High-Energy Innovation: The Case of Shale Gas

The following case study is an excerpt from Breakthrough's latest publication High-Energy Innovation. The report illustrates how energy innovation will increasingly be initiated by developing (as opposed to wealthy) nations and will take place across international borders. The four technologies examined in the report – shale gas, nuclear, carbon carbon and storage, and solar – demonstrate how firmly emerging economies are committed to securing clean, cheap, and reliable energy to meet growing demand. The report focuses on these four technologies not to suggest that they should be the only energy technologies pursued by international efforts, but rather to illustrate the distinct challenges facing different technologies, including their innovation and diffusion in different national contexts.

SHALE GAS

The recent boom in natural gas production in the United States, brought about through technical innovations in the recovery of natural gas from previously inaccessible shale rock formations and land-use policies that favor private development, has helped lower electricity costs and benefitted the petrochemical and manufacturing industries.¹ Even more significantly, it has contributed to a drop in US carbon dioxide emissions to their lowest levels in two decades,² as inexpensive natural gas accelerates the closure of aging coal plants around the country.

Though hydraulic fracturing’s diffusion across the United States since 2005 was rapid,³ the actual innovation process occurred over decades. The technique of fracturing rock to recover fuels was invented in the late 1940s, but it required many additional innovations — the result of public-private partnerships and federal investments at many points in the process — to develop a method of fracking that was economically viable.⁴ The version of fracking that came to dominate was the one that took advantage of resources available to US companies, particularly the abundant water supplies that made feasible injecting millions of gallons of water into underground rock formations.⁵ Fracking’s economic success also depended on external factors such as the continuous improvements to the country’s energy infrastructure, especially its natural gas pipelines.

The possibility of cheaper and cleaner energy from shale gas has prompted interest from governments around the world. If it can achieve the necessary innovations for tapping perhaps the largest shale gas reserves on the planet, China may be able to reduce its dependence on coal and shift to a lower-carbon economy.⁶ European countries such as the United Kingdom are also exploring the possibility of exploiting shale gas.⁷

However, caution is warranted. The large deployment of fracking technology faces significant hurdles outside of the US context. China’s nascent industry is plagued by technical bottlenecks, lack of adequate water supply, and poor infrastructure.⁸ Drilling an exploratory shale gas well in China still costs much more than it does in the United States.⁹ In Europe, the challenges are more likely to be political and legal.¹⁰ Unlike in the United States, European landowners do not automatically own the rights to extract the resources from the ground beneath their property, making the building of new extraction plants fraught with political difficulties.¹¹

From this example, three lessons are clear. First, incremental innovation within an existing and powerful segment of the energy sector has lowered American carbon emissions and reaped substantial benefits to the economy.¹² The shale gas revolution has reduced US power sector emissions on the order of 150 to 200 megatons annually over the past decade, and cheaper energy costs have provided a $100 billion-per-year boost to the US economy.¹³ Second, the diffusion of energy technologies beyond the techno-economic system from which they emerge is rife with challenges. Third, and precisely because this process is so hard, the transfer of expertise and technical knowledge (rather than merely dropping in hardware) is critical to accelerating diffusion.

Countries have tried to do this by attracting the expertise of US firms. Mexico, for example, has opened up its oil and gas sector to foreign investment¹⁴ in order to acquire the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques that can help it access one of the world’s largest reserves of shale gas and tight oil.¹⁵ And a Chinese energy company, Sinopec Group, paid Devon Energy (which had previously acquired Mitchell Energy, the firm that co-created the shale gas revolution with the US government) billions of dollars to work with it on fuel extractions projects, in the hope of gaining access to the US firm’s expertise.^16,17 Other countries are enthusiastically exploring the possibility of shale gas production, including Argentina, South Africa, and Poland.¹⁸