The provincial energy minister has a struggling economy and a potential onshore natural gas resource he wants found.

Rural residents are afraid their water wells could be contaminated by hydraulic fracturing. Also known as fracking, it is the controversial method often used to make onshore natural gas flow.
Junior exploration companies that are publicly financed need potential investors to believe they will find large, commercially viable, natural gas deposits to pay for their continued exploration.
The battle over onshore exploration has gotten hot and is destined to get hotter.
Signs shouting No Fracking Way have popped up along our highways, repeated protests have been held in Aulds Cove and Halifax. Seven onshore exploration companies are compiling geological and historical records in preparation for drilling exploratory wells.
Meanwhile, everyone is waiting on a provincial review of fracking that will lay the groundwork for if, where, when and how fracking is allowed in Nova Scotia.
The energy minister’s staff is behind schedule on a review of scientific and technical literature on fracking, which will help the province decide whether the practice is allowed or forbidden.
JOIN US on Monday for a live web chat on fracking
The irony is that we might not have much commercially viable onshore natural gas.
“We’re giving ourselves a five per cent chance,” Edwin Macdonald said in December.
The senior geologist for St. Brendan’s Exploration, Macdonald is in a unique position. He’s not selling hope or fear.
Oh, he wants to find hydrocarbons, but he’ll get paid either way.
St. Brendan’s is privately owned by Triana Energy of West Virginia, so he doesn’t have to sell hope on the stock market. He has $10.5 million to spend looking for oil and gas between the New Brunswick border and New Glasgow.
“When the price is high, companies are willing to do fairly high risk exploration,” Macdonald said. “Nova Scotia would be considered high risk.
“There’s nothing to give any indication that there’s a resource play that extends across all the blocks. Nova Scotia is not a West Virginia.”
Energy Minister Charlie Parker quotes unofficial estimates of a potential for 70 trillion cubic feet of natural gas onshore Nova Scotia. How much of that can be reached -- and how much reached economically -- are other questions entirely.
This is not a story about the environmental merits of fracking. It’s a story about the complicated energy world faced by Nova Scotia over the decades to come and how that should inform the debate over fracking. Nothing happens in a vacuum -- it’s not just an equation of risks to groundwater and potential royalties to the province.
Geologically, Nova Scotia is a hodgepodge. About 380 million years ago, the province was rather rudely slapped together by the whimsy of continental drift.
The zone that has folks excited or upset includes everything on the mainland north of a line that runs from Canso to the Minas Basin. Cape Breton is a whole other kettle of fish.
To humour your attention span, we’ll explain it like this.
The northern mainland is like a bowl that filled up with sand and dead stuff. The dead stuff rotted and the sand turned into stone and as it did, the two were all mixed together in what’s called shale rock.
While most of us prefer cereal in our bowls, sand and dead stuff keeps the lights on.
But the oil and gas (the squished and rotten dead stuff) is trapped in tiny pockets deep underground. To get at it, folks like Macdonald drill holes 750 metres to 2.5 kilomeres deep, case them with concrete and hope oil or gas comes back up.
If not, they can frack the well by drilling sideways from the bottom, casing it with concrete and then pumping thousands of gallons of water, sand and chemicals (about three per cent of the mixture) down to fracture the rock.

The problem, and there have been some problems in other jurisdictions, occurs when the pipe isn’t properly sealed with concrete and some of the fracking fluid or some of the dead stuff (oil or gas) flows into the water table.
Folks like Macdonald say irresponsible drilling can be pre-vented by regulations and supervision. Those opposed are split into a variety of camps.
Some won’t accept any risk to groundwater.
Some are scared by well publicized home owner horror stories from West Virginia and Pennsylvania, where regulations are playing a catch-up game with rampant shale gas development.
Others remain on the fence.
The issue faced by Nova Scotia is the fact that whether we allow fracking in our bowl or not, we’ll likely end up using natural gas from someone else’s bowl to keep the lights on and stay warm.
“Nova Scotia’s offshore is declining and in the foreseeable future, the supply of offshore gas will come to an end,” said Tom Adams, a Toronto based energy analyst.
Pennsylvania and West Virginia are giant bowls filled with proven reserves of much more natural gas than we have. But until recently there was no way to get at it.
Then came fracking.
Since Sable Island gas first came onshore in 2000, fracking has changed North America’s energy equation by unlocking the United States’ bowl of natural gas.
Natural gas prices have dropped because it’s cheaper to frack onshore than it is to import liquefied natural gas on ships or drill for it offshore.
Natural gas prices, according to the United States Energy Information Administration, will be kept low by fracking over the coming decades. Electricity will also stay cheap and get cleaner as the United States weans itself off ever-more expensive coal.
Offshore drilling won’t get cheaper either. The existing Sable project will soon dry up, replaced by Deep Panuke that has an expected production life of about 13 years.
“Drilling offshore is extremely expensive, 10 to 20 times more than drilling onshore,” said Larry Hughes, a Dalhousie University professor who researches energy security.
So the province’s estimated 120 trillion cubic feet of offshore natural gas reserves may stay deep under the sea for a long time.
Hughes shares Macdonald’s assessment that Nova Scotia doesn’t have large onshore natural gas reserves.

Both Hughes and Adams, meanwhile, expect Nova Scotia will end up importers of American shale gas.
And why not -- we’ve already got a pipeline.
“Reversing the Maritimes Northeast Pipeline is hardly a new idea,” said Hughes of the pipeline currently carrying Sable gas to the New England states.
One proposal, admittedly in its early stages, by Pieridae Energy would see the pipeline reversed and carrying cheap American shale gas to a proposed $4.5-billion export terminal at Goldboro.
Pieridae owner Alfred Sorensen is using a project he developed and sold for $300 million in Kitimat, B.C., as a template for Goldboro. Just before Christmas the Kitimat project, which hasn’t been built yet, got a significant boost when Chevron Corp. purchased a half share.
This brings up a moral conundrum.
The equation goes like this: Home heating oil and electricity prices in this province are rising and are predicted to continue rising toward the breaking point for homeowners and industry.
South of the border, fracked natural gas is predicted to make home heating and electricity cheaper and cleaner. Both are set to get more expensive in Nova Scotia.
Our provincial budget is buoyed by transfer payments from oil provinces like Alberta that allow fracking.
Fracked natural gas from the United States could offer at least some alleviation to those costs in the future via a reversed Maritime and Northeast Pipeline.
Fracking in our province is unpopular among a wide segment of Nova Scotians due to environmental concerns, despite the fact that 57 per cent of our electricity is being generated by coal mined in Colombia and the United States.
So, are we hypocrites?
“Obviously there’s some NIMBYism going on,” said Fred Morley.
The chief economist of the Greater Halifax Partnership, through Saint Mary’s University and his work with the provincial government, has long been involved in the province’s economic development.
What we need to be doing as a province is having a discussion on where, when and how we allow fracking to be done, he said.
“In our case, we’re not having a discussion, we’re just saying we don’t want to talk about it right now because it’s too hard, too controversial,” Morley said.
But we need to have that conversation soon, and the quicker the better, he said.
That’s because the predicted cheap energy prices in the United States will give them a competitive advantage in manufacturing as they emerge from their recession.
“Suddenly, the United States will be one of the more competitive places to manufacture in the world and jobs will start coming back from China and Mexico,” Morely said.
“If we have a super competitive manufacturing engine south of the border and we’re not taking the potential for cost reductions then we will be in a bad situation.”
To Morley, the provincial government’s current review of fracking is a good first step.
Parker was quick to point out during a December interview that the fracking done in the province so far was under a previous administration. Three wells drilled in Hants County in 2007 produced inconclusive results, and large ponds of recovered fluid still wait disposal.
A plan to have the water treated by Atlantic Industrial Services in Debert fell through when tests found the water had picked up radioactive traces from underground rock formations.
It’s left a bad taste in the mouth of those who oppose the practice.
“I suppose there are some lessons to be learned there,” acknowledged Parker, adding that his department is working with the company to have the ponds cleaned up.
The province’s review is waiting on results of similar studies being done by the American Environmental Protection Agency, the State of New York, Environment Canada and the Province of Quebec.

“Our goal is to learn from them and get the very best practices to protect drinking water and surface water,” said Parker.
Until the review is published in mid-2014, the minister said fracking won’t be approved in the province.

Aaron Beswick is The Chronicle Herald’s reporter based in Antigonish.

(abeswik@herald.ca)

http://thechronicleherald.ca/heraldmagazine/537635-caution-fracking-ahead