As I’m making my foray into the investment world, I’m learning all the nuances that go into stock picking. In my mind I always pictured the New York Stock Exchange floor with the ticker symbols going around in circles on a screen and people hollering at each other, but there’s more to it than that. Changes in technology, politics, economics, energy, and agriculture all play huge roles in making investment decisions. Energy was my first study topic.

Last fall, I was tasked with reading a pamphlet written by my grandpa in 2013 titled “Natural Gas: An Energy Game Changer” (updates made in 2017) and then discuss what updates should be made for 2024/25. About 10 pages into his pamphlet, I realized that I didn’t have a good handle on fracking and took a detour.

There’s a lot of concern regarding natural gas and its relationship to methane and carbon dioxide. Natural gas does not create methane; it’s primarily composed of methane, and the two are frequently used interchangeably. Methane, however, can create carbon dioxide and water.

Here’s the chemistry (courtesy of Grandpa):

CH₄ +2O₂  –> CO₂ + 2H₂O

CH₄ (natural gas, i.e., methane) combined with 2O₂ (two oxygen molecules) gets you CO₂ (one carbon dioxide molecule) and 2H₂O (two water molecules).

There’s also a lot of argument for generating electricity via wind and solar, which I don’t disagree with, it just doesn’t necessarily have a practical application in every part of the country, depending on how much sun and wind you get. Read Grandpa’s pamphlet if you want to see the numbers.

As for carbon dioxide, yes, it’s toxic to humans, but it’s essential to plants. And plants provide oxygen, which is essential to us. If the amount of oxygen is disproportionate to the amount of carbon dioxide, is that caused by natural gas? Or by the ever-decreasing number of trees we seem to have…Or both?

After I crawled back out of the fracking rabbit hole, I did go on to read the rest of the pamphlet. And you can too, there’s a lot of interesting information. I got stuck on fracking because its use has been a heavily debated topic for years, and I was curious about the science behind it.

Do I have an answer for what to do about fracking? No.

Do you?