The setting was the Cape Town International Convention, South Africa. The occasion was Windaba 2013, the third wind industry conference presented by the SA Wind Energy Association and the Global Wind Energy Council. The speaker was Steve Sawyer, Secretary-General of the GWEC. In an opening speech defininitely to make one sit up and take notice he explained how he considered that the massive quantities of shale gas produced through fracking in the US, despite considerable local opposition, and their marketing efforts to export this gas to the world at large was a serious threat to the renewable wind energy industry.
The delivery noted that the International Energy Agency was referring to the coming of a “golden age of gas” and promising “plentiful, clean and wonderful natural gas”.
Sawyer said in rebuttal of these preposterous claims:
“Well, it’s not so golden, it’s not so cheap, and it’s certainly not very clean. But it’s become something of a sacred cow in the US and they’re trying to export it globally, and it could be a serious problem for us (renewable wind energy industry).
Measurements from a fracked gas field in Utah showed that even if this gas was used in to generate electricity in the most efficient modern plants, in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions you’d be better off burning coal.
They have methane leakage rates of somewhere between seven and nine percent in that gas field. It’s different in every gas field, but it’s something to think about – saviour of the climate it (fracked shale gas) certainly is not.”
Since 1999, the council’s long-term goal had been to achieve somewhere between 10 percent and 12 percent of global electricity supply from wind energy by 2020. While the target had been on track it had fallen off recently, and exports of shale gas from the US could knock the plans off course.
Interestingly Sawyer noted that Ethiopia was ahead of South Africa in terms of installed wind energy generation capacity, but thought that outh Africa would quickly catch up. However he warned that there were considerable challenges to wind energy from traditional fossil fuels and the new wunderkind/bette noir on the block, shale gas.
While there is some opposition to fracking in the US, particularly when it takes place near to communities, it is nothing as large as the fuss people in the UK have made in opposition to an untried and untested (in terms of the water supply/seismic effect) technique for extracting gas.
