Fracking - where is it headed ?

[Undertoad]

Maybe so, but only if you limit your definition of "fracking" to the "natural gas" production.

Nice try buddy.

[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Nice try buddy.

As in many discussions, there are the "lumpers" and the "splitters"

[Undertoad]

I'm sorry, I am simply not interested in discussion with anyone who will not admit when they are plainly wrong.

[Griff]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...mpacting-water

[richlevy]

It's not a matter of 'supply and demand', it's a matter of ethics, law, and public policy.

Fracking affecting public lands can be blamed on the 'tragedy of the commons' and the failure of government to act as a steward of public resources. The affect of fracking on private lands is also a failure of government to protect individual property rights in the face of economic development. Losing access to clean water, risking exposure to natural gas seepage, and the lowering of property values consist of a 'taking'. It's even worse than eminent domain because at least with eminent domain there is compensation.

Conservatives talk about smaller government and then go on to talk about personal responsibility. The failure to effectively government- or self-regulate fracking demonstrates the fallacy of applying the concept of 'personal responsibility' or 'self-regulation' to corporations. The system is at least partly broken even with government oversight involved. Weakening further or removing oversight will obviously make issues worse. At some point there would even be a weakening of tort to further shield businesses from responsibility for their actions.

We can point to many civilized cultures that practiced human sacrifice. In, some ways, hyper-capitalism (my term for it?), the concept of corporate socialism where the government operates under the assumption that in all cases the success of corporations are an automatic social plus, ignoring all negative factors, is a form of human sacrifice. Sickness, death, loss of property rights - all are considered acceptable sacrifice in the face of the perceived social good of business success if such losses are small enough to impact only a small group of citizens or communities. In theory, capitalism would provide a method for compensation, but in hyper-capitalism the risks are socialized and the benefits are not. Citizens impacted are considered 'collateral damage' and not accounted into the benefit/loss calculation.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by richlevy

Conservatives talk about smaller government and then go on to talk about personal responsibility. The failure to effectively government- or self-regulate fracking demonstrates the fallacy of applying the concept of 'personal responsibility' or 'self-regulation' to corporations. The system is at least partly broken even with government oversight involved. Weakening further or removing oversight will obviously make issues worse. At some point there would even be a weakening of tort to further shield businesses from responsibility for their actions.

This is an important point. If the individuals involved in fracking were held responsible for bad out-comes instead of being shielded it would be done much better. The antis need to stick to the facts though. There has been so much made up left-wing stuff especially in my county that they are no longer being taken seriously at all.

[ZenGum]

From reliable sources, fracking does cause earthquakes ... medium sized or smaller.


http://www.nature.com/news/energy-pr...quakes-1.13372

Natural-gas extraction, geothermal-energy production and other activities that inject fluid underground have caused numerous earthquakes in the United States, scientists report today in a trio of papers in Science1–3.

Most of these quakes have been small, but some have exceeded magnitude 5.0. They include a magnitude-5.6 event that hit Oklahoma on 6 November 2011, damaging 14 homes and injuring two people ...

[xoxoxoBruce]

Fracking for helium in Arizona.

Though helium is the second most common element in the universe, the gas is hard to find in commercial quantities here on planet Earth. Exception: northeastern Arizona. The region supplied the U.S. with some of the richest deposits of helium in the 1960s and 1970s, and could do so again.

The world now faces a helium shortage, thanks to an ill-advised federal sale of its dwindling stockpiles begun in 1996. Helium cools MRI scanners, particle accelerators, and the chips in your smartphone. It cleans rocket tanks, keeps deep-sea divers breathing, and may yet fill our skies with airships. (Hydrogen, not helium, blew up the Hindenburg.)

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

From reliable sources, fracking does cause earthquakes ... medium sized or smaller.


http://www.nature.com/news/energy-pr...quakes-1.13372

To make this clear, it isn't the fracking itself that causes an increase in pore pressure (the mechanism that can increase the probability of a quake) but the injection of fracking wastewater back into the Earth. Any seismic activity due to the actual hyraulic fracturing is minimal in comparison. This is not strong evidence against fracking but does hint that we need to be more wary of this particular method of wastewater disposal.

On a side note, this mechanism is actually well known within the geotech community and is a big problem for deep geothermal energy and CO2 sequestration since both involve raising the pore pressure at depth, possibly along fault lines.

[Lamplighter]

Fracking is not an issue in the U.S. only....


NY Times
ROGER COHEN
August 26, 2013
Britain’s Furor Over Fracking

BALCOMBE, England — The lovely green hills of the High Weald are Tory country,
a corner of West Sussex full of affluent residents who commute to London and like their golf
and ambles and thatched cottages.<snip>
But peace and love are not the story. This is the heavily policed front line of Britain’s fracking war.
A conflict has erupted over Prime Minister David Cameron’s vision
of turning the English countryside into hydraulic-fracturing central, a place
where West Sussex would release its inner West Texas.

“There’s about 1,300 trillion cubic feet of shale gas lying underneath Britain at the moment,”
he enthused this month. Extracting even one-tenth of it would provide 51 years of gas supply.
The man who vowed in 2010 to head “the greenest government ever” was adamant
in an article in The Daily Telegraph: “We cannot afford to miss out on fracking.”

To which banners on the road outside the village of Balcombe offer this retort: “Fracking kills.”<snip>

So Cameron has stuck his neck out on fracking, with little or no national debate.
He has vowed to win the fracking cause while avoiding any major speech
on the government’s supposed commitment to low-carbon energy.
Like the Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s advocacy of genetically modified food in the 1990s
— an attempt that failed — he has taken on nature-loving middle England.

Why? There is huge money involved....
<snip>

[Griff]

Two local stories.

The DEP apparently issued a well permit for an unleased piece of land only a couple miles from Grifftopia. It was rescinded but does show how little effective oversight we have.

The local who took Yoko Ono and company on a tour has had an injunction filed against her for repeated trespass on Cabot sites. Word on the street is she's engaged in a lot of property damage but they can't make it stick.

[Clodfobble]

So wait, someone tried to sell fracking rights on land they didn't own, or they sold rights to an area that should have been protected environmentally, but accidentally wasn't?

[Griff]

The driller sent a drilling proposal to the DEP that included a horizontal under a property they had no lease for. The owners of the property are not really anti-drilling, they just felt the compensation wasn't sufficient so they didn't sign a lease. As soon as they made their complaint, everything stopped but if a neighbor hadn't mentioned seeing a map of the proposal they could have been drilled under and could have ended up in court over it. It just looks like sloppy or corrupt work by the driller and/or DEP.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Susqu...11745075546371

[busterb]

From New Scientist.
Third, we risk being surprised by the boom in shale gas production. That, too, may prove to be a bubble, maybe even a Ponzi scheme. Production from individual shale wells declines rapidly, and large amounts of capital have to be borrowed to drill replacements. This will surprise many people who make judgement calls based on the received wisdom that limits to shale drilling are few. But I am not alone in these concerns.

Even if the US shale gas drilling isn't a bubble, it remains unprofitable overall and environmental downsides are emerging seemingly by the week. According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whole towns in Texas are now running out of water, having sold their aquifers for fracking. I doubt that this is a boom that is going to appeal to the rest of the world; many others agree.

Fourth, we court disaster with assumptions about oil depletion. Most of us believe the industry mantra that there will be adequate flows of just-about-affordable oil for decades to come. I am in a minority who don't. Crude oil production peaked in 2005, and oil fields are depleting at more than 6 per cent per year, according to the International Energy Agency. The much-hyped 2 million barrels a day of new US production capacity from shale needs to be put in context: we live in a world that consumes 90 million barrels a day.

[Lamplighter]

There is an editorial today in the NY Times about these new rules in Colorado.
The thrust of the rules is concern over C02 and VOC's on air pollution and climate change (warming).
This is the link to that editorial, entitled: "Fracking’s Achilles’ Heel"

LA Times
Neela Banerjee
November 18, 2013
Colorado proposes reducing methane leaks from energy production

Colorado proposed new rules Monday to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations,
the first effort in the country to address emissions of the greenhouse gas that is a byproduct
of the domestic fossil fuel boom.

Carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change, but while
less methane is emitted overall, it is an even more potent heat-trapping gas than carbon.<snip>

The state has rules in place to curb emissions of methane,
the primary component of natural gas, during drilling.
The proposed new rules call for detecting and repairing methane leaks
throughout a company’s infrastructure once a well is producing:
at equipment at the well site, above-ground pipelines and at compressor stations.

The rules would also reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs,
an air pollutant that can be created from the production and burning of fossil fuels.
Because high output of VOCs tracks with high methane pollution,
the new rules base their monitoring requirements on the tons of VOCs companies generate annually.