Fracking, Gas Liquids and Global Production of Plastics: Implications for Theorizing Political Ecology

Currently, the U.S. and Canada are the world’s top two producers of unconventional (fracked) gas and oil. But despite growing opposition to fracking operations sparked by increasing evidence that it is destructive to the environment and threatens both human health and human rights, and the growing evidence of similar threats from plastics production, the connection between fracking and plastics production remains obscure. In this paper, I examine this connection to refine the meso levels of two competing theories: the theory of the treadmill of production, and the theory of ecological modernization.

Treadmill of production theorists Schnaiberg, Pellow and Gould (2015) argue that competition within the global capitalist economic system forces continual increases in the production of goods, which entails continual increases in both withdrawals of natural resources, and pollution and wastes. Ecological modernization theorists Mol and Spaargaren (2009) argue that highly developed industrial economies will prosper by adopting new industrial practices, such as “industrial symbiosis,” in which the byproducts from one industry are supplied to another industry instead of being discarded as wastes.

Examining the role of gas liquids in global supply chains helps to contextualize and focus both theories. Before being refined, fracked “wet” gas contains gas liquids including propane, butane and ethane, the gas liquid most commonly used to produce plastics. The abundance of inexpensive ethane has fueled global investment in plastics production. These developments suggest that there is, at the least a close alliance between the gas and oil and plastics industries (or at most, that they are actually the same industry), rather than competing industries. It also suggests that the industrial use of byproducts does not always result in environmental protection: it can also be used to stimulate production of environmentally destructive materials.