Geosciences Education, Hydraulic Fracturing, and the Evolving Fossil Fuel Market, Worldwide

The Ohio Geological Society

Lunch Symposium

Thursday, April 21th, 2022

Lunch at 11:30, talk at 12:30 pm

Hilton Doubletree, 175 Hutchinson Ave, Columbus Ohio 43235

Geosciences Education, Hydraulic Fracturing, and the Evolving Fossil Fuel Market, Worldwide

Dr. William Reinthal  – Ashland University

As a geologist, it has been fascinating to watch the changes in the energy and mineral industries over the past forty-plus years.  From the oil price shocks at the height of the OPEC’s cohesion; from the trauma of the nuclear industry, after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima dai-ichi; from the lurching difficulties of technological transformation in the battery and supercapacitor industries…Earth has continued to provide fuels that, while not ideal, have allowed us to power the human race’s journey into the future.  We all know the negatives associated with burning coal; natural gas, too, while eminently cleaner, has produced its share of complications, particularly as conventional fields have become depleted, and we have innovated into the realm of more pervasive hydraulic fracturing of less permeable rock. Superimposed on this has been the rapid development of many populous, but previously impoverished, nations and regions, and has culminated with the realization that the Western world’s wealth cannot be easily translated to these socieities without immeasurable harm coming to Earth; the scale of the problem is simply insurmountable. Further exacerbated by the current political world’s adoption of “alternative” facts, and the profound anti-scientific movement underlying it, we find ourselves poorly served by the concurrrent demise of geoscience education, whether it be at the middle, high school, or university level.  If we can’t understand and contextualize Earth systems in the face of the triple onslaught of rapid industrialization, population growth, and energy/resource needs, how can we make intelligent decisions about national, let alone international, priorities?  Will NIMBY-ism prevail, or will we decide that it’s better to regulate, however imperfectly, and pay more for resources that the entire world will need?  Will we make innovation a national (and international) priority, or will we simply follow well-trodden pathways that no longer make any sense for our children’s world?  Take a look at Asia’s past and projected coal use; take a look at the hardball politics of Russian natural gas, in the midst of permafrost meltdown; take a look at water resource mismanagement in our own backyard.  The time has come for new pathways into the future.  The metamorphosis, represented by mining of oil in the tar sands of Alberta, and hydraulic fracturing, farther south, has given us an enormous economic, and security, windfall, and an avenue, and a window, into a future that is far different from the convoluted paths we have all followed, as geologists.

Bill Reinthal received his bachelor’s degree from the College of Wooster, and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His background is in economic geology, and primarily precious metals, trying to understand the full spectrum of physical and chemical parameters that allow for gold deposition in epithermal systems. He has worked in the oil (although primarily focusing on potential uranium deposits) and the minerals industries, and has spent more than ten years teaching at universities, most recently at Ashland.