Germany Finally Says the F-Word: ‘Fracking
A country used to buying gas elsewhere suddenly remembers there’s a lot in the ground at home
Germany Finally Says the F-Word: ‘Fracking
A country used to buying gas elsewhere suddenly remembers there’s a lot in the ground at home.
By Joseph C. SternbergFollow
Oct. 6, 2022
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has produced a string of surprising changes in Germany over the past seven months: substantially higher defense spending, delivery of lethal weapons to a combat zone, new realism on the limits of trade-based diplomacy.
But the surest evidence that Europe’s largest economy is veering into “signs and wonders” territory is that politicians are uttering with increasing frequency that dirtiest F-word of all—“fracking.”
Germany’s energy crisis is a crisis of choice, or rather a crisis of two choices, the second following directly from the first. The choice most German politicians seem to want to talk about is the second of the two, the choice to source so much of the country’s energy imports and especially natural gas from a single, unsympathetic vendor, Russia.
A solution to this problem is achievable without an excess of policy imagination or political skill. If importing gas from Russia no longer is an option, the gas will be imported from somewhere else. Pledges to accelerate construction of terminals to accept liquefied natural gas from the U.S. and Middle East have lent Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck of the Green Party an image of vigorous activity in pursuit of Germany’s voracious energy needs.
But Germany is as dependent as it is on foreign fuel only because of the first decision Berlin made: not to tap the country’s substantial domestic gas reserves, which by some estimates could satisfy much of Germany’s gas demands for the next two decades.
The manifestation of this choice was hostility to the hydraulic fracture, or fracking, technology that could tap Germany’s shale-bound gas reserves. Berlin in 2017 all but banned, on dubious safety grounds, the fracking techniques that could reach most of Germany’s gas.
Now some politicians are asking whether the country can afford to leave that gas in the ground. A split has opened within the unwieldy governing coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Two of the coalition’s three parties are staunchly anti-fracking—Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and Mr. Habeck’s Greens. The third, the free-market Free Democrat Party (FDP), is for it.
The FDP “supports the significant expansion of domestic gas production,” the party’s energy guru in Parliament, Michael Kruse, told a newspaper in June. Another party leader, Torsten Herbst, challenged the objections: “As scientific studies show, under modern safety standards fracking doesn’t cause any relevant environmental damage.”
Some opposition politicians are picking up the theme. Bavaria’s conservative state premier, Markus Söder, in late July posed the obvious question: “Wouldn’t it be appropriate for Germany to think about whether it wants to use its own gas capacity?”
That interview came with a broader, not-so-subtle point about energy trade-offs. Mr. Söder is cool on fracking in his own state of Bavaria, but keen on fracking in the northern state of Lower Saxony. Lower Saxony also happens to be the site of one of the three remaining nuclear reactors Berlin may keep running into next year, and the state is a hotbed of antinuclear resistance.
Mr. Habeck currently plans to shut Lower Saxony’s reactor on schedule in December while keeping the other two plants (one of which is in Bavaria) running.
Mr. Söder’s fracking message is that the energy has to come from somewhere. One can extract it from shale or from the atom—Mr. Söder is enthusiastic about the atom—but not extracting Germany’s fuel resources is no longer an option. Message received, apparently. As of this week, even the left-leaning Spiegel news magazine found itself wondering why exactly fracking remains such a taboo ahead of state elections in Lower Saxony.
Don’t hold your breath for this debate to lead to German fracking any time soon. Opinion polling over the summer found only 27% of respondents supported fracking, compared with 81% support for more wind and 61% support for burning more coal as solutions to Germany’s looming energy crisis.
Yet don’t entirely abandon hope. The real surprise of that poll was that “only” 56% of respondents opposed fracking outright, with the remaining 17% undecided. This after voters have been bombarded for years with antifracking messages, and with fracking supporters launching the latest debate from a standing start. That the opposition isn’t near-universal suggests that the harsh realities Russia’s war has imposed on Europe may be opening the door to more skeptical thinking about German energy policy.
Germany is deciding if it wants to play a more active role in a range of foreign, security and economic policy debates around the world. Up to now, the idea that Germany is resource-poor seemed to underlie many foreign-policy discussions, and it encouraged Berlin to take supine positions. But this perceived resource poverty is more a form of learned helplessness than a geological reality. Whether Germany can wake up to this fact will shape what direction Mr. Scholz’s “turning point” ends up taking
Germany Finally Says the F-Word: “Fracking” by @josephsternberg https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-finally-says-the-f-word-fracking-scholz-fdp-bavaria-energy-crisis-russia-putin-nuclear-natural-gas-11665075646