Fracking - where is it headed ?

[tw]

Originally Posted by BigV

unemployment in some of those boom towns is as low as 0.1%. A tenth of a percent.

A boom is followed by a massive bust. Once wells are installed, contractors move on. Towanda PA is already seeing that boom start to crash.

A problem is that many 'boom town' citizens forget. A resulting crash will follow as the wells pump out natural gases with little need for humans.

[ZenGum]

Well, if you didn't have a job keeping you there, would you stay in Bumtuck, North Dakota?

[busterb]

Link to page about frackin, and other oil things. Maybe BS?
http://priceofoil.org/2013/02/20/bew...le-gas-bubble/

[xoxoxoBruce]

That sounds grim, Buster.

[Griff]

"Although shale gas production has grown explosively to account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. natural gas production; its production has been on a plateau since December 2011."

That may be a price artifact. Some wells around here have been turned off or finished and but not hooked to the pipelines apparently because gas is too cheap.

[xoxoxoBruce]

From Chemical & Engineering News;

Sewage Plants Struggle To Treat Wastewater Produced By Fracking Operations
When energy companies extract natural gas trapped deep underground, they’re left with water containing high levels of pollutants, including benzene and barium. Sometimes the gas producers dispose of this contaminated water by sending it to wastewater treatment plants that deal with sewage and water from other industrial sources. But a new study suggests that the plants can’t handle this water’s high levels of contaminants: Water flowing out of the plants into the environment still has elevated levels of the chemicals from natural gas production (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es301411q).

When I first saw this I thought, well crap, sewage treatment plants aren't designed to handle this stuff.
But it says "plants that deal with water from other industrial sources".

Hmm, does that mean this stuff is harder to clean up, or maybe nobody has been checking to see how well they clean the stuff, "from other industrial sources"?

[xoxoxoBruce]

We have a leak, I guess... of something... from somewhere.

An unidentified “liquid natural-gas product” is flowing freely into the shallow ground near a creekside gas processing plant in rural western Colorado. After 11 days of cleanup operations and investigations, the source and precise contents of the toxic spill remain a mystery.

60,000 gallon of something.

[Undertoad]

Now take a Google search of "tammy manning methane", restrict it to from a year ago to a few days ago before this finding, and determine who was fibbing about it all along.

Such as Bloomberg:

Robert Poreda, an earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Rochester, said his researchers have made their own analysis in Franklin Forks and found evidence that the gas seeping into the water table there is from the Marcellus Shale, indicating an impact from gas drilling and not natural causes.

Liar liar tap water on fire.

[xoxoxoBruce]

And of course the state Department of Environmental Protection is as pure as the driven snow, unaffected by politics or money.

[Undertoad]

There are many ways to determine truth but conspiracy theory is not one of them.

[xoxoxoBruce]

It's not conspiracy theory to be skeptical of anyone with a dog in the hunt.

[Lamplighter]

For those who think that fracking activities are kept hundreds of feet below ground,
or that fracking only involves Canada and northeastern states in the US,
or that the US Clear Air Act will prevent air contamination,
or that the Keystone Pipeline will only be used to transport natural gas,
or that Detroit deserves what it gets,
or that the Koch brothers are good guys ...


NY Times
IAN AUSTEN
5/17/13

A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted
and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.
And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.



The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists
who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups
that challenge the science behind climate change.
The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas,
where it is burned as fuel.
<snip>
An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from
the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke,
of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled.
Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta.
Much is just piled up there.

Detroit’s pile will not be the only one.
Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived from oil sands to the United States,
which include transporting it through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline
have pulled more coking south to American refineries, creating more waste product here.
<snip>

[Undertoad]

LL I know this stuff is difficult and I mean no disrespect. But.

Oil from oil sands recovery has nothing to do with gas fracking.

The Keystone pipeline was *always* about transporting oil sands oil out of Canada and *never* about natural gas.

If you don't like oil from this dirty sands process you should be in favor of gas fracking as a much cleaner alternative.

[Lamplighter]

"nothing to do with gas fracking"

Ummmm...
Maybe so, but only if you limit your definition of "fracking" to the "natural gas" production.
The petroleum industry is changing... rapidly...more so than the public is aware.

Oil Change International

Tar sands (also known as oil sands) is a low quality form of oil that consists of bitumen mixed with sand, clay and water.
Vast quantities of the substance are found in Alberta, Canada and in eastern Venezuela.
Other deposits are known to exist in Utah, parts of Russia, Congo (Brazzaville),
Madagascar and elsewhere, but it is currently only commercially produced in Canada and Venezuela.

Tar sands is extreme oil in every way.
Its extraction is particularly energy and water-intensive, polluting, and destructive.
<snip>
It is either strip mined or produced by injecting high pressure steam into the ground
to melt the bitumen and get it to flow to the surface.
To process it into usable fuel requires complex upgrading and refining that is also highly energy intensive and polluting.

But bitumin is not only brought to the surface by fracking,
it is transported by-products of "traditional hydrolic fracking" for natural gas:

How Fracking Boosts the Tar Sands

There is no doubt that the dirty tar sands and fracking are revolutionising the industry.
But what is less understood is how inter-connected the two are.
Ironically one dirty technology is actually boosting the other.

One of the big energy issues dominating the energy and political debate
over the last year has been the building of the Keystone XL pipeline,
which would facilitate the export of tar sands from Canada to the US.

The fracking boom has produced an excess of condensate in the United States.
Condensate is a by-product of oil and gas production.
It is a kind of wet gas or gaseous liquid depending on how you look at it.
It is abundant in the shale gas and tight oil wells that are being drilled across America using the fracking method.
<snip>

So as tar sands producers gear up for massive expansions of their high carbon production,
more and more of the condensate produced from fracking is being exported to Canada
to facilitate the transportation of bitumen to American refineries.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA),
the independent statistical arm of the US Department of Energy,
in the first three months of 2011,
the US exported 1 million barrels of a type of light condensates known as “pentanes plus”.
These exports rocketed to 10 million barrels in the same period this year.

[Ocean's Edge]

I'm going to state a fairly unpopular position.

Big Oil isn't the problem.

The problem is - that even as greater and greater understanding world wide of the dangers and environmental impact of these kinds of projects - the world wide demand for fossil fuels is not diminishing, the demand for oil continues to grow. Fact is they wouldn't be looking for new and even more expensive sources if they weren't selling the stuff and they wouldn't be selling it if we weren't using it.

It's all well and good to blame "Big Oil" ... but at the end of the economic chain their is us. While there are still some coal mines - there aren't nearly as many or as large or as dangerous and expensive as they used to be... why? because we, the world, aren't really using much coal anymore. At the end of every economic chain - there is US.

We demand oil, we really only pay lip service (as a society) to real alternatives, and as long as we're demanding it - they're gonna keep looking to supply us with it.

We are the problem.