President Obama’s failure on climate change

President Obama was elected in 2008 based on promises to, among other things, do something about global warming.  My e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey called my attention to an article highlighting his refusal to act.  Here’s an excerpt:

Obama has sufficient scientific resources at his command to know exactly what we are doing and failing to do. He came into office with control of both houses of Congress and a clear mandate to act on the climate crisis, with scientists the world over sounding all the necessary alarms.

But in pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, highlighted by the figurative explosion of fracking and the literal explosions of oil trains and deep sea drilling rigs, Obama has turned the US into the No. 1 producer of fossil fuels in the world.

The value of federal government subsidies for fossil-fuel exploration and production increased by 45 percent under his watch, even as he turned what were once climate “treaty” talks into a subterfuge for global inaction. This, from the guy who ran against “Drill, Baby Drill!”

Source: Truthout

True, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has enacted regulations classifying greenhouse gasses as pollutants, which are intended to close down aging coal-fired electric power plants.  He has obtained subsidies to promote renewable energy.  And he has set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to be accomplished by future administrations.

But this has been offset by his promotion of the domestic oil and gas industry and his opposition to enforceable international climate treaties.

The problem is that there is no immediate political payoff from trying to slow down global warming.  The climate change that is manifesting itself right now—record-breaking temperatures, floods and droughts—is the result of decisions made or not made 30 or 40 years ago.

What is done—or not done—today about climate change will not change the present situation.  It will only help people 30 or 40 years from now.  There is little political incentive to do that.

Neither democratic government nor free-enterprise economic systems, assuming that this is what we have, would respond to the immediate concerns and wishes of the public, but not to warnings about future problems.  Not that socialist dictatorships have a better record!

The only answer, as I see it, is for climate change activists to do what Naomi Klein describes in her book, This Changes Everything, which is to join up with those who are fighting fossil fuel companies on other grounds—protection of property rights, Indian treaties, public health and the environment, and the authority of local government.

LINK

President Obama’s Lethal Climate Legacy by Zhiwa Woodbury for Truthout.

Anti-intellectualism and questioning of authority

Hat tip to Bill Elwell.

Anti-intellectualism has long been a strong and deplorable force in American life, but there’s a fine line between anti-intellectualism and questioning authority.

It is not anti-intellectual to refuse to accept someone’s opinion because the person has an advanced degree and speaks in scientific jargon.

I don’t believe credentialed experts who tell me that hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is safe, or that the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership will create jobs, or that it’s necessary to drop bombs on people in Middle Eastern countries for their own good.

I question authority, but I accept legitimate authority.  I don’t elevate my personal feelings to equal standing with scientific fact, and I don’t think I can determine everything for myself.  Rather I try to figure out which persons have real knowledge and wisdom, based on their records and on my ability to follow their reasoning.

The battle for Seneca Lake

View of Seneca Lake from the south

Crestwood Midstream Partners, a Texas company, wants to store methane, propane and butane in salt caverns underneath upstate New York’s beautiful Seneca Lake.

The company wants to make Seneca Lake a hub for transportation and storage of natural gas products for the whole northeast United States.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has already approved the methane part of the plan.   The New York Department of Environmental Conservation is considering whether to approve storage of propane and butane—aka liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

Ellen Cantarow, writing for TomDispatch, explains what’s wrong with this idea.

Crestwood’s plan would mean the full-scale industrialization of the lake’s shores near Watkins Glen, including a 14-acre open pit for holding brine (water supersaturated with salt) removed from the caverns upon the injection of the gas; a 60-foot flare stack (a gas combustion device); a six-track rail site capable of loading and unloading 24 rail cars every 12 hours, each bearing 30,000 gallons of LPG; and a truck depot where four to five semi-trailers would be unloaded every hour.

As many as 32 rail cars at a time would cross a 75-year-old trestle that spans one of the country’s natural wonders, the Watkins Glen gorge, its shale sides forming steep columns down which waterfalls cascade.

The plan is riddled with accidents waiting to happen. Brine seepage, for example, could at some point make the lake water non-potable. (From 1964 to 1984, when propane was stored in two of the caverns, the lake’s salinity shot up.)

That’s only the first of many potential problems including tanker truck and train accidents, explosions, the emission of toxic and carcinogenic organic compounds from compressor stations and other parts of the industrial complex, air pollution, and impacts on local bird species and animal life due to deforestation and pollution.

Salt caverns 1,000 feet or more underground have been used for gas storage since the middle of the last century and have a checkered history.

A January 2015 analysis of Crestwood’s plan, based on documents by both independent scientists and an industry geologist, found 20 serious or extremely serious incidents in American salt cavern storage facilities between 1972 and 2012.

Ten of these involved large fires and explosions; six, loss of life or serious injury; eight, the evacuation of from 30 to 2,000 residents; and 13, extremely serious or catastrophic property loss.

via Dirty Energy vs. Clean Power: The Past Battles the Future at Seneca Lake by Ellen Cantarow for TomDispatch (via Unz Review).  An excellent article, well worth reading in its entirety.

A plan to store natural gas under Seneca Lake

A plan is afoot to store natural gas in salt caverns beneath Seneca Lake, one of the world’s beauty spots, an important location for the New York wine industry and a source of fresh water for 100,000 people.

Although Gov. Andrew Cuoma has suspended hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in New York state, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has authority to allow fracked gas to be brought in for storage from Pennsylvania and other states.

Filmmaker Josh Fox and author and activist Sandra Steingraber report in the video above how the natural gas industry intends to make New York’s Finger Lakes a storage and transportation hub for gas throughout the Northeast.

They argue that this creates danger of not just of a gas explosion, but even of the collapse of the lake bottom.

LINKS

Video of the Week: We Are Seneca Lake – A Call to Action from Josh Fox and Sandra Steingraber from Josh Fox’s Gasland blog.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

We Are Seneca Lake: Josh Fox & Fracking Opponents Fight Natural Gas Storage Site in Upstate NY on Democracy Now! (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

Hillary Clinton promoted fracking to the world

My e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey in Baltimore sent me a link to a well-researched article in Mother Jones documenting how Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State promoted fracking in foreign countries.

Fracking—hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas—is a destructive process that, among other things, creates increased risk of earthquakes and contamination of ground water and uses up vital supplies of fresh water.

I’m opposed to fracking unless there is a more desperate need for fuel than there is now.

But however you look at it, promotion of fracking in foreign countries in no way benefits the American public, except for a few wealthy investors and corporate investors, such as Beau Biden, the Vice President’s son, who is on the board of directors of an energy company that hopes to do fracking in Ukraine.

There is a strong grass-roots opposition to fracking in many countries, and, to the extent that the American government is seen to be promoting fracking, this generates ill-will toward the U.S. government and Americans generally.

Unlike in the USA, most landowners do not own the mineral rights under their land. Those rights are owned by governments and can be sold, leased or given away even if the owner objects. So fracking decisions are not usually made by an individual landowner to get income, but by government officials.

Hillary Clinton did not decide to promote fracking on her own. This is President Obama’s policy.

I doubt Republicans in Congress have any objection to promoting fracking abroad. They object to the Obama administration presuming to regulate fracking on U.S. public lands.

LINK

How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World by Mariah Blake for Mother Jones.

Oklahoma now exceeds California in earthquakes

Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California.

Geologists blame fracking.

Hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas involves drilling a vertical well and a horizontal tunnel through layers of shale, then setting off explosives at the end of the tunnel to fracture the shale.  Liquids are pumped into the fractures to force out the oil and gas.

Geologists say the problem is not the fracturing, but that the liquids used in fracturing lubricate existing faults and allow them to shift more easily.

LINK

A disaster waiting to happen in Oklahoma?  The link between fracking and earthquakes in an oil-rich town by Andrew Dewson for The Independent.

The Link Between Fracking and Oklahoma’s Quakes Keeps Getting Stronger by Tim McDonnell for Mother Jones.

New reports on the hazards of fracking

Source: Daily Kos.

I’ve long been aware that hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is associated with earthquakes, but I had thought the main reason was the settling of the geological strata after the fracking process is complete and the fracking fluid is pumped out.

But according to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey, the main cause of fracking-induced earthquakes is the injection of the huge amounts of contaminated waste water into deep geological strata.

Large areas of the United States that used to experience few or no earthquakes have, in recent years, experienced a remarkable increase in earthquake activity that has caused considerable public concern as well as damage to structures. This rise in seismic activity, especially in the central United States, is not the result of natural processes.

Instead, the increased seismicity is due to fluid injection associated with new technologies that enable the extraction of oil and gas from previously unproductive reservoirs.  These modern extraction techniques result in large quantities of wastewater produced along with the oil and gas. The disposal of this wastewater by deep injection occasionally results in earthquakes that are large enough to be felt, and sometimes damaging. Deep injection of wastewater is the primary cause of the dramatic rise in detected earthquakes and the corresponding increase in seismic hazard in the central U.S.

via USGS Release.

Meanwhile in California the Center for Biological Diversity, a non-profit conservation organization, has found deep underground storage of oil fracking waste water has allowed toxic and cancer-causing chemicals to contaminate aquifers, underground reservoirs that can be a source of irrigation and drinking water.

The fracking boom is ending with a bust

Source: Business Insider.

Business booms are followed by busts—the interaction of overconfidence, oversupply and diminishing returns.

That’s not just a law of the free-market system, it’s a law of human nature.

As the chart above indicates, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is an industry entering the bust part of its cycle.

The glut of natural gas probably will continue for some time.   Gas companies would continue to pump gas even if they’re losing money.

They’ve already paid for the drilling equipment, and they’d lose less money by continuing to pump than by walking away from their sunk costs.

It’s good that New York state didn’t jump into fracking just now.   We’d have had all the problems associated with fracking and none of the benefits the come with getting in on the ground floor.

The wise thing to do just from a business point of view, aside from all environmental and climate considerations, is to keep natural gas in the ground as long as we can.  If there comes a time when we desperately need it, it will be there.

LINKS

Fracking has collapsed by Wolf Richter of Wolf Street for Business Insider.

Keystone XL, Cold War 2.0 and the GOP Vision for 2016 by Michael T. Klare for TomDispatch.  Fracking is a factor in geopolitics.

Update 2/28/15

As Bill Harvey pointed out in his comment, a decline in the number of rigs doesn’t mean a decline in production—that is, not right away.

Oil rigs and oil production in the United States

A happy surprise: Gov. Cuomo bans fracking

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s decsion to ban hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas in New York state was made for the right reason – the Precautionary Principle.

That is, he banned fracking not because it was proven to be harmful, but that there were good reasons to think it might not be safe.

I misjudged Cuomo.  I thought he intended to approve fracking, but was postponing this unpopular decision until after the election.

With falling oil and gas prices, the economic benefits of fracking are even less than before.  The oil and gas locked underground in the Marcellus shale will not go away.  It will still be there if someday the USA is so desperate for energy that fracking is necessary.

∞∞∞

“This Will Have a Ripple Effect Across the Country”: State of New York Bans Fracking by Cole Stangler for In These Times.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

The passing scene: November 7, 2014

Millennials Aren’t Cheap, They’re Broke by Lynn Stuart Parramore for AlterNet.

Millennials are the generation of Americans born between 1980 and 2000.  There are about 80 million of them, about a quarter of the U.S. population.

A writer in the Atlantic wondered why, compared to previous generations, more of them live with their parents and more of them refrain from making major purchases, such as automobiles.  Lynn Stuart Parramore doesn’t find this hard to understand.

• Millennials have the highest unemployment rate of any generation.
• They have more student loan debt than Gen Xers and Boomers did at their age.
• More millennials live in poverty than previous generations did at the same stage of life.
• They make up 61 percent of Americans making minimum wage.
• Having entered the workforce during an economic downturn, the effects on their future wages will likely be permanent, even if the economy bounces back.

The battle for a surgeon general by Rebecca Cooney for The Lancet.

Rebecca Cooney wrote that the reason President Obama appointed Ron Klain, a lawyer, as his Ebola “czar” is that Republicans have blocked Vivek Murthy, his nominee for Surgeon-General.  Republicans in Congress have blocked Murthy on the trivial grounds that he sent Twitter message about a year ago saying that guns are a public health problem.

Point taken.  But this still doesn’t explain why Obama appointed a political supporter rather than a specialist in infectious diseases to head his Ebola team.

Then, too, Cuba is sending trained medical specialists to help in west Africa while the United States is sending troops.  What are the troops supposed to be doing?  Is this security, security theater or something else?

Blockadia: the climate fight’s new front

The fight against global warming consists of many local struggles that, at first glance, don’t have anything to do with climate change.

These struggles include resistance to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, to the Alberta tar sands industry and the Keystone XL pipeline, to deep ocean oil drilling and to other destructive practices by oil, gas and coal companies.

Such destructive practices are necessary to keep the fossil fuel companies in business because all the easy-to-get oil, gas and coal has been used up.  And greenhouse gas emissions will decrease only when oil and gas drilling and coal mining decrease.

Naomi Klein in her book, THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: Capitalism vs The Climate, reported on how these scattered local resistance movements are coming to realize they are part of a common cause.

In just one chapter, she touched on protests in Greece, Rumania, Canada’s New Brunswick, England’s Sussex, Inner Mongolia, Australia, Texas, France, Ecuador, Nigeria, West Virginia, South Dakota, North America’s Pacific Northwest and Quebec—all related directly or indirectly to stopping fossil fuel operations that would produce greenhouse gasses.

She and others call this alliance “Blockadia”.   Unlike some of the big, established environmental organizations, the grass-roots protesters do not limit themselves to lawsuits and political lobbying.  They engage in nonviolent direct action, the kind of mass defiance that Gene Sharp advocated.   These movements, more than the lobbying and lawsuits of the Big Green environmental organizations, will determine the future climate, she wrote.

How much shale oil and gas is there, really?

Source: Bloomberg News.

Shale drillers are a lot more optimistic about potential oil and gas when they talk to shareholders than when they report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  Why?

Hint:  The SEC can prosecute for false statements.  Shareholders have to sue.

 

The domestic scene: Links & comments 9/11/14

Five Reasons for the Zephyr Teachout Phenomenon and Five Reasons Andrew Cuomo Is Still Governor by Matt Stoller for Medium.  (Via Naked Capitalism)

Zephyr Teachout in defeat showed that an outsider can make headway against the Democratic establishment.  Gov. Andrew Cuomo in victory has probably lost any chance to be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

The End of Fracking Is Closer Than You Think by Robert Eshelman for Vice News.

David Hughes, a Canadian geologist, studied data from 65,000 U.S. oil and gas well based on hydraulic fracturing.  He concluded that production on average drops 50 percent after the first year, and 85 percent in three years.   Fracking is an exchange of short-term gains for long-term damage.

When unarmed men reach for their waistbands by Radley Balko for the Washington Post.

When police shoot unarmed black men, they almost always say that the black man was moving his hands as if reaching for a gun.  But if the man was unarmed, what would he be reaching for?

Digging up our coal, oil and gas for export

I don’t think many Americans are aware of how much of our coal, oil and natural gas production is for export.  In particular, I don’t think Americans are as aware as we should be that the pipeline to carry bitumen from tar sands fields in Alberta to oil refineries in Texas is for the benefit of Canadian exporters, not (except very indirectly) American consumers.  The tar sands production is being piped south to Texas because other Canadian provinces are unwilling to take the environmental risk of having it piped east or west.

In and of itself, anything that reduces the U.S. trade deficit is a good thing, not a bad thing.  We need to import things from abroad, and we need to pay for them with exports.  Now we pay a price for this, which we did not have to pay for oil exports from Texas in the 1950s.

The easy-to-get coal, oil and natural gas has been pretty much used up, and so we need hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, mountaintop removal to dig for coal, deep water drilling for oil and the Alberta tar sands to get at what fossil fuels are left.

All these methods involve risks to human health and the natural environment, but that’s a price that can’t be avoided until alternatives are found and energy consumption is reduced.

An advanced nation should not depend on exports of raw materials, and imports of high-tech manufacturing goods, but that is the U.S. situation today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/business/energy-environment/an-oil-industry-awash-in-crude-argues-over-exporting.html?_r=0

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/24/coal-s-new-exporteconomyleavesacloudofdustoverlouisiana.html

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/03/140320-north-american-natural-gas-seeks-markets-overseas/

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text

As the old saying goes, you can’t have your cake, and eat it too.

A nation can’t have reserves of fossil fuels, and burn them up or sell them all for export, too.

Hat tip to Bill Elwell for the cartoon.

The only places where Americans are doing well

Double click to enlarge.

Is drilling for shale oil the only way Americans can make a good living from honest labor?

I hope not.

Click on How oil made North Dakota rich by Amy Harder for National Journal for more and the source of this map.

MORATORIA, BANS, and RESOLUTIONS Part 2

New NY 23rd

 This is a list of Hydrofracking activity outside of around the USA (out side of NYS), and the World. Contact Joe Hoff (Jhoffefact@aol.com) to get on the email list, or to sent information from your area.

Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh adopts the first-in-the-nation community rights ordinance which elevates the right of the community to decide, and the rights of nature over the “rights” associated with corporate personhood. The City Council unanimously adopted this ordinance banning corporations from conducting natural gas drilling in the city.

Luzerne County Lehman Township, ordinance calling for “home rule” and a ban on drilling within their surrounding township area.

The Board of Supervisors for Licking Township, Clarion County, PA, voted unanimously on Wednesday to adopt an ordinance banning corporations from dumping “fracking” wastewater in the township. The Licking Township Community Water Rights and Self-Government Ordinance is the first ordinance of its kind adopted in Pennsylvania to…

View original post 3,011 more words

MORATORIA, BANS, and RESOLUTIONS

New NY 23rd

 Joe Hoff, Chairman of Keuka Citizens Against Hydrofracking, keeps track of the Hydrofracking Legislation, Court Cases and similar activities. He occasionally sends out a summary. The list below is his notes from New York State. I will post his list of other states and countries at another date. To get on his mailing list, (or to update him on local happenings) just contact him at: Jhoffefact@aol.com

In a move that was applauded by local residents and environmental activists, the Putman County Legislature voted unanimously to ban the sale, application and disposal of hydrofracking waste products in their county.  The new law also bars the processing of fracking waste at Putnam’s wastewater treatment plants and applying fracking brine on county roads and properties for de-icing and dust control.

New York State

208 Communities Protected, (48 of these are in the NYC/Syracuse Watersheds), 92 Municipalities Staging for Passage of Draft Legislation – 300…

View original post 5,253 more words

Hydrofracking: toxic costs for a clean, cheap fuel

Double click to enlarge

This chart from a New York Times article last year shows one of the costs of hydraulic fracturing, a technique for extracting natural gas tightly locked in shale strata by means of fracturing the shale and forcing out the gas with a mixture of water, chemicals and sand.   Even when this is done properly, there remains the problem of disposing of the waste water, which contains not only the hydrofracking chemicals but sometimes underground toxic metals and radioactive elements.

Some benefits of hydrofracking are shown in the charts below.  The technique increases the supply of natural gas, which drives down the price, and the increased use of clean-burning natural gas lessens greenhouse gas emissions.  Hydrofracking isn’t the sole reason for either lower prices or lower carbon emissions, but it is a big contributor.

Natural gas prices in inflation-adjusted dollars are the lowest since 1976.  Carbon dioxide emissions are the lowest since 1994.  But before we in upstate New York join in the hydrofracking boom, we should ask ourselves—which will be more permanent, the benefits or the costs?   It seems to me that we will still be dealing with the costs long after the boom is over.

Click on Regulation Lax as Gas Wells’ Tainted Water Hits Rivers for the New York Times article.

Click on Why US natural gas prices are so low for analysis of the economics of natural gas.

Click on U.S. Carbon Emissions Fall to Lowest Levels Since 1994 for more about the benefits of clean-burning natural gas.

Click on The record is clear: Obama delivers on clean energy for comment on President Obama’s support for hydrofracking.

Click on A Mysterious Patch of Light Shows Up in the North Dakota Dark for a report on North Dakota’s natural gas boom.

Click on Future Bakken Production and Hydrofracking for a report on the temporary nature of North Dakota’s boom.

Hydrofracking and the world balance of power

Two countries without shale gas reserves: Russia and Iran

All my life I’ve held that if you have a finite resource, such as oil or natural gas, and you use it at an ever-increasing rate, someday you will run out.   As a matter of logic, this is an irrefutable truth.  But all my life, the oil and gas industry has been rendering this truth irrelevant, by discovering new sources of oil and gas and new ways to get at it.

The latest discovery is the hydraulic fracturing technique for extracting natural gas, which, together with oil drilling in the warming Arctic, is creating a new energy era.

Because of hydrofracking, Americans are burning less coal and oil, and more clean-burning natural gas.  Carbon emissions are at their lowest level in nearly 20 years.   Increased use of renewable energy and better conservation methods contribute to the improvement, but hydrofracking is a key factor.

Because of hydrofracking, the world balance of power is changing in favor of the United States.   The world has less need to import oil from the Persian Gulf.  Europe has less need to import gas from the Russian Federation.   Here’s how Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, sees things.

The future of the American energy supply was looking grim until recently. With its own resources waning, the United States was dependent on Arab oil sheiks and erratic dictators. Rising energy costs were hitting a vital nerve in the country’s industrial sector.

But the situation has fundamentally changed since American drilling experts began using a method called “fracking,” with which oil and gas molecules can be extracted from dense shale rock formations.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the United States will replace Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas in only two years.  The Americans could also become the world’s top petroleum producers by 2017.

Low natural gas prices — the price of natural gas in the United States is only a quarter of what it was in 2008 — could fuel a comeback of American industry. *** ***  

The outlines of a changed world order are already emerging in the simulations of geo-strategists.  They show that the United States will benefit the most from the development of shale gas and oil resources.  A study by Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, concludes that Washington’s discretionary power in foreign and security policy will increase substantially as a result of the country’s new energy riches.

According to the BND study, the political threat potential of oil producers like Iran will decline. Optimists assume that, in about 15 years, the United States will no longer have to send any aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to guarantee that oil tankers can pass unhindered through the Strait of Hormuz, still the most important energy bottleneck in the world.

The Russians could be on the losing end of the stick.   The power of President Vladimir Putin is based primarily on oil and gas revenues.  If energy prices decline in the long term, bringing down Russian revenues from the energy sector, Putin’s grip on power could begin to falter.  The Americans’ sudden oil and gas riches are also not very good news for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

I’m of course glad that natural gas prices are falling, and that I am paying less to heat my house than I did a few years ago.  I acknowledge that hydrofracking has contributed to my well-being.  I don’t think it would benefit anyone if I were to switch to fuel oil, or if it would be possible to return to the coal furnaces of my boyhood.

My friend Michael thinks cheap gas from hydrofracking will tide us over during the transition to renewable energy.  I doubt it will work this way.  So long as the price of the supposed transitional energy supply is falling, there will be little economic incentive to make the transition.  That will have to wait until the price of fossil fuels starts to rise again.

I know that I can’t predict the future.  I won’t try to predict how long the hydrofracking boom will last.  I would be happy of the supply of cheap gas lasts my lifetime.  Since I’m 76, it just might.  But I don’t think it will last the lifetime of my niece and nephew, or of their infants and toddlers.  I read a report on The Oil Drum site that hydrofracked gas wells are being depleted more quickly than expected, and I link to that report at the end of this post.

I still think the smart thing for we upstate New Yorkers to do is to hold back on hydrofracking until the price of natural gas starts going up again.   The question is not whether hydrofracking is a good thing overall or not, but rather whether adding our little increment to the world supply will be worth the cost.

Click on Full Throttle Ahead: US Tips Global Power Scales With Fracking for the full Der Spiegel article.

Click on Future Bakken Production and Hydrofracking for the full article on The Oil Drum.

Click on U.S. Carbon Emissions Fall to Lowest Level Since 1994 for a report on the benefit of clean-burning natural gas.

Click on Gazprom Gas Giant Is Running Into Trouble and Stepping on the Gas: New Drilling Technologies Shake Up Global Market for more from Der Spiegel on natural gas and world power.

Matt Damon stars in anti-fracking movie

Hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is supposed to take care of the United States energy problems for the next generation.  Many struggling farm owners in New York and Pennsylvania see it as their economic salvation.  But there is a price to be paid that goes beyond the direct economic cost, in destruction of the land, in danger to the ground water and in greenhouse gas emissions.

Matt Damon stars in a new movie, “Promised Land,” which he also helped write, which makes a case against hydrofracking.  It is due out in December, and should be interesting to see.

Hydraulic fracturing requires drilling a deep vertical well, then drilling a horizontal well out from the side of the vertical well, then setting of an explosive charge to fracture (frack) the underground shale.  Then a mixture of water (hydro) and chemicals is pumped into the crevices in order to force out the gas.  If the seal on the sides of the well is imperfect, gas and chemicals can leak into the ground water.

Even if the seals are always perfect and execution is always perfect, lots of fresh water is used, and it is not in infinite supply.  Natural gas is a clean-burning fuel, but in unburned form it is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.  Drilling is hard on the land, and oil rigs are hard on local roads.  Hydraulic fracturing has been associated with minor earthquakes.  There are a lot of things that can go wrong with the process.

For now we in the United States need natural gas, and all the cheap easy-to-get gas has been used up.  We may have to turn to hydrofracking eventually, unless better energy sources are developed in the meantime.  Drilling companies may be in a hurry to get control of the land ahead of other drilling companies.  We the poeple don’t have to be in a hurry to use up our reserves shale gas. The shale gas is not going to go away, and it’s not going to lose its value if we hold off on drilling.  In fact, natural gas prices at present are extremely low and likely to go up in the future..

Click on Shakeshock Media videos for background about hydrofracking and the anti-fracking campaign.

Click on Blog | No Fracking Way for Shaleshock Media’s web log.

Hat tip to Hal Bauer.