Fracking - where is it headed ?

[Undertoad]

There are many ways to determine truth but conspiracy theory is not one of them.

[xoxoxoBruce]

It's not conspiracy theory to be skeptical of anyone with a dog in the hunt.

[Lamplighter]

For those who think that fracking activities are kept hundreds of feet below ground,
or that fracking only involves Canada and northeastern states in the US,
or that the US Clear Air Act will prevent air contamination,
or that the Keystone Pipeline will only be used to transport natural gas,
or that Detroit deserves what it gets,
or that the Koch brothers are good guys ...


NY Times
IAN AUSTEN
5/17/13

A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted
and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.
And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.



The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists
who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups
that challenge the science behind climate change.
The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas,
where it is burned as fuel.
<snip>
An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from
the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke,
of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled.
Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta.
Much is just piled up there.

Detroit’s pile will not be the only one.
Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived from oil sands to the United States,
which include transporting it through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline
have pulled more coking south to American refineries, creating more waste product here.
<snip>

[Undertoad]

LL I know this stuff is difficult and I mean no disrespect. But.

Oil from oil sands recovery has nothing to do with gas fracking.

The Keystone pipeline was *always* about transporting oil sands oil out of Canada and *never* about natural gas.

If you don't like oil from this dirty sands process you should be in favor of gas fracking as a much cleaner alternative.

[Lamplighter]

"nothing to do with gas fracking"

Ummmm...
Maybe so, but only if you limit your definition of "fracking" to the "natural gas" production.
The petroleum industry is changing... rapidly...more so than the public is aware.

Oil Change International

Tar sands (also known as oil sands) is a low quality form of oil that consists of bitumen mixed with sand, clay and water.
Vast quantities of the substance are found in Alberta, Canada and in eastern Venezuela.
Other deposits are known to exist in Utah, parts of Russia, Congo (Brazzaville),
Madagascar and elsewhere, but it is currently only commercially produced in Canada and Venezuela.

Tar sands is extreme oil in every way.
Its extraction is particularly energy and water-intensive, polluting, and destructive.
<snip>
It is either strip mined or produced by injecting high pressure steam into the ground
to melt the bitumen and get it to flow to the surface.
To process it into usable fuel requires complex upgrading and refining that is also highly energy intensive and polluting.

But bitumin is not only brought to the surface by fracking,
it is transported by-products of "traditional hydrolic fracking" for natural gas:

How Fracking Boosts the Tar Sands

There is no doubt that the dirty tar sands and fracking are revolutionising the industry.
But what is less understood is how inter-connected the two are.
Ironically one dirty technology is actually boosting the other.

One of the big energy issues dominating the energy and political debate
over the last year has been the building of the Keystone XL pipeline,
which would facilitate the export of tar sands from Canada to the US.

The fracking boom has produced an excess of condensate in the United States.
Condensate is a by-product of oil and gas production.
It is a kind of wet gas or gaseous liquid depending on how you look at it.
It is abundant in the shale gas and tight oil wells that are being drilled across America using the fracking method.
<snip>

So as tar sands producers gear up for massive expansions of their high carbon production,
more and more of the condensate produced from fracking is being exported to Canada
to facilitate the transportation of bitumen to American refineries.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA),
the independent statistical arm of the US Department of Energy,
in the first three months of 2011,
the US exported 1 million barrels of a type of light condensates known as “pentanes plus”.
These exports rocketed to 10 million barrels in the same period this year.

[Ocean's Edge]

I'm going to state a fairly unpopular position.

Big Oil isn't the problem.

The problem is - that even as greater and greater understanding world wide of the dangers and environmental impact of these kinds of projects - the world wide demand for fossil fuels is not diminishing, the demand for oil continues to grow. Fact is they wouldn't be looking for new and even more expensive sources if they weren't selling the stuff and they wouldn't be selling it if we weren't using it.

It's all well and good to blame "Big Oil" ... but at the end of the economic chain their is us. While there are still some coal mines - there aren't nearly as many or as large or as dangerous and expensive as they used to be... why? because we, the world, aren't really using much coal anymore. At the end of every economic chain - there is US.

We demand oil, we really only pay lip service (as a society) to real alternatives, and as long as we're demanding it - they're gonna keep looking to supply us with it.

We are the problem.

[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.