By Doug Allen Kevin Drum thinks the recent Citigroup report that sees natural gas as a major ally for renewable deployment will cause some tension among environmentalists: If this analysis is correct, it’s going to provide some major heartburn for environmentalists. Fracking, for all its dangers, may turn out to be the least of our … Continue reading The Fracking Divide
[youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phCibwj396I] Readers revive a recent thread: As a professional on the land side of the domestic oil and gas industry, I just want to point out one thing: Fracking is used in the production of both oil and natural gas. The conversation is usually framed as one about natural gas production alone, which is incorrect. When talking … Continue reading Facts On Fracking, Ctd
A reader adds to this post: Living in Colorado, we are impacted by fracking – not only on the Western Slope, but also in the counties north of Metro Denver. Missing from this discussion is the significance of water. Water is scarce in the West, and Colorado is situated in the High Plains Desert. Typical precipitation … Continue reading The Facts On Fracking, Ctd
Lisa Margonelli regrets that “we are stuck in a bipolar discussion that casts fracking as either a panacea for the economy or as death to the environment”: Well-regulated, fracked natural gas could be a plus for the environment—particularly if it were coupled with a ban on coal. The extraction of coal via mountaintop removal is … Continue reading The Facts On Fracking
Ronald Bailey argues that the "environmental and economic benefits of fracking greatly outweigh the costs":
Natural gas is outcompeting coal as a cheap fuel for producing electricity and the result is that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are down sharply to a level last seen around 1992. In addition, a study comparing the costs and benefits of coal with those of conventional and shale gas in the February 2013 issue of Energy Policy finds that burning natural gas produces far less in the way of air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, soot, and mercury. The authors conclude that a shift from coal to gas would "reduce the overall likelihood of health problems affecting the nervous system, inner organs, and the brain"…
He goes on to address concerns related to methane leakage, local water pollution, and land disturbance. Meanwhile, Andrew Revkin relays two approaches that could "potentially [end] fights over the source of any subsequent contamination of water supplies in a drilling area":
The Brooklyn Brewery fears so:
The brewmeister of Brooklyn Brewery says toxic fracking chemicals like methanol, benzene, and ethylene glycol (found in anti-freeze) could contaminate his beer by leaking into New York's water supply. Unlike neighboring Pennsylvania, New York state has promised to ban high-volume fracking from the city's watershed. But environmentalists say the draft fracking regulations are weak and leave the largest unfiltered water supply in the United States—not to mention the beer that is made from it—vulnerable.
Meanwhile, Walter Russell Mead digests a new study that found gas production, often via fracking, has actually reduced carbon emissions by 450 million tons over the past five years:
While greens have spent years chasing a global green unicorn, America has been moving towards reducing its carbon footprint on its own, and fracking has been the centerpiece of this change. In fact, America’s drop in carbon emissions is greater than that of any other country in the survey.
A reader writes:
Friedman's optimistic reading is baseless. First of all, the small quakes we're talking about here are mostly around magnitude-2 events (see Oklahoma Geophysical Survey's catalog). The amount of energy released by an earthquake jumps by a factor of ~32 for each successive magnitude. In order to release the same amount of energy as a magnitude-7 earthquake, you'd need about 30 million magnitude-2 earthquakes. So 1047 small earthquakes make hardly a dent in terms of energy release, and an increased frequency of small earthquakes is not something we can tout as a feature.
David Friedman offers a more optimistic reading of the otherwise terrifying phenomenon: The energy for an earthquake has to come from somewhere, and I don't think the amount of energy that goes into pumping water underground can be close to enough. What is presumably happening is that pumping in the water causes the release of energy that is … Continue reading When Fracking Imitates Fiction, Ctd
Jonathan Franzen’s second novel, Strong Motion, featured a seismologist who discovers that an outbreak of earthquakes is the byproduct of industrial drilling. Brian Ted Jones takes a deep breath:
This past Saturday, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake struck the tiny town of Sparks in Lincoln County, Oklahoma. … Up through 2009, Oklahoma had averaged about fifty earthquakes a year. The total number of quakes reported in 2010? 1,047. This swift and dramatic change in Oklahoma’s vulnerability to earthquakes has some people wondering if the practice of hydraulic fracturing — or “fracking” — might be the culprit. Fracking is the process of injecting highly-pressurized fluids into the earth to break up shale and rock and release otherwise inaccessible sources of natural gas. The waste fluid is then shot back underground at sites called “injection wells.” There are 181 active injection wells in Lincoln County Oklahoma.
Chris Wood takes a closer look at fracking and the dangers it poses to underground water supplies. We no longer use the original frackant, napalm. But companies are pretty secretive about what they do use:
This piece in the Federalist by Maureen Mullarkey strikes me as whiff of the future. It’s a full-bore attack on the Pope, and an attempt to define him as a Peronist leftist activist who needs to be “called out”. It comes after various broadsides from the theocons – which we first chronicled here. The anti-Francis … Continue reading The American Right’s New Target: Pope Francis
