Team:Lethbridge/ethics3

Human Practices

CAB Extraction Survey

In order to better understand the public opinion about hydraulic fracturing and methods for extracting unconventional natural resources, we put together a short survey for people to fill out. The responses gave us a chance to think, not only about the science behind our project, but also about the financial, environmental, safety, and engineering aspects of our project. After giving a short description of our proposed CAB extraction method, we asked people the following questions:

1. Thinking about the described procedure for extracting carbonate oil, do you imagine any ethical or environmental problems associated with it? If yes, what kinds of problems or issues come to mind?

2. Do you know what hydraulic fracturing is? Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a well stimulation process that involves high-pressure injection of water, sand, and chemicals into buried geological formations to open and enlarge fractures in the rock, creating pathways for trapped hydrocarbons to flow into the wellbore at higher rates. When describing our method, did it make you think of hydraulic fracturing? Now that you are thinking of it, do you see any similarities or differences between hydraulic fracturing and our proposed method?

3. What sort of safety procedures would you like to see implemented if our method for extracting carbonate oil were to be used by oil and gas companies?

4. Do you think that Canadians should be investing in new ways for extracting unconventional oil sources? Do you think this is an important investment for the world as a whole? Do you think there are other sources of energy that we should be investing more time and money into instead of unconventional sources? Why or why not? Participants were allowed to give free-form answers to these questions, and we boiled down their answers into a few main responses for each questions. Here is a breakdown of the main responses for each question:

Overall, participants were mostly concerned with the effects acetic acid would have on ground water and the surrounding plant life. However, almost 30% of the participants could not see any major ethical or environmental issues associated with CAB extraction, mostly because acetic acid did not seem harmful enough to cause any major damage. Some participants were concerned that acidification of the soil due to acetic acid or unregulated side reactions occurring underground could be harmful. Ground stability would have to be monitored, especially if future development was planned near the wellsite.

While a large majority of participants did see similarities between hydraulic fracturing and CAB extraction, almost half of the participants thought that CAB extraction would be a safer and less damaging procedure to use for fracturing rock. Approximately 10% of the participants would prefer to use hydraulic fracturing, since it has been in use for many years and a number of the issues surrounding this procedure have already been addressed, whereas CAB extraction seems very experimental and would need much further testing before it was ready to be used.

Almost one-third of the participants were most concerned about bacterial contamination of the environment. CAB extraction has been designed to have the bacteria contained within bioreactors and not directly applied to the carbonate rock, helping to prevent contamination of the environment. As well, a kill switch module will be used to prevent proliferation in the event of a contamination. Most participants agreed that regular and thorough testing of water and soil samples would be necessary to ensure that the acetic acid was not causing any minor effects to the surrounding environment. Since Alberta is land-locked and we do not experience earthquakes, nor do we construct buildings with the infrastructure needed to withstand them, careful monitoring of seismic activity and ground stability would also be of high importance.

Finally, when asked about alternative sources of energy, our participants were quite evenly divided. Almost half agreed that it is important to keep our minds open to new technologies, whether they be unconventional or green. Those in support of unconventional sources argued that the Canadian economy is dependent upon the production of natural resources, and that it would be best to develop the resources we have rather than rely on other countries to supply us with necessary energy sources. Those in support of green technologies thought that a change in our lifestyles to greener thinking (using electric cars, reducing our greenhouse gas output) is more important, and investing in wind and solar power would be more beneficial. One participant thought that we should look at natural energy-producing systems, and use those as models for a completely new type of energy source (spoken like a true synthetic biologist in the making!). And if those methods fail, we could always try to engineer E. coli to perform cold fusion.