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From AFR
US shale gas expert warns Australia to be quick
PUBLISHED:

SIMON EVANS
A United States expert on hydraulic fracturing has warned that Australian companies and regulators may miss the opportunity to fully extract the value of the developing shale gas in­dustry if they are too slow and cautious because of the commercial dynamics of the global gas sector.

She said Australian authorities and companies should take comfort from the track record of companies in the shale gas industry in the United States, where more than 1 million wells have been drilled, claiming that the US Environmental Protection Agency had no record of this resulting in the contam­ination of aquifers. “They have no record of hydraulic fracturing inter­acting into water wells,” she said in Adelaide on Thursday.

Dr Ehlig-Economides, who was brought to Australia by engineering firm Fyfe for the roundtable with industry players, said one of the issues for Australia was the higher costs of drilling wells because of the deeper shales and higher temperatures encountered, compared with the US.

“The cost of entry here is high,” she said, noting that the average cost of drilling a well in the US was about $8 million. Depending on the specifics of the area and access to infrastructure and rigs, it could be almost double that price in Australia.

Dr Ehlig-Economides said regu­lators and companies in Australia needed to ensure a strong safety and environmental record to improve public confidence in fracking, and said there were factors that would be specific to each well drilled.

She also took a swipe at the 2010 US documentary Gasland, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The documentary is highly critical of fracking, but she said it misrepresented the situation in an industry where there are many different political agendas.