Aubrey McClendon

When oil and gas executives gathered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to discuss the state of the industry shortly after Obama won re-election, they raised a recurring complaint.

“We now face four more years of regulatory uncertainty,” said Randy Alpert, an official with Consol energy told gathered shale gas executives.

Penny Seipel, Vice President of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association hit a similar note the very next day.

“Unfortunately, we have had quite a bit of uncertainty regarding our fiscal situation,” she said as she described proposed regulation and taxation of drilling companies in her state.

This uncertainty mantra has been trotted out by many industries facing potential oversight and is now being picked up by oil and gas: "We are not against regulation, we are against regulatory uncertainty," the line goes. “We don’t care what the rules are,” companies say, “just tell us ahead of time and then we will follow them gladly.”

This well-worn trope gives the impression that drillers do not view regulators as adversaries. All they’re asking for is common-sense fairness. Who could be against someone asking to know what the rules are? Predictability is a reasonable request.

It's a shrewd position for the shale industry. But it’s also deeply misleading and worth flagging now since it is likely to get amplified in coming months as more attention turns to whether federal officials should step up their oversight of oil and gas drilling.

Food and Water Watch (FWW) released a report today titled "U.S. Energy Security: Why Fracking for Oil and Natural Gas Is a False Solution." 

It shows, contrary to industry claims, there aren't 100 years of unconventional oil and gas sitting below our feet, even if President Barack Obama said so in his 2012 State of the Union Address. Far from it, in fact.

The report begs the disconcerting question: is the shale gas bubble on its way to bursting?

FWW crunched the numbers, estimating that there are, at most, half of the industry line, some 50 years of natural gas and much less of shale gas. This assumes the industry will be allowed to perform fracking in every desired crevice of the country. These are the same basins that advocates of hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") claim would make the U.S. the "next Saudi Arabia." 

"The popular claim of a 100-year supply of natural gas is based on the oil and gas industry’s dream of unrestricted access to drill and frack, and it presumes that highly uncertain resource estimates prove accurate," wrote FWW. "Further, the claim of a century’s worth of natural gas ignores plans to export large amounts of it overseas and plans for more domestic use of natural gas to fuel transportation and generate electricity."

This month, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection released its bi-annual report on how much natural gas has been produced in the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation which stretches underneath much of Appalachia. Investors were shocked because the production numbers seemed far lower than expected.  Watched closely by market and energy analysts, the report sparked a heated debate about the oil and gas industry's excited rhetoric about fracked shale gas as the cure-all to many of America's energy and jobs needs.

But the story quickly got complicated. The report was released despite lacking data from the state’s second largest driller, Chesapeake Energy, and state regulators never flagged the omission. The amount of gas flowing out of Pennsylvania had actually climbed dramatically.

It was a major flaw, and suddenly the searing spotlight of the media honed in on questions about whether regulators were keeping accurate track of how much gas the wells in their state really produce. How could they overlook such a massive error? Can the public be sure that the updated tally gives an accurate picture of how these wells are performing?

If regulators make mistakes in tracking energy production in their state, how reliable is the companion to that report, which tracks the toxic waste produced by these same companies?

Those are all valid questions that need honest answers. But the most important questions raised in the controversy were largely overlooked.

Given radioactive wastewater, earthquakes, and flammable tap water, one might think that drilling and fracking could not possibly have any more dirty secrets. But here’s the biggest secret of all: it’s expensive.

With natural gas at historic low prices – the Wall Street Journal ran a column recently suggesting that the price of gas might even sink to negative numbers, so that producers would need to pay buyers to take it off their hands – it may seem odd to think that fracking is costly. But it’s true. Not just in terms of its environmental footprint, but also in terms of its financial costs.

And everyone should care about how expensive gas is, especially those concerned about energy security and the environment, because the answer will determine the fate of renewables, the way we use land and water, and whether our nation’s energy policies are fundamentally sound.

To understand what’s going on, you need to look at Chesapeake Energy, the second largest producer of natural gas in the US, the company described by its founder and CEO Aubrey McClendon as the “biggest frackers in the world.”

For 19 of the past 21 years, the company has operated at what investors call “cash flow negative” – last year by $8.547 billion dollars – meaning that Chesapeake has consistently spent a whole lot more than it earned. For decades.

To fund all that fracking, the company has been flipping land, engaging in so many financial transactions that it’s been said to resemble a hedge fund more than a gas driller.

McClendon's company has become the environmental Enron, with Chesapeake's accountants creating some of the most labyrinthine and impenetrable books since Enron, according to some investors.