Hydrofracking - are we nuts? (OT)

Chemicals found in a Wyoming town's drinking water likely are associated with hydraulic fracturing, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday, raising the stakes in a debate over a drilling technique that has created a boom in natural-gas production.

The agency's draft findings are among the first by the government to link the technique, dubbed "fracking," with groundwater contamination. The method—injecting large volumes of water, sand and chemicals to dislodge natural gas or oil—has been criticized by environmentalists for its potential to harm water supplies, which the industry disputes.

Yeah, I was on a tear of deleting my posts for a while. Sorry.

The problem is that the hysteria is so wrong. They don't even know why the Marcellus in the northeast is a terrible place to frac. I can explain it in two paragraphs. I am working, though.

I am on a long consulting contract with one of the biggest horizontal companies in the country, so I get to sit in on the engineering meetings and all that. I know pretty much every play in the country.

It isn't a problem in TX, LA, OK, ND, etc. We have the infrastructure and good geology to deal with the fluid disposal.

In the northeast they have no way of disposing of the water, which is bad when it flows back because it is mixed with formation water that is high in chlorides. Saltw#ter in the groundwater is the worst. You can't clean it up. I heard that they were using produced saltw#ter to salt roads in Pennsylvania or one of those Marcellus areas. You would go to prison in OK for doing that.

Frac jobs involve moving a lot of fluid around. It isn't that nasty, but I wouldn't drink it.

The real crime here is that 90% of the hysteria is based on zero science. Nobody noticed that Obama opened up the Chukchi and Beaufort Sea to drilling. Much of the Beafort area starts at the three mile limit offshore of ANWR. The eskimos are a maritime people, so they wanted the onshore drilling. They are freaking out about the offshore drilling permits and have joined in lawsuits.

Now. Those places have ice 9 months or so out of the year. How are you going to have a spill plan? The Chukchi is also really shallow, and at least near the shore, the ice bulldozes the sea bottom. I have no idea how they are going to protect the pipelines. That is the reason that the proposed gas line from AK to the lower 48 had its route changed. The Canadians wanted it to follow the coast and pick up the McKenzie Delta stranded gas. Too risky.

All this happened a while back, and nobody noticed. The leases in the Chukchi Sea (north of the Bering Sea) went for billions, so there must be some damn good geology over there.

Gasland is total crap. There is actually one part of it that is a real pollution problem.

Gas prices are in the toilet, so the drilling has really slowed down. It is all oil zones right now.

However, using fracking fluid that contains contaminants to our drinking water supplies is just plain wrong.

Base - 1st, I gotta say sorry for no believing a word you've got to say about the subject of hydrolic-fracturing.

You guys just don't understand the first thing about geology, or at least petroleum geology

The only upside was that there was zero unemployment. If you had a pulse, you had a job. If you owned mineral rights, you were rich.

You probably don't know about this, because the newspapers don't know jack

How is it prevented from re-intergrating with clean water supplies?

Also you flush your meds everytime you pee!

Also - Sierra Ledge Rat - consider if the trucks and machinery in your hometown were instead related with a wind-farm going up in your area... Would you still be as pissed?

That overlying sal-tw#t-er is presumably in a relatively permeable unit, no? That sal-tw#t-er is more dense than the underlying petroleum, no? And it is separated by the confining layer/trap, no? Connect the two via an unintended fracture through the impermeable layer and the sal-tw#t-er will flow down while the petroleum flows up, no?

I don't know if those fractures penetrate the cap rock... and I don't think the oil companies/hydrofrac'ers do either. I'm not saying it is currently an issue, I'm saying it may be an issue... one I seriously doubt oil companies spend much time contemplating... other than what will happen if brine enters their reservoir, in which case they shut it down and walk away... out of site, out of mind. But the buoyancy forces persist...

Look, I don't doubt that your knowledge on the actual practice of hydrofracing surpasses everyone else's here. I'm also aware that, to the best of your knowledge, hydrofracers take every necessary precaution to prevent any contamination... but we are both aware that people cut corners and accidents happen (BP via Halliburton).

Oil companies have zero control over price. It has always been that way. The big exporting nations control the majority of reserves, and all the Saudis had to do in the eighties was open the spigot. Took down the Soviet Union. Took down much of our domestic industry along with it.

Fracking is here to stay cause of peak oil, which is MAJOR. Yes demand can be cut for short time but don't forget that China has trillions in surplus and wants to develop and india is in line behind them not to mention the rest of the third world would prefer to move up to second world.... Sad to say, but the same forces will demand we drill ANWAR. The only question is whether it takes $7 a gallon gas or $13 a gallon.

You start talking energy and Baba just goes off.

Oh man. You start talking energy and Baba just goes off. The Saudis still have excess production capacity. They can dump a few million bbls per day onto the market and kill prices.

Racing between OPEC meetings in Vienna, Saudi Arabia's powerful oil minister Ali Al-Naimi told a reporter that the cartel was "determined" to keep the price of oil at around $25 a barrel, rather than risk a slump in the market by boosting its production.
Wait a minute. $25? Al-Naimi said that in April 2003 — less than five years ago — when a barrel of oil cost one-quarter of this week's whopping $100, and when prices were regarded as high enough to keep oil-rich countries happy......

Saudi Arabia oil minister Ali al-Nuaimi said Saturday that OPEC wanted the price of oil to be $25 a barrel, avoiding brutal swings either up or down.



"We (OPEC) want it to be at $25, rather than $30 or $38," he said at a seminar at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Crude oil prices are currently around $25 or $26 a barrel.



"Our revenues come from oil and we need to make an accurate assumption of what the oil price will be," he said.



"I am sure that if the oil price should go up or down in a precipitous manner we will work together for a stable oil market," he added.



Al-Naimi said that the recent decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut oil production was taken to prevent a freefall in price and "keep it towards the $25 per-barrel target."

Twilight in the Desert reveals a Saudi oil and production industry that could soon approach a serious, irreversible decline. In this exhaustively researched book, veteran oil industry analyst Matthew Simmons draws on his three-plus decades of insider experience and more than 200 independently produced reports about Saudi petroleum resources and production operations. He uncovers a story about Saudi Arabia’s troubled oil industry, not to mention its political and societal instability, which differs sharply from the globally accepted Saudi version. It’s a story that is provocative and disturbing, based on undeniable facts, but until now never told in its entirety. Twilight in the Desert answers all readers’ questions about Saudi oil and production industries with keen examination instead of unsubstantiated posturing, and takes its place as one of the most important books of this still-young century.

Karl,

I was insulting to you, and I apologize for that. That is not my nature.

The problem is that the hysteria is so wrong.

I think we all know the answers. Its too bad that even on a climbing site there are folks who would advocate such destruction of the environment...

The only place that I know of with a problem of radioactive formation water is the Permian Basin in SW Texas. They had been using old production tubing for fences, playgrounds, you name it. Then they figured out that the scale accumulation in the tubing was loaded with NORM. Naturally occuring radioactive material. So that was a major freakout that was frantically cleaned up by removing all of that tubing. This was discovered in the seventies and is now well known.

Oklahoma City lies on top of the Oklahoma City oil and gas field, the biggest in the state. There is still drilling going on regularly inside the city limits.

A company that I do some work for has been in a number of wells in the NW part of the city....all frac'd. Big fracs.

That is also the rich part of town. The entire BOD of two of the biggest natural gas companies in the country live there. I can drive you by their houses. I have seen Aubrey McClendon's house, anyway. He is the CEO of Chesapeake.

The way the US can stop the bloodshed is simple: use less.

Yeah, as for what people call "Peak Oil," most geologists, and even bean counters, in the industry now think that the world has already passed its production peak.

That is not the really scary number. The scary number is when demand exceeds supply.

Argentina is going to take another run at the Falklands because they think
they're going to find gas and/or oil out there. That's what rising demand
will do!

You may think that oil companies control this card game, but they don't. Who controls this game is the hungry gullet of consumption. I will defend that statement until the end of time.

Ohio earthquake was not a natural event, expert says
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - A 4.0 magnitude earthquake in Ohio on New Year's Eve did not occur naturally and may have been caused by high-pressure liquid injection related to oil and gas exploration and production, an expert hired by the state of Ohio said on Tuesday.

Ohio's Department of Natural Resources on Sunday suspended operations at five deep well sites in Youngstown, Ohio, where the injection of water was taking place, while they evaluate seismological data from a rare quake in the area.

The wells are about 9,000 feet deep and are used to dispose of water from oil and gas wells. The process is related to fracking, the controversial injection of chemical-laced water and sand into rock to release oil and gas. Critics say that the high pressure injection of the liquid causes seismic activity.

Won-Young Kim, a research professor of Seismology Geology and Tectonophysics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday that circumstantial evidence suggests a link between the earthquake and the high-pressure well activity.

"We know the depth (of the quake on Saturday) is two miles and that is different from a natural earthquake," said Kim, who is advising the state of Ohio.

Data collected from four seismographs set up in November in the area confirm a connection between the quakes and water pressure at the well, Kim said.

"There is circumstantial evidence to connect the two -- in the past we didn't have earthquakes in the area and the proximity in the time and space of the earthquakes matches operations at the well," he said.

A spokesman for Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich, a strong supporter of oil and gas exploration in the state, said Ohio could announce a preliminary decision whether to continue the suspension of the wells as early as Wednesday.

The state was already looking into the cause of earlier seismic activity from 10 previous earthquakes, beginning in March, 2011.

According to Kim, this is not the first time Ohio tremors have been linked to human activities. "We have several examples of earthquakes from deep well disposal in the past," Kim said.

A quake of 4.2 magnitude in Ashtabula, Ohio, on January 26, 2001, was believed to be due to deep-well injection, he said. And in 1987 there was an incident with a correlation to high pressure deep well injection, he said.

There are 177 so-called "class two" deep wells in Ohio, according to Tom Stewart, executive vice president of Ohio Oil and Gas Association. They all operate under federal guidelines spelled out by the Clean Water Act.

There is no evidence that the wells in Youngstown were operating at higher pressures than allowed, Stewart said.

"We haven't seen anything from anyone at (the state agency) that would lead us to believe that the well was not operating properly," he said.

Kim said that even though the wells have stopped pumping water into the rock, the area might not have experienced its last earthquake. "It could take a couple of years for the earthquakes to go away. The migration of the fluid injected into the rock takes a long time to leave," Kim said.

Ohio's Democratic Senator, Sherrod Brown, said the quick response by the state shows it is a serious issue.

"There are things we need to know about drilling and earthquakes," Brown told Reuters on Tuesday.

Brown said he supports new energy exploration that brings jobs to the state but has questions about how companies will handle fracking and wastewater disposal. "They have got to answer the question of what they are going to do with the waste just like nuclear power," Brown said.

(Editing by Greg McCune and Jim Marshall)

The process is related to fracking, the controversial injection of chemical-laced water and sand into rock to release oil and gas. Critics say that the high pressure injection of the liquid causes seismic activity.

There is also a big correlation with geothermal wells and earthquakes as well. It is really common on some hydrothermal injection wells, which is clean energy.

From what I've gathered, using the term "fracking" is a misnomer in this Ohio earthquake case. It sounds like they were just injecting waste material into a disposal well, which is probably pretty routine (I imagine). Yes, you can create seismicity (earthquakes) through fracking, but injecting water/waste down a deep well through a pre-existing fault zone - which sounds like was the case in Ohio - can cause seismicity as well. So saying it was caused by "fracking" isn't quite accurate... Routine injection? Yes. Fracking? No.

Besides, it's only a magnitude 4.2 fer cryin out loud. I'm curious as to what the highest magnitude earthquake directly caused by fracking or injection is. In Basel Switzerland a few years ago, they canceled an Enhanced Geothermal Systems test because they were inducing microseismicity, and there were a handful of magnitude 4's and 3's, but that's about the worst I've ever heard of.

Michele Bachmann is an extremist who spouts weird conspiracy theories, garbles history and foreign policy, and tells untruths with such conviction that she’s less a liar than a denizen of an alternative reality.

It is conceivable that we could trigger a magnitude 8 by injecting into the San Andreas, but it would likely happen anyway.

But geothermal is forever and always.

every day drillers in North Dakota "burn off enough gas to heat half a million homes."

Film review: Fracknation
posted at 9:31 am on January 20, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

Full disclosure: I’m a friend of filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, producers of the new documentary Fracknation. I’ve been looking forward to this effort for some time, interviewing Phelim and Ann during the last couple of years as they prepared for and produced the film. Outside of friendship — and Ann and Phelim are a truly lovely and delightful couple — I wanted to get the other side of the fracking dispute represented in the cinematic arena, especially after Gasland and now Promised Land.

And make no mistake — this documentary succeeds in rebutting Josh Fox, the producer/director/writer of the documentary Gasland that touched off much of the anti-fracking activism. Phelim steps through a number of Fox’s claims inside and outside of the documentary, systematically undermining each of them. He includes a clip of his in-person challenge to Fox, which Fox tried to suppress, and another with a state official that cozied up to Fox — whose lawyer hilariously demands the film of the interview immediately afterward. (It’s amazing how little some lawyers know about the First Amendment.) Instead of speaking with Hollywood actors and the UAE (which provided some funding for Promised Land), Phelim speaks with the farmers in the supposedly-blighted areas of Pennsylvania, New York, and the Delaware Rivery Valley, as well as experts on fracking, water science, and environmental agencies.

The best part, however, comes near the end. One couple in the area have been particularly effective activists, giving interviews, appearing in Gasland, and protesting about their contaminated water supply. The EPA even came to Dimock based on their complaints to test the water supply specifically in their wells, which they claimed were contaminated by the fracking that had taken place in the region. When Phelim asks to interview them for Fracknation and to get the results of the test, they get belligerent enough to call a policeman (who turns out to be one of the most reasonable of all the people in the film) as well as threaten to pull a gun on Phelim. Only through a FOIA request does Phelim find out why — the EPA didn’t find anything wrong with the water, and they were smart enough to tape the meeting in which they told the couple the results.

Fracknation delivers a powerful debunking of the scare campaign against fracking and domestic natural-gas production. But don’t take my word for it — here’s Variety on the impact of Fracknation:

Those nursing the suspicion that Hollywood politics are awash in knee-jerk liberalism may well have their cynicism validated by “FrackNation,” a counterargument to the outcry over the natural-gas retrieval process known as “fracking” recently explored in Gus Van Sant’s feature “Promised Land.” But the more thoughtful and politics-oriented auds targeted by this well-reasoned film from helmers Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney and Magdalena Segieda will find plenty to chew over, including the possibility that perhaps all is not as simple as it seems in the world of nonrenewable energy.

Irish journalist McAleer narrates and serves as host to this briskly paced, low-budget and mischievous pic, presented as a rebuttal to Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated “Gasland,” a docu that has been instrumental in building political resistance to a process seen by different factions as a godsend and an antidote to Big Oil. Fox is clearly depicted as the villain in “FrackNation,” from a “Gasland” post-screening Q&A where Fox refuses to answer McAleer’s simple questions, to a scene at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum where Fox literally flees the camera.

McAleer makes a good case against Fox’s movie. From the farmers of the Delaware River Basin, for whom fracking hysteria has meant a loss of crucial income, to experts like James Delingpole, who somehow makes a fairly reasoned case that the anti-fracking people are the tools of Russian President Vladimir Putin (for whom the natural-gas market provides political leverage), most of the voices entertained here make a good deal of sense. But the filmmakers might have done well to address the animosity so many Americans feel toward the energy business in general.

And what did the New York Times think? You’d probably guess … and you’d be wrong:

Narrated by Mr. McAleer, whose previous documentaries have also argued against environmental concerns, “FrackNation” is no tossed-off, pro-business pamphlet. Methodically researched and assembled (and financed by thousands of small donations from an online campaign), the film picks at Mr. Fox’s assertions and omissions with dogged persistence. Much of what it reveals is provocative, like a confrontation with Mr. Fox about the presence of methane in the water supply decades before fracking began.

What’s clear is that Mr. McAleer knows his way around the Freedom of Information Act and has done his legwork. Besides talking to carefully selected scientists and water experts, he visits pro-fracking residents of Dimock Township, Pa., who are annoyed that their community is being characterized as a toxic wasteland. And he’s not above taking a sentimental detour to Poland to commiserate with a pensioner who can’t pay her energy bills, or reveling in the odd gotcha moment, like accusing a public official of “inappropriate ties” to Mr. Fox.

More than anything, “FrackNation” underscores the sheer complexity of a process that offers a financial lifeline to struggling farmers. Whether it also brings death to their water supply is something we won’t find out by listening to only half of the debate.

Fracknation will air on Tuesday evening on Mark Cuban’s AXs cable television channel at 9 pm ET. It’s a brilliant effort by Phelim and Ann, and it’s appropriate for all ages. The only violence in the film comes, unsurprisingly, from people who don’t want to have Phelim asking inconvenient questions.

So you are to believe an "online" funded movie.It is amazing that safe drinking water has been turned into a political issue.
Debra Winger, an actor, helped fund gasland,an individual,not hollywood.Please give me a reason as to why Josh Fox would lie and fracknation,truthland,would not.
I live here,western new york,they[big oil/gas] are going to push fracking right through,our politicians are bought and paid for.There are presently reports of only 2 methane contaminated wells in our area.We shall see.
Dimrock ,Pa,the wells contaminated there were not caused by fracking,instead,by operators spilling frac fluids into a creek there.Cleverly said as "not caused by fracking".
This story is amazing,corporations politically mobilizing a campaign for drilling thousands of wells in the name of energy independence,all the while fully knowledgeable of the consequences,with there real intentions of exporting to the highest bidder.The deamonizing of individuals against this ,whether they made a movie ,or not,is just truly so "republican" of you and yours.Check your stock prices!

John,firstly,burning firewood is one of the cleaner ways to heat.Yes ,the particulate goes in to the atmosphere

right now, with gas prices in the gutter, drilling has slowed to a crawl in the shale gas plays. Everyone is drilling for oil. The joke is if you hit a gas well you will be fired.

It would involve fewer regulatory hurdles - after all, they'd simply double an existing pipeline on existing rights of way, and increase the amount of tanker traffic through an already heavily used and regulated waterway.

I'll say it for the thousandth time. An American uses something like thirty times more resources than your typical third world citizen. So when you talk about our 0.9% population growth, the effect is much higher. We are a little country, 5% of the world's population, and use 25% of the world's oil.

Essentially to point out that central North America is rapidly producing more oil and gas,

"i have not seen fracknation,so i cannot comment on Dr Chu"

"John,firstly,burning firewood is one of the cleaner ways to heat.Yes ,the particulate goes in to the atmosphere,there it combines with a variety of compounds and settles out through gravity,in effect cleaning our atmos phere.The same thing is said of forrest fires.As a geology prof once said"a solution to pollution is dilution".Not only does firewood do that ,it is carbon neutral,burning methane is not."