Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Dave
Mountain climber
the ANTI-fresno
|
|
|
Jun 20, 2015 - 05:52am PT
|
"reminds me of when the gold miners filled the sacramento with sediment from the hydro mining and finally the public had to make laws against it. "
Because you were alive in 1898, thereabouts?
Facts. They're what's for dinner.
But don't worry about them if you are a Sierra Clubber I guess.
|
|
Dave
Mountain climber
the ANTI-fresno
|
|
|
Jun 20, 2015 - 05:54am PT
|
"Sorrry to say it, but it's deniers of logical thinking like yourself that have brought our ecosystem to the state its in today. I'm sure your kids and grandkids will be so thankful for your willful ignorance."
As an engineer, this statement is f*ing depressing. And ignorant.
|
|
couchmaster
climber
|
|
|
Jun 20, 2015 - 09:26am PT
|
Studly said:: "Common sense goes a long ways John. F*#king over future generations for the quick buck. Sorrry to say it, but it's deniers of logical thinking like yourself that have brought our ecosystem to the state its in today. I'm sure your kids and grandkids will be so thankful for your willful ignorance.
And there is no evidence for safe fracking, it's propaganda bullshit by big business, but if you deny it long enough, maybe your Petroleum stock will go up. "
I remember in the 70s the same argument being made, loudly and widely, against the Alaska pipeline. It was going to be "environmental Armageddon" if it was built. There is no free ride and there is environmental destruction in ALL energy applications/resource extraction. ALL.
To illustrate this, I will add one example from this state as it relates to wind. Not long after it was up and spinning, I learned that the North Powder wind farm in Eastern Oregon alone had killed well over 60 Golden Eagles. That they know of. 60. The blades whack them right out of the sky. How many uncounted dead ones are hauled away by Coyotes (and Wolves) from the fields in the night? How many are injured and manage to die further afield? Unknown. But it is a factor. How many bat and other species will be exterminated by wind? Unknown, but it indiscriminately kills them as well. Who here wants to tell their children: "OH, YEAH WE EXTERMINATED THAT SPECIES OF BIRD SO WE COULD HAVE WIND POWER". Is this something anyone would want? Uhh, no. This single point should illustrate that wind ain't free of side effects and bullshit that your kids will be paying for either, you have to pay the price for energy. ALL energy.
Pick your poison and pay the price.
Now, who here can do 7 pullups. SEEEVVEEENNNN!!!!!
|
|
couchmaster
climber
|
|
|
Jun 20, 2015 - 09:48am PT
|
QUOTED: "We have some high quality people involved who have examined these issues. It's not like the Bush administration at all which was full of industry hacks (not that it made them wrong, only biased). Read Secretary Munuz bonifides (or former Secretary of Energy Chu, a Phd nobel prize winner) and consider if his (or their) support of fracking is in error. These guys are all about green energy and reducing the environmental impacts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Moniz Read it.
I haven't changed my opinion of Fracking, which is this: overall and on balance, it has some issues but it's a great thing for our country." |
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 11:17am PT
|
Given the way regulators have been whacked around by all the federal courts for failing to follow proper procedure the last couple of years, the ruling on the EPA mercury rules did not surprise me, Moosedrool. The EPA said cost was irrelevant, so it made no finding on the cost of the regulation. Even then, four justices said its regulations were OK. Not so long ago, the EPA was slapped down 9-0. If it had simply found that the benefits exceed the costs, it would have won at the SCOTUS.
All this decision accomplished was a slight delay, and providing regulatory agencies with a roadmap for making rules impervious to challenges. As long as the regulators stop being arrogant and simply follow the rules, making findings they don't consider, but Congress requires them to make, they can still accomplish what the want.
John
|
|
PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 11:27am PT
|
That will slow down the shipments of petcoke arriving in richmond,ca due to the new laws not allowing them to burn it . So they were selling overseas instead. Now they will go back to burning it the US. Can't wait to get past the growing pains of solar and other renewable's.
|
|
BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 11:48am PT
|
Reactions from guys like Studly above...who has no idea how the process works, the risks, the engineering..well, I don't really get too upset over it. If you just go to Youtube and type in "fracking," you will immediately see reams of baloney. There is so much disinformation out there that I keep saying even a reasonably intelligent person can't find the basic truth. So getting into a bickering match is pointless.
Myself, I actually make very little of my money off of the horizontal plays. I have a few royalty interests in leases that were producing from conventional vertical wells, and then a company comes in and drills deeper to the Woodford. I make only a few hundred bucks a month off of it.
I have been doing conventional vertical wells that needed fracking for my entire career, though. Some producing zones have low permeability, and they have been fracked since 1950. The zones which produce from high permeability zones don't need a frac. I'd guess that 75% of the reserves that I've found needed a frac job. It was nothing new. Tens of thousands of wells all over the state have been fracked.
Somehow the anti-oil folks latched on to fracking. It was surprising at first. Why suddenly fracking became such a big deal. The only difference with the fracked horizontals is the size of the frack. With a vertical well, you can only frack around the 8 inch borehole. With horizontals, you perforate "stages" along the wellbore. Every 100-300 feet. If the lateral is a mile long, then it is like drilling 20 or 30 vertical wells with a single wellbore. The shales are too low perm to produce economically out of a single wellbore in almost all circumstances, but the technique can be used in conventional zones if the stars align. I've done that.
The thing that I don't like about drilling and producing is the scar it leaves on the land. In the mid-continent, you are usually drilling in wheat or corn. That land has already been totally destroyed by man. You should see SW Kansas. It is an ocean of center pivot irrigation, and it is hard to find a weed. The land has been plowed, terraced, and turned into monoculture. The grasslands are gone. Why people don't get riled up about that confounds me.
A well pad is usually small. After the well is plugged, you can't tell where it even was. In areas like the arid west, the roads, pipeline right of ways, and producing pads are visible from the air if you have ever flown over it. That bugs me. Fracking? No.
You guys seem to think that somehow induced fractures climb all the way to the surface. This is baldly false.
To get to the Woodford Shale, for example, you have to drill through (in the Anadarko Basin), a couple of thousand feet of anhydrite and gypsum. Then you drill through maybe a hundred zones that contain saltwater, separated by clay rich ductile shale. You can't frack that rock even if you tried.
I keep up on it, though. These Devonian shales have intervals that are quartz rich and brittle. You have to steer the well through those zones or the well will be a dud. The gas is trapped in the shale through capillary pressure, unlike the high perm zones above and beneath it. If you get out of that target interval, you can pump on it day and night and it won't fracture. The rock properties have to be just right. A well's success is often gauged by how many of the separate frack stages that successfully injected the proppant, normally sand.
Anyway, drilling for natural gas is not very lucrative with today's glut and prices. Most of the attention is towards wells that produce oil or condensate.
Nobody asked for a well log! An entire well's log is about 30 feet long, so I can only post snippets here. I can email you one, though, just so you guys can see the geological setting of these zones.
|
|
BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 12:59pm PT
|
Since we are still in the hydrocarbon age, and all of you are part of this, no matter how often you ride your bike, here is the alternative to natural gas: Coal.
The Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, struck down an EPA rule about mercury emissions from coal fired power plants.
The Coal age should be over. That stuff is nasty.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/supreme-court-just-handed-obama-144414979.html
|
|
jfailing
Trad climber
part Texas, part Oman
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 01:03pm PT
|
BASE is adding very insightful information to this discussion.
For fun (and because I love talking about fracking with people who generally are curious about it), I created a *very* elementary sense of scale for how deep these wells are. The point being is that even if you had a freshwater aquifer 1000 feet deep, you still have a looooong way to go before you hit that 50 foot payzone where all the fracking is taking place.
This first one is your typical human with three sizes of casing for scale. I'm an amateur at Google Sketchup, but these are roughly to scale:
Next, let's look at your typical drilling rig and assume that it's 100 feet tall - usually taller, but let's keep things simple:
Now down to the bottom of the surface casing, which is usually around 26" in diameter, and is usually drilled through the water table to avoid further contamination - let's say 120 feet in this case:
Now let's get confused and switch the view to 3D for a better idea of hwo big the rig is and how deep just the surface casing is:
Now down to 2000 feet:
Now to 10,000 feet:
That gray rectangle is a 1650' x 2000' area on the ground-surface.
The point being, these wells are DEEP. It's next to impossible a frack job would propagate anywhere near the surface.
Then again, I'm just a brainwashed industry worker....
|
|
NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 04:16pm PT
|
High pressure toxic fluid injection plus imperfect knowledge of cracks and weaknesses in the rock layers between the injection site and the water table, and the imperfect ability to engineer systems according to design over a large number of iterations, leaves a lot of room for "oops" moments. It seems quite a bit of hubris to assume we can control all the variables well enough, to not just mitigate, but to "prevent" accidents.
In my totally unrelated field (but within the realm of engineering), there is a big gap between the theoretical resiliency in a system and how it will perform, versus what happens in reality on a large scale when "the human element" is introduced- testplans are not followed accurately, people cut corners to make deadlines or reduce costs, etc....
In this case, accidents or unforeseen elements can render many communities without usable drinking water, or worse, have that happen without public awareness and not detected until long term negative effects are observed.
So yeah, I do think that workers who make money in the industry are brainwashed. I would be if my livelihood depended on it.
|
|
TGT
Social climber
So Cal
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 05:29pm PT
|
In this case, accidents or unforeseen elements can render many communities without usable drinking water, or worse, have that happen without public awareness and not detected until long term negative effects are observed.
And a space alien could zap me with his ray gun mid lead and the entire pitch of pro could rip, and the seemingly bomber anchor could rip and,
Wait for it!
Yer gonna die!
|
|
wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 05:57pm PT
|
http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/drilling/violations/
Yep,Humans never screw up.
Edit;That chart represents what happened in two years of fracking,now, there is a law prohibiting disclosure of this info.
Your industry talks out of the side of their mouths.
Beyond criminal.
|
|
The Real Mad Dog
Gym climber
Napa, CA
|
|
|
Jun 29, 2015 - 06:01pm PT
|
I don't care for fracking, but the more we do, the sooner we can shut down all coal plants, which produce SO2, which becomes sulfuric acid, which is acidifying the oceans. Lesser of two evils. I'm still waiting for hydrogen fusion plants. We should get them in 30, 300, 300, 3000, ??? years. Speaking as a geologist, I say that humans have always been between a rock and a hard place (goes for climbers too). Oh Lord, send me back 50 million years ago, when there were no dinos and only small mammals and tropical climates virtually everywhere (except Antarctica). Whoops, no Himalayas and no Alps. Got to rethink this.
|
|
jfailing
Trad climber
part Texas, part Oman
|
|
|
Jun 30, 2015 - 08:07am PT
|
So then what is the alternative to fracking?
Am I brainwashed? Probably. But realize that there is an enormous scientific community within oil and gas. The amount of research that goes into every well, field, region to best understand the subsurface is very significant. This isn’t a “Hey Cletus, go put them thurr frack chemicals down in that hole over yonder” type situation. It’s in an operator’s best interest NOT to contaminate the water table, and thousands of man-hours go into the research behind where to dispose of fluid or how to best drill/frack a well.
Consider that you may be dismissing and/or underestimating the science behind drilling and fracking in the same way that a fervent climate-change denier dismisses the science behind global warming. That much is apparent by some of the responses in this thread…
One notion that I try to explain to people is that these layers of rock that contain the natural gas and oil are isolated. By that I mean that they are confined by many stratigraphic layers above that act as a seal to contain the oil and gas. Otherwise they would have seeped to the surface millions of years ago. The majority of accidents (that I DO acknowledge happen due to human error) occur at the surface, most often with the improper storage or spilling of fluids. In my opinion, some serious regulation and oversight is necessary to help alleviate these accidents.
Yes, the industry is driven by $$$, but what isn’t in this country? What is the alternative to fracking? Do we just stop it completely (although fracking has already lurched to a crawl currently), so we can keep shipping in millions of barrels a day from OPEC producers to satisfy our thirst for hydrocarbons?
Research renewables you say? Do you think that isn’t happening right now? The technology just isn’t there yet to satisfy our enormous energy needs. Until the next solution is developed, we’re stuck with oil and gas. I say increase regulation and oversight. If we’re going to do it, make the information public. People have the right to know about environmental accidents and violations. Companies should be required to disclose what chemicals they’re adding to a frack fluid. If we’re going to do it, we should be doing it right.
If you do look around though, progress is being made. The current glut of oil shows that. People are becoming more energy conscious – driving better MPG (or electric) cars, buying energy-saving appliances, adding solar panels to homes and businesses to reduce reliance from the grid – it’s happening, albeit slowly.
Like other folks have said, natural gas is at least much environmentally friendlier than coal. Can you at least admit that?
I know I won’t convince anyone who has already made up their minds that a group of evil-grinning Dick Cheneys and Daniel Plainviews are sitting around a table maliciously plotting the intentional widespread destruction of our most valuable resource (water) whilst sitting among their fat stacks of cash. Okay, maybe to some extent, but not as bad as some are painting it... But I do hope you do a little more research into the side you oppose. Fracking might not be as destructive as it seems to be… Compared to the alternatives at least.
Do I wish we didn’t have to rely on it so much? You bet! Like everyone else on this forum, I care deeply about the pristine environments we all enjoy so much. Unfortunately, I think oil and gas is a necessary evil that keeps the gears of this country turning. Let’s just try and make it less evil?
|
|
golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Jun 30, 2015 - 10:10am PT
|
If its acceptable to inject unknown crap so far down deep, then why can we get rid of a lot of our other waste this way?
For the last 7 years I have been working on the mother of all environmental clean up projects at the Hanford site, the most costly remediation project in the world, well over $100 BILLION.
If toxic chemicals are OK to inject then I can assure you that injecting the 53 million gallons of rad waste into the earth would be far cheaper.
Now it doesn't seem so smart right?
|
|
NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
|
|
|
Jun 30, 2015 - 10:16am PT
|
jfailing, I appreciate the measured rational response.
I'm not against the concept of fracking entirely, but it is something that should be highly transparent and highly regulated to protect communities because the cost of a screw-up is so high. I don't understand the economics enough to know how much independent data gathering, checkpoint/oversight and regulatory compliance costs would affect the profitability of the endeavor. But there should be full disclosure with community buy-in (which is admittedly a political/marketing nightmare, but perhaps rightly so given the cost of failure) built into the modeling for how profitable it is to pursue these energy reserves in a manner that is sufficiently safe for the affected communities.
Maybe a good requirement would be for all executives of the companies making a profit from the fracking process should be required to use the local tap water for all of their families' water needs ;) Not really practical to enforce this, but nice idea!
A tricky part of it is ensuring the true independence of the oversight, rather than government cronies rotating in and out of executive positions in the companies they are regulating (like the FDA).
|
|
Studly
Trad climber
WA
|
|
NEW YORK BANS FRACKING
“After years of exhaustive research and examination of the science and facts, prohibiting high-volume hydraulic fracturing is the only reasonable alternative.
High-volume hydraulic fracturing poses significant adverse impacts to land, air, water, natural resources and potential significant public health impacts that cannot be adequately mitigated. This decision is consistent with DEC’s mission to conserve, improve and protect our state’s natural resources, and to enhance the health, safety and welfare of the people of the state.”
DEC Commissioner Joe Martens in a statement.
|
|
BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
|
|
DUH!
hope those fr%ckers get spanked now for all the willful ignorance
|
|
wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
|
|
I have mentioned before I am not against fracking.
I have also mentioned that there are places here on earth where fracking takes place w/o chems Aiding the process.
That can be done .
Why is it not ? Why because ,chems AID in the process,making it far more Profitable.
Stockholders and Corporations with their aspirations, drive the industry.
Any regulation stands in the way of their profitability.
They cannot have that ,This is Capitalism at it's ugliest.
Remember,They are building wealth.
Comparing anti fracking people to Climate Deniers is really something.
Golsen is doing what I am going to school for right now,cleaning up messes that industry has left behind.
All at a cost to all of us.
Cleaning up Superfund ,Brownfield sites are commonplace here in the East,all thanks to poorly regulated,poorly run industries that were
"building wealth".
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!