Fracking in Colombia: Environmental and Economic Risks in the Context of the Climate Crisis

The statements of the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, at the presentation of the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on April 4, would appear to be addressed to the Duque government: “We are on the road to global warming of more than twice the 1.5C limit agreed in Paris. Some government and business leaders say one thing and do another. In short, they are lying, and the results will be catastrophic.”

As an example, President Duque's intervention at the last “Ocean Summit” could be taken, where he spoke of the country's “ambitious” emission reduction targets (51% by 2030, 169 mTonCO2 eq), while its bureaucratic apparatus was exerting all possible pressure to accelerate the delivery of an environmental license for the first fracking pilot, in a process denounced as irregular and which involved different legal actions.

Let us understand in figures the dimension of the current government's double climate discourse: if only 25% of existing reserves were exploited in unconventional deposits (much of it through fracking), according to the estimate of the National Hydrocarbons Agency ANH, around 6,500 Mton CO2 eq would be emitted, almost 40 times the figure with which Duque poses as an environmentalist at international events. The exploitation of these types of deposits involves enormous socio-environmental risks, both locally and globally, in a historical context in which the world is moving away from fossil energies.

A first impact that must be taken into account, at the local and regional levels, is related to the terrifying use of water in this type of exploitation. According to the Environmental Impact Study (EIA) submitted by Ecopetrol to the Environmental Licensing Agency (ANLA), there is talk that fracturing in 20 stages requires more than 48 million liters of water. To understand the size of this figure, it can be compared with that of the water used for drilling a similar well in conventional reservoirs (what has been done in the Magdalena Medio region for more than 100 years), which under normal conditions, is not even 10% of this value. 48 million liters of water is also the amount that use 370,000 Colombians in one day, or the one that a typical family, of 5, would use in 202 years.

This amount of water is mixed with different chemicals, of which more than 100 are endocrine disruptors, which act as toxic to reproduction and development, according to the compendium made by the prestigious “Concerned Health Professionals” of New York, United States, of scientific and medical findings demonstrating the risks and fracking damage.

This mixture of water with chemicals and sand (230 tons, according to the Ecopetrol document) with which the subsoil is massively fractured, must be added heavy metals, radioactive elements, brines and volatile organic compounds, possibly present in the geological formations to be intervened; all this would be transported to the surface with the so-called “return flow”, which, according to the same EIA, would be between 25% and 35% of the total, which after treatment would be reinjected into the subsoil, a practice associated with possible seismic movements and which was the main reason for the declaration of a moratorium on fracking in the United Kingdom.

As we can conclude from the above data, this is a major alteration to the region's water complex, one of the most sensitive and rich in the country, threatened by more than a century of conventional oil exploitation.

According to research by Duke University, in the United States, in essence, “most of the water used for fracking operations (...) is lost to humanity, since formation does not return to the underground, or, if it does, it is highly saline, difficult to treat and usually disposed in deep wells of injection”.

A natural condition of this type of exploitation, inherent in the stimulation process that creates artificial flow channels supported by small grains of sand, is that they will tend to close quickly. A comprehensive study of major fracking basins in the United States shows that, after three years, almost all production (about 80%) is lost; this implies that, in order to maintain the extraction rate of a field, it is necessary to drill and fracture a large number of new wells that would use amounts of water, sand and chemicals similar to or even greater than those mentioned above.

Ecopetrol, consulted by the so-called “experts” commission, paid by the Duque government, indicated that, in an average scenario, drilling of more than 12,000 wells could be estimated throughout the region. In addition to an environmental and social problem of these proportions, the economic problem is evident, since drilling wells and fracturing are the most demanding activities in investment, money taken by the companies that provide these services and that cannot be recovered by the operators who will necessarily end up drowning in banks and bankruptcy, as has been widely evidenced in the United States.

The latest IPCC report explicitly states that the need to “Limit global warming to 2C or less will leave a substantial amount of fossil fuels unburned and could leave much of the fossil fuel infrastructure stranded.”

To the high rates of decline mentioned, we must add that, given the urgency of effective action in the face of the climate crisis, Ecopetrol would expose funds from the Nation by financing businesses that would generate “stranded assets”, defined as those that suffer unforeseen or premature amortization, devaluation or conversion to liabilities, due to environmental constraints, in this case, associated with the climate crisis.

When the need for science to leave most of the buried hydrocarbon reserves is most evident, the Duque government intends to lay down its nefarious legacy, which it avoids talking about abroad, along with the serious human rights situation surrounding these projects: threats through pamphlets and in a direct way that has led to the displacement of opponents of fracking, and even the exile of a major female opponent in the region.

Therefore, suspending pilots to prevent commercial entry of this technique into our country is a matter of national interest, and this is how two of the three presidential candidacies understand it; water and the lives of our and future generations are at stake, above private interests. It must be very clear to us.

* Environmentalist, petroleum engineer from the National University of Colombia, specialist in geothermal engineering at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). Researcher on issues of hydrocarbons, climate, post-oil societies and environmental transitions at Censat Agua Viva (Friends of the Earth Colombia). He has worked as a drilling engineer for oil companies such as Ecopetrol, Halliburton and Weatherford (Mexico).