that share price moves up and access to capital markets is assured. [27]
Rogers also notes that shales became one of the largest profit centers within these banks in their energy M&A portfolios since 2010. She goes on to show the parallels with the financial crisis bubble noting that Wall Street began executing deals to spin assets of troubled shale companies in the industry, deals that deteriorated only months later, resulting in massive write-downs in shale assets. As well she states that the banks were instrumental in crafting convoluted financial products such as VPPs (volumetric production payments) which were subsequently sold to investors such as pension funds that had little knowledge of the intricacies and risks of shale production. Further , she concludes that leases were bundled and flipped on unproved shale fields in much the same way that mortgage backed securities had been bundled and sold on questionable underlying mortgage assets prior to the economic turndown. [28]
Other financial risks to investors in fracking have come with the increasing awareness of citizens around the world of the very serious impacts of fracking and the distribution of shale gas which has led to a growing protest movement against the shale gas industry, at both local and global levels. This backlash has led to an increasing numbers of bans and moratoria being placed on fracking and even court cases against the Industry. In addition there is the threat to the fracking industry of renewables especially as they gain entry into the market at lower prices as well as the volatility of prices in oil markets. [29]
Heinberg cites the risk to the Industry that comes from potential liability for environmental and human health damage noting that States and counties in the US are increasingly restricting and even banning fracking out of concern for human and environmental health. The result, he says, could be a sharp decline in potential revenues for operators and therefore a drop in stock value and an increase in borrowing costs. [30]
In the same vein, a recent article on socially responsible investors working to minimize fracking impacts reports that:
Across the country, grassroots coalitions of community members have succeeded in passing bans and moratoria on the practice of fracking, thus imposing heavy costs on companies whose operations are halted. Norse Energy Corporation USA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2012 as a result of New York State’s four year moratorium that idled seven of the company’s wells in the area. Royal Dutch Shell estimates 40 percent of its New York acreage could be off-limits because of potential state rules. [31]
Another serious threat to investors has come from protesters use of the courts to stop the government’s collusion with the oil and gas industry. A recent Supreme Court of Canada judgment on aboriginal title for the Tsilhqot’in First Nation in British Columbia, a decision which has potential relevance for all First Nations peoples, has thrown fear into oil and gas investors as noted in a recent article in the Financial Post:
This judgment will significantly increase the level of uncertainty in Canada’s natural resource sector and will likely deter investment and exploration in Canada…. When investors examine potential opportunities, they spend considerable time evaluating exposure to various risks, including business, economic, political, and exchange rate risk. Many of these risks can be managed and mitigated through insurance and hedging. Others, such as political risk, can leave a business exposed to uncertainty that simply cannot be controlled or mitigated. [32]
4) Risk Blindness
Jeremy Leggett argues in Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance that the traditional energy industries and their political and institutional support base are repeating the failings of the financial sector and are guilty of an enculturated risk blindness that will lead to a global energy crash. He concludes that too many people across top levels of government and business close their eyes and ears to systemic risk taking and as a result denial has become institutionalized.
Leggett also notes that military think-tanks have tended to side with those who distrust “the cornucopian narrative” of the oil industry citing a 2008 study by the German army on psychological barriers which cause indisputable facts to be blanked out and lead to almost instinctively refusing to look into this difficult subject in detail. [33]
Another way of framing this assertion is through paradigm and paradigm shift analysis. The term paradigm came into usage as a result of the landmark intellectual work in the early 1960’s of Thomas Kuhn, historian of science and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his Structure of Scientific Revolutions he used the term paradigm to attempt to delineate the core essence of a scientific community’s ‘shared examples’, in other words what they believed and understood their science and scientific theories to be. Paradigms are also equivalent to what present day systems thinkers call “shared mental models” theories, perceptions, assumptions, or frames of reference.
Thomas Kuhn, found in his research on scientists that their paradigms literally acted as “physiological filters” that prevented them from seeing data right before their very eyes. It seemed to him that: professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and on the other to a considerable resistance to paradigm change. In this respect management consultant, Joel Barker, who developed training strategies and materials for the business, NGO and government sectors based on Kuhn’s discoveries about paradigms, defined this inability to transcend or move beyond old paradigms as paradigm paralysis.. [31]
It should be noted that Leggett also stated that this blanking out of indisputable facts extends to the mainstream media which, he says, has enthusiastically echoed the mantras of the oil companies to the extent that the very phrase ‘peak oil’ has been positioned as a badge of baseless scaremongering.
Conclusion:
This paper leads to the conclusions i) that the content and implications of ‘industry misinformation and hype’ must be closely examined and understood by decision makers before making commitments to pursue fracking, ii) that industry facts and perspectives must be challenged and thoroughly reviewed by any jurisdiction considering the permitting of fracking and iii) that the inherent financial risks in fracking must be carefully scrutinized because of the very real possibilities of fracking companies, if not the entire industry, experiencing financial insolvency and pulling out without warning or recompense, something that has happened in instances in the US according to Richard Heinberg.
Additionally, the concepts of risk blindness or paradigm paralysis, that prevent many specialists, business persons and professionals from thinking outside the box, must be taken seriously. Awareness of the nature of paradigms and paradigm shifts can assist in moving us beyond old paradigms as outlined in the paper cited above on Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts, by the author of this paper, which was commissioned by the Nova Scotia Department of Health in 1996. It not only explains paradigms and paradigm shifts but also shows how traditional paradigms can restrict our ability to envision future alternatives and also how a new systemic perspective or paradigm can help move us to more appropriate and sustainable policy development.
It is not possible within the scope of this paper, to review the emerging literature on the dominant paradigm shifts happening psychologically, economically, politically and socially in the world today but it should be noted that shifts going on around us demand a thorough discussion of the fossil fuel based economic growth paradigm which has been widely acknowledged to be failing humanity and our ecological systems. This Neoliberal global economic growth model that has been fuelled by fossil fuels and furthered by a flawed free trade model, deregulation, privatization of public services and the commons, militarization, and a transnational corporate agenda. New approaches that move us beyond this destructive paradigm are emerging e.g. Degrowth Economics, Ecological Economics, Localism, Transition Towns, Evolutionary Reconstructionism, Canadian academic Peter Victor’s Managing without Growth, the UK’s Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth, the South American concept of Buen Vivir, New Economy initiatives, Deglobalization, and Gross National Happiness over GDP and they need to be studied and considered, if only to have on the back burner should collapse occur without warning. [32] Economics can no longer be given priority over ecological principles, the precautionary principle, human rights, economic justice, people’s well being, and democracy, especially not with ‘limits to growth’ now foreshadowing the collapse of financial, societal and ecological systems.
When paradigm paralysis is seen as part of this broader phenomenon there is cause for alarm. Flogging a dying horse, like shale gas, a clear sign of paradigm paralysis, only complicates an already dire situation for Nova Scotia and the planet in general. Fracking has been shown to be unsustainable, unsafe, and destructive to the essentials of life including water, farmlands, the air we breathe, our communities, ecosystems and by extension, our very health. These negative impacts have been seen by the Wheeler Commission as reasons to recommend placing fracking on hold for an interim period while waiting for insights from other jurisdictions, further research or some new technology or magic bullet that might convince the public that fracking is safe.
With all the evidence against and concerns about fracking that the Wheeler Commission has brought forward and with the added knowledge herein of financial risks that threaten financial losses and run counter to principle-centred policy making, it would be unconscionable and a profligate waste of time and money to conduct further research on an industry already in decline and egregiously incompatible with environmental and sustainability goals.
It is therefore imperative that the government of Nova Scotia place an outright ban on fracking in this province. Given the evidence herein, from some of the best minds grappling with the issues and realities of the fracking industry, it would seem little more than a ‘fool’s errand’ to do otherwise.
REFERENCES:
[1] Andrew Nikiforuk. Shale Gas: Myth and Realities. The Tyee 7 Jan 2013. http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/01/07/Shale-Gas-Realities/
[2] Andrew Nikiforuk. Fracked Gas Won’t Solve Energy Crunch: Report. The Tyee.ca 23 Feb 2013. http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/02/23/David-Hughes-Fracking-Report/
[3] Nafeez Ahmed. Write-down of two-thirds of US shale oil explodes fracking myth. The Guardian, May22, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/22/two-thirds-write-down-us-shale-oil-gas-explodes-fracking-myth
[4] Alex Kirby. Fracking Won’t Avert Energy Crisis, Davos Is Told. 25th January 2014 http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2252418/davos_fracking_wont_avert_energy_crisis.html
[5] Tim Morgan. Shale gas : The dotcom bubble of our times. The Telegraph, UK. August 4th 2014 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/11006723/fracking-for-
[6] Guy Chazan. Shell writedown is bad news for US shale. Aug 1, 2013 http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cf41cc36-fab2-11e2-87b9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz39WiSf1QA\
[7] Richard Heinberg. Environmentalists Blamed for Bursting Fracking Bubble. Global Research August 11th , 2014. http://www.globalresearch.ca/environmentalists-blamed-for-bursting-fracking-bubble/5395536
[8] Richard Heinberg. Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future. Published by the Post Carbon Institute. 2013.
[9] Jeff Goodall. The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind Aubrey McClendon’s Gas Boom. Rolling Stone. March 1, 2012 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-big-fracking-bubble-the-scam-behind-the-gas-boom-20120301
[10] Richard Heinberg. How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.
[11] William Engdahl. Fracked–up USA Shale Gas bubble. March 13, 2013 http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-fracked-up-usa-shale-gas-bubble/5326504
[12] BP Energy Outlook 2013, London, January 2012
[13] Nikiforuk. Fracked Gas Won’t Solve Energy Crunch: Report ; David Hughes. Drill Baby Drill: Can Unconventional Fuels Usher in a New Era of Energy Abundance. February, 2013. Post Carbon Institute. http://assets-production-webvanta-com.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/000000/03/97/original/reports/DBD-report-FINAL.pdf
[14] Richard Heinberg. How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.
[15] Richard Heinberg. How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.
[16] Andrew Nikiforuk. Fracked Gas Won’t Solve Energy Crunch: Report.
[17] Ralph Surette. Fracking is Fool’s Gold. Chronicle Herald , December 13, 2013 http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1173949-surette-fracking-is-fool-s-gold
[18] Tim Morgan. Shale gas : The dotcom bubble of our times.
[19] Guy Chazan. Shell writedown is bad news for US shale. August 1, 2013 http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cf41cc36-fab2-11e2-87b9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz39WiSf1QA\
[20] William Engdahl. The Fracked-up USA Shale Gas Bubble.
[21] Peak Oil Review. January 2014. http://peak-oil.org/2014/01/peak-oil-review-6-january-2014
[22] David Hughes. Drill Baby Drill.
[23] Richard Heinberg. How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.
[24] Jeremy Leggett. Energy and Nations. Resurgence July /August Issue 285 2014. http://www.resurgence.org/magazine; Jeremy Leggett. The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance. 2014. Routledge
[25] Ralph Surette. Fracking is Fool’s Gold. Dec 13, 2013 http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1173949-surette-fracking-is-fool-s-gold
[26] David Hughes, Drill Baby Drill.
[27] Richard Heinberg. How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.
[28] Deborah Rogers. Shale and Wall Street: Was the Decline in Natural Gas Prices Orchestrated? http://shalebubble.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/SWS-report-FINAL.pdf ; Richard Heinberg. How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.
[29] Jeremy Leggett. UK Energy Independence: Five Hidden Costs Expose Turth About Fracking. The Guardian. 18 August 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2014/aug/18/uk-energy-dependence-five-hidden-costs-fracking
[30] Richard Heinberg. How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.
[31] Lucia von Reusner. Socially Responsible Investors: Working to Minimize Fracking Impacts. May 2, 2013. http://livebettermagazine.com/article/socially-responsible-investors-working-to-minimize-fracking-impacts
[32] Ravina Bains and Neils Veldhuis. Supreme Court’s Tsilhqot’in First Nation land title ruling boosts uncertainty in Canada’s natural resource sectors. Business Financial Post. July 21, 2014 http://business.financialpost.com/2014/07/21/supreme-courts-tsilhqotin-first-nation-land-title-ruling-boosts-uncertainty-in-canadas-natural-resource-sectors/ ]
[33] Jeremy Leggett. Energy and Nations.
[34] Janet M Eaton. Paradigms, and Paradigm Shifts as Broad Context for the Transition to “Health Care”. 1996. https://www.chebucto.ns.ca/CommunitySupport/NCC/SCDEFJE.html
[35] Janet M Eaton . What is Degrowth? August 4th, 2012. https://beyondcollapse.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/what-is-degrowth-by-janet-m-eaton-august-3-2012/
* Janet M Eaton, PhD, has worked as a marine biologist; as part time university lecturer in Invertebrate Zoology, Globalization Issues, Environment and Sustainable Society, Community Political Power, and Innovations in Education; as an Adult and Community Education administrator and educator, as an independent researcher ; and as a volunteer leader in many Canadian NGOs. She has also been a member and research fellow of the International Systems Institute, and an advocate of systemic thinking and systemic change for the past twenty years. In the 1990s she did workshops for various Nova Scotia government departments and NGO groups on ‘Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts as it pertained to their mandates.
Contact:
Address: 133 Main St., Wolfville, N.S. B4P 1C2 ;
Ph# 902) 5420 1631 ; E-mail jmeaton@ns.sympatico.ca
Blog: https://beyondcollapse.wordpress.com/
Janet Eaton's Blog 
Useful article , Janet. Thanks
Thanks Patrick. Appreciate your feedback.