Gas is leaking from pipes beneath New York City and Bill McKibben has confidently informed us that this is simply more evidence that the climate benefits of shale gas are much worse than many claim. Unfortunately the only real message from the article is that Bill McKibben is rather selective about evidence when it comes to fracking and that his apparent willingness to “do the math” on climate change does not transfer over very well to the rather important question of where we get our energy from.

The federal government played a crucial and often unexpected role in the decades-long technological innovations that led to the shale gas revolution, according to a new report from the staff of the American Energy Innovation Council, the latest independent investigation into the public sector origins of the North American gas glut first uncovered by the Breakthrough Institute.

The report shows how government funding and institutional support amounted to billions of dollars over three decades and a complex structure of policies that combined government and industry resources to solve a critical technological challenge: tapping a vast underground bounty of energy recently considered inaccessible. The conclusions further challenge the longstanding myth that the shale gas boom was brought about through private sector innovation alone and offer important lessons for energy innovation more broadly. 

Over the last year, celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Robert Redford, Mark Ruffalo, Mario Batali, Scarlett Johansson, Alec Baldwin, and Matt Damon have spoken out against the expansion of natural gas drilling. “Fracking kills,” says Ono, who has a country home in New York. “It threatens the air we breathe,” says Redford. 

Shale gas is the "killer app" in the fight against coal, Breakthrough chairman and cofounder Ted Nordhaus argued in a recent debate with Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp. The goal of climate policy must be to advance a zero-carbon revolution. Krupp called for more regulations and carbon pricing as well as opposition to expanded gas production.

The wild artistic license of movies like Gasland notwithstanding, the common feeling in the media and, therefore, among the public, is that fracking is causing significant environmental damage (Energy Justice). However, it seems that fracking may be getting a bum rap, at least from the standpoint of toxic emissions.

Natural gas has been rapidly replacing coal power in recent years, driving down U.S. emissions faster than in any country in the world. But to some renewable energy advocates who have long prophesied that solar and wind are on the cusp of replacing coal, such a reality can't possibly be happening.

Such appears to be the case with the Rhodium Group, which claimed recently that non-hydro renewables like solar, wind and biomass are responsible for 58% of recent US decarbonization, compared to only 38% for natural gas.

How does Rhodium claim that solar and wind had a greater impact than gas, even though the EIA shows that gas increased last year ten times more than wind, and nearly one hundred times more than solar? By using improper assumptions, and inventing a bizarrely indirect way of measuring what matters.

Coal electricity declined by 12.5 percent in 2012, mostly driven by the switch to natural gas, which increased by almost the exact same amount (217 terrawatt-hours) as coal declined (216 TWh), according to new annual numbers released by the US Energy Information Administration.

Carbon dioxide emissions need to be reduced far more and far faster than previously thought if a global temperature rise is to be kept under 2 °C, according to a report in Environmental Research Letters. The researchers say that scaling up existing technology won’t be good enough to meet the goals. Instead, we need new technological breakthroughs.

The following is a speech delivered at the Energy Innovation Conference in Washington, DC, on January 29, 2013.

About once a month we at the Breakthrough Institute get an email or, as often, a carefully hand-typed letter, from someone who politely if sternly informs us that they have invented the solution to all of the world's energy needs. This incredible technology, they explain, has none of the problems that plague other energy technologies. It's so cheap as to be almost free. It emits zero pollution. It's safe. And it's totally reliable.

Unfortunately, they explain, the investors they've shown their design to just don't get it. They are writing in the hopes that we might get it — seeing as we’re committed to paradigm shifts and all — and help them to secure modest up-front financing required to demonstrate this miracle for all of the world to see.

A few years ago, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology was seen as the best way to clean up coal and cut carbon emissions. And Europe was seen as the expected leader in the field. But instead, reports the science journal Nature, Europe has fallen behind North America in the race to create systems that separate carbon dioxide from exhaust gases.

And what’s worse, Europe is increasingly turning to coal, the most polluting of all sources of electricity. In some European countries, reports The Economist, the amount of coal-generated electricity is rising by up to 50% a year, at annualized rates. Ironically, some experts say CCS is the only way to eliminate coal emissions.

The gap between the cultures of technology and academic economics was on display at the 2013 meeting of the American Economic Association in San Diego last Friday and Saturday. On Saturday, January 5, Rice University’s Kenneth Barry Medlock moderated a panel entitled “The Future of Energy: Markets, Technology and Policy” that featured Jim Sweeney of Stanford, Dale Jorgenson of Harvard, and Adam Sieminski of the US Energy Information Administration.

Jim Sweeney’s presentation was on “The Future Role of Energy Efficiency and Technology” but he focused on the narrow topic of using incentives or behavioral “nudges” to get people to conserve electricity. He demonstrated that decades of attempts to get people to change their behavior to conserve more electricity had shown meager results—mainly because the savings are such a negligible amount of personal disposable income—but called for renewed efforts anyway.

The New Year will not mark a clean slate. Congress and the president will re-convene their hostilities. And while the impasse will prevent legislative action to fix the level greenhouse gas emissions, the president is nevertheless preparing a more insidious attack on climate change.

Re-election to the White House is giving President Obama the oomph he needs to tackle the effects of global warming — a topic that has been legislatively off-limits. To achieve his objectives, Obama is remaining persistent and is pursuing a high-tech, clean-tech economy in conjunction with his administration’s recently enacted environmental regulations.

“Addressing climate change is urgent,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland, Calif. “Energy transitions take a long time and we need to get started.”

Does renewable energy need to be backed up by fossil fuels? The answer is yes, at least until large scale methods of energy storage are invented. However, the question is one that I would argue is uninformative. A more relevant question is: Can renewable energy supply electricity when demand is at its highest?

[A quick note: the following arguments only hold in countries with similar electricity demand patterns. In particular they may not apply to countries with summer peaks in electricity demand.]

There are two key things that vary in an electricity grid: electricity demand and electricity supply. Fundamentally an electricity grid always needs to be able to match demand. Most high latitude countries are like the UK, with maximum seasonal demand in the middle of winter, as shown in the graph below, taken from UK govt. statistics.

The ongoing displacement of coal by natural gas in the US electric generating sector was neatly illustrated in two recent articles. The Washington Post examined it from the perspective of utilities faced with expensive decisions about which fuel to bet on for the future, while the Wall St. Journal looked at the resource and tax implications of this trend for states. The intensity of competition between coal and gas would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago, when the price and energy security advantages of the former seemed insurmountable. The shale gas revolution continues to upend conventional wisdom on energy.

It's worth recalling that coal was once a widely-distributed fuel, powering homes, businesses, trains and factories, as well as power plants. Most of its decentralized applications yielded to competition from the post-World War II oil boom, resulting in a nearly 40% decline in US coal demand between 1945 and 1960, on a BTU basis.  Coal got its second wind in response to the energy crises of the 1970s, when its promise of more than a century's worth of secure, low-cost supply trumped concerns about the environmental impacts of its extraction and consumption. From 1972 to 2000 coal, together with nuclear power, displaced roughly two-thirds of the petroleum used in US power generation. That freed up oil for other, more valuable uses and solidified coal's energy security benefits in the minds of the public and policy makers. In the process, coal's share of generation expanded from 44% to 53%.

Much has changed in the last few years. From 2007 to 2011 a weak US economy and the rapid expansion of natural gas and oil production from unconventional sources shrank net US petroleum imports by nearly 30%, while increasing the country's effective energy independence — domestic production of all energy sources as a fraction of total consumption — from 70% to 80%. That lessens the salience of energy security, for which the gas and renewable energy sources perceived to be competing with coal can claim comparable benefits, along with domestic job creation. And the gas supplies that constitute the main competition for coal are, in contrast to earlier gas booms, backed by resources with useful lives that could rival those of the nation's coal deposits.

ISTANBUL—New energy trends are bolstering the United States and China, giving their industries a sharp competitive edge over Europe’s and Japan’s in the next quarter-century, according to a major new study by the International Energy Agency. However, IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, suggested that Europe can arrest its long competitive slide if it reverses a thus-far halting approach to the development of shale gas and oil.

Birol, addressing a conference organized by the Atlantic Council in Istanbul, spoke Friday as part of a week-long rollout of the IEA’s much-watched annual energy outlook. On Nov. 12, the IEA began the launch by forecasting that the US will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer in 2017 and hold that position through the early 2020s before slipping back to second or third place. The US is already the world’s largest natural gas producer.

The US leap in hydrocarbon production stems from the surprising success of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of shale gas and oil in places like North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The story has been different in Europe, which also possesses potentially rich shale formations but has experienced environmental resistance to developing it. France and Germany have banned fracking, and Germany is considering doing so. Permitting has been slow in some other European countries, said Chevron’s Ian MacDonald. Europe, as with some US communities and states, has adopted the cautious approach because of the potential for poisoned drinking water and other concerns.

In 1981, George Mitchell, an independent Texas natural gas entrepreneur, realized that his shallow gas wells in the Barnett were running dry. He had millions of sunk investment in equipment and was looking for a way to generate more return on it. Mitchell was then a relatively small player in an industry that by its own reckoning was in decline. Conventional gas reserves were limited and were getting increasingly played out.

Not long after President Obama defended his green energy investments by pointing to decades of taxpayer money for the natural gas revolution, prominent conservatives responded by denying the government's role outright. "I hear the President say the DOE invented [fracking] 30 years ago," said T. Boone Pickens, "and I don't know what he's talking about." At a public forum last July, Romney adviser Linda Gillespie Stuntz said, "The American wildcatters who really developed the hydraulic fracturing technology that's made this energy bonanza a reality didn't have anything to do with federal government."

U.S. emissions have plummeted 7.7 percent since 2006, thanks to the rapid switch from coal to cheaper and cleaner natural gas. Where did all this cheap gas come from? A concerted, public-private effort dating back to the mid-1970s to cheaply extract gas from shale. There is a clear lesson for those concerned about global warming: seek public-private investments in technological innovation to make clean energy cheap.

"Along each stage of the innovation pipeline -- from basic research to applied R&D to cost-sharing on demonstration projects to tax policy support for deployment -- public-private partnerships and federal investments helped push hydraulic fracturing in shale into full commercial competitiveness."

Below is an overview of our investigation into the history of government support for shale gas fracking. This support included investments in R&D, pilot demonstration, and key mapping techniques that developed horizontal drilling in shale, microseismic imaging, and modern hydraulic fracturing techniques.

Click here to read our FAQ and responses to critics of the investigation.

Click here to download our fact sheet "Where the Shale Gas Revolution Came From" (PDF).

The history behind the shale gas boom remained relatively unknown until late 2011, when researchers at the Breakthrough Institute conducted an extensive investigation revealing the role that federal agencies like the Department of Energy and the National Laboratories played in supporting gas industry experimentation with shale fracking.

Featured in the Washington Post and the President's 2012 State of the Union, this Breakthrough investigation enunciates - again - the crucial role that the federal government has always played in technological innovation.

For more, here's a round-up of Breakthrough's coverage of the shale gas history, and the example it provides for future public investment in clean energy.

• "Where the Shale Gas Revolution Came From: Government's Role in the Development of Hydraulic Fracturing in Shale" by Alex Trembath, Jesse Jenkins, Ted Nordhaus, and Michael Shellenberger


• New Investigation Finds Decades of Government Funding Behind Shale Revolution


• "A boom in shale gas? Credit the feds." Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in the Washington Post


• Obama's Energy Revolution: The President references the Breakthrough Institute's shale gas investigation in his 2012 State of the Union


• Interview with Dan Steward, Former Vice President of Mitchell Energy


• Interview with Gas Resources Expert Terry Engelder


• Interview with Alex Crawley, Former Program Director for the Energy Research and Development Administration


• "Beyond Cap and Trade: A New Path to Clean Energy." Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus at Yale360 on the implications of the shale revolution on clean energy development


• "Shale Revolution Challenges Left and Right." Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in the American Enterprise Institute's The American on the lessons of the shale gas revolution


• CNN Blows Obama State of the Union Fact-Check

Frequently Asked Questions and Responses to Our Critics on the History of Shale Gas

CNN reported that hydraulic fracturing was first used in 1947 and that "the technology has led to a boom in gas exploration in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, which sit atop extensive shale rock formations." In a recent TED session, T. Boone Pickens related his experience with fracking: "I witnessed my first frack job in 1953. I hear the President say the DOE invented it 30 years ago and I don't know what he's talking about." If fracking has been around since the 1940s, then why did the government invest in it in the 1970s and 1980s?

It's true that hydraulic fracturing was utilized before the federal government began research on shale gas in the 1970s, but for entirely different applications. Fracking was first applied to limestone deposits in 1947. But drilling in limestone is fundamentally different from drilling in shale. Key innovations were needed to effectively and commercially tap shale deposits, including the use of diamond-studded drill bits, microseismic imaging, and horizontal drilling. Until these and other crucial innovations were developed, gas industry experts remember drilling through shale to get to limestone deposits, unable to successfully permeate the porous shale rock.

Domestic natural gas production was declining in the 1970s. The gas industry collaborated with the Federal Power Commission (now the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) to open the Gas Research Institute to develop new drilling and extraction methods, but more work was needed. The Eastern Gas Shales Project, an initiative of the federal Energy Research and Development Administration, began in 1976. The Project set up dozens of pilot demonstration projects with universities and private gas companies testing drilling and fracturing methods to commercially extract natural gas from shale. Massive hydraulic fracturing (MHF) was developed by the nascent Department of Energy in the late 1970s, a technique that would be improved upon later to spark the modern gas boom.

The combination of high porosity, low permeability, and natural fractures in large shale formations made imaging and drilling extremely difficult. Microseismic imaging, originally developed by Sandia National Laboratory for application in coalbeds, proved absolutely essential for drillers to navigate and site their boreholes. The optimal combination of water, sand, propants and other chemical lubricants took several decades to calibrate, up until 1998 when Nick Steinsberger and other engineers at Mitchell Energy developed a technique called "slickwater fracking." Federal researchers and private industry engineers had been trying for decades to access the hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath their feet in shale; the fact that it took over 25 years to successfully and economically extract gas out of shale is a testament to the ingenuity and innovation of public and private engineers, and an indication of the difficulty of the projects.