In the study, Haewon McJeon, an economist at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and his colleagues explain that using hydraulic fracturing technologies to process shale gas resources is not an effective substitute for climate change mitigation policy, and could ultimately do more harm than good.

Since natural gas emits half as much CO2 as coal, many experts were hopeful that the recent natural gas boom could help slow down climate change, the authors said. While government analyses did indicate that natural gas did play a role in declining US carbon emissions from 2007 through 2012, reliance upon shale processing could hamper the development of other, more economical energy sources such as wind, solar and nuclear energy.