Drill, baby, drill.
Jacob LaRiviere will present “Quantifying Environmental Benefits of Fracking,” as this semester’s first Energy & Environmental Forum Thursday, at 1 p.m. in the Toyota Auditorium at the Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy.
LaRiviere, University of Tennessee associate professor of economics, will examine the economic benefits and environmental effects of hydraulic fracturing, the process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground to fracture shale rocks and release natural gas.
“Fracking has received a lot of attention because people are worried about what the (negatives) are,” LaRiviere said, referencing the controversies surrounding the drilling process as people are concerned it pollutes ground water and increases earthquake frequency.
However, for LaRiviere, the positive effects of the technique vastly outweigh the negative.
“(Fracking) technology has probably been the biggest discovery in the energy industry in 50 years,” LaRiviere said. “There’s been a change in how electricity is produced in this country.”
The economic and environmental advantages of fracking have the potential to reshape the energy industry entirely, LaRiviere said.
“Fracking has made natural gas cheap,” he said. “Natural gas has then displaced coal, natural gas is cleaner than coal in terms of electricity production, so as a result the air is cleaner than it used to be.”
Christopher Clark, associate professor in agriculture and resource economics, said he sees much of the criticisms surrounding fracking as largely unfounded. Although he dismisses anecdotes that victims of fracking “turn the tap on and light their water,” Clark recognizes much about the effects of the practice are still largely unknown.
“There’s sort of a disconnect at the national level when talking about natural gas,” Clark said. “Can we frack safely or not? We don’t really have the answers to those questions yet.”
Clark sees the public’s negative view of the drilling technique as premature. He said the potential of mining natural gas needs to be explored with more depth before passing judgement.
“We need play this out, we need to understand it, we need to do a lot more research.”
Paul Armsworth, associate professor in ecology and evolutionary biology and one of the co-organizers of the forum series, sees the event as an opportunity to examine the controversial topic from a different angle.
“It is that broadening of the lense to which we look at environmental and energy policy questions that we want to share with our participants,” Armsworth said. “It really is also about bringing the community together and enabling them to meet one another and interact and trade on some of these topics.”
More information on the event can be found here.
