Federal Study: Fracking Process To Drill For Oil and Gas Does NOT Pollute
Federal Study: Fracking Process To Drill For Oil and Gas Does NOT Pollute
Fracking (or hydrologic fracturing)can be the key to Americas energy independence for the next century or more. Fracking involves injecting water, with sand and other additives, into shale rock to push oil and/or gas into accessible pockets. Improvements in technology allow drilling horizontally from a single, above-ground well,
reducing the above-ground hit on the environment. But environmentalist are trying to outlaw fracking because (they claim) it pollutes water, causes earthquakes, male pattern baldness, and wrote all the lousy scripts for all the disappointing movies so far this summer (OK I will admit it–I made up the last two).
CBS is reporting that a landmark federal study on fracking conducted by the Department of Energy, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process, seeped its way up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site.
After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking water, geologist Richard Hammack said.
Although the results are preliminary — the study is still ongoing — they are a boost to a natural gas industry that has fought complaints from environmental groups and property owners who call fracking dangerous.
Drilling fluids tagged with unique markers were injected more than 8,000 feet below the surface, but were not detected in a monitoring zone
3,000 feet higher. That means the potentially dangerous substances stayed about a mile away from drinking water supplies.
Recent shale oil and gas discoveries can substantially increase onshore oil production. The Bakken oil field located in western North Dakota, northeast Montana/Canada’s Saskatchewan Province is pumping 225,000 barrels of oil a day (it started at just 3,000 barrels per day in 2005) with estimates of a million barrels of oil production per day by 2020. A newer shale oil field, Eagle Ford
in Texas, is one of about 20 new fields so far that combined could increase the oil output of the United States by 25 percent within 10 years.
The Green River Formation located within Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah contains the equivalent of 6 trillion barrels of oil. The Department of Energy estimates that, of this 6 trillion, approximately 1.38 trillion barrels are potentially recoverable with today’s technology That’s equivalent to …
A Fracking Revolution: U.S. Now Leads World In CO2 Emission Reductions
A Fracking Revolution: U.S. Now Leads World In CO2 Emission Reductions
Fortunately, the U.S. did not sign the idiotic United Nation’s Kyoto Protocol that Democrats attempted to force on the U.S. And, thank goodness for common sense, most Americans did not swallow the incredibly lame global warming fear-mongering that is a……
Eight questions to ask a climate activist about Eight questions to ask student activists about the fossil fuel divestment campaign
Eight questions to ask a climate activist
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/07/eight-questions-to-ask-climate-activist.html
Eight questions to ask any climate activist:
Eight questions to ask student activists about the fossil fuel divestment campaign
How colleges and universities can turn Fossil Free campaign meetings into teachable moments
By:
Tom Harris
A teachable moment is something all good educators welcome. It is a critical time during which learning about a particular topic or idea becomes easiest. In his 1998 book, Sequential Problem Solving: A Student handbook, American author Fredric B. Lozo defined a teachable moment as “that moment when a unique, high interest situation arises that lends itself to discussion of a particular topic.”
The Fossil Free divestment campaign at post secondary institutions across North America provides superb teachable moments for educators to help students improve their research and critical thinking skills. In this article I discuss one way that university and college administrators can take advantage of the strong personal engagement student activists feel towards climate change and energy to transform confrontational meetings into teachable moments.
Last November, the climate activist group 350.org began the Fossil Free divestment campaign. It encourages university and college students to pressure their schools into divesting their endowments of 200 companies that 350.org considers the main threat to the climate due to their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Over 300 campuses in the United States and Canada now have student-led divestment campaigns and a handful of small colleges in New England have even committed to 100 percent divestment.
Instead of quickly yielding to student pressure, or immediately rejecting their demands, academic leaders must motivate young people to learn more about the issues at hand, think critically, and come to their own conclusions based on the evidence they find. Students should be encouraged to free themselves from politically correct ‘group think’ and put aside the simplistic, and often wrong, talking points provided by professional activists. After all, progressive universities and colleges want students to be fearless intellectual explorers, not mere followers of contemporary fashion. Later in their lives, many will work for organizations that demand unthinking conformity, so now is the time to learn to think for themselves.
The contentious and complex climate change issue is ideal for such exploration. As the 1,500 Carleton University students who took my courses in climate science know, I like to challenge young people with questions, including, and some would say especially, politically incorrect ones…questions they may have …
U.S. coal burning up 11% in 2013; Gas use down 14%; CO2 emissions increasing 2013-14
U.S. coal burning up 11% in 2013; Gas use down 14%; CO2 emissions increasing 2013-14
The Los Angeles Times reports: Power plants in the United States are burning coal more often to generate electricity, reversing the growing use of natural gas and threatening to increase domestic emissions of greenhouse gases after a period of decline, according to a federal report. Coal’s share of total domestic power generation in the first […]…
Analysis: The Shale Revolution Is Slaying Green Extremism: ‘The fact that greens can’t see in environmental benefits of shale gas means that they will continue to be forced to sit out serious energy policy debates’
The Shale Revolution Is Slaying Green Extremism
http://www.thegwpf.org/shale-revolution-slaying-green-extremism/
The fact that greens can’t see in environmental benefits of shale gas means that they will continue to be forced to sit out serious energy policy debates.
Ask a green what he or she thinks about fracking, and you’re likely to get an earful of criticism about methane leaks, poisoned groundwater, and climate change disaster. But a new report from the ecologically minded Breakthrough Institute (BI) makes the case that shale gas actually has a net environmental benefit. Nevermind the boosts to our energy security, and economy that fracking provides; the controversial drilling process is worth embracing on green merits alone.
Natural gas’s biggest green qualification is the extent to which it displaces coal as an energy source. Burning coal emits roughly twice as much greenhouse gas into the air as natural gas. Thanks to the shale boom, we’re getting less of our electricity from coal-fired power plants and more from natural gas. The BI notes, “From 2008 to 2012, annual coal consumption for US electric power declined, on average, by 50 million tons.” That’s something greens should be cheering, and it’s mostly thanks to fracking.
But natural gas doesn’t just beat coal on carbon emissions. The BI explains why, at the local level, shale gas does less harm than coal:
The environmental and community impacts of shale fracking are reliably far more modest than those created by coal mining and production. Whereas coal mining removes entire mountains and contaminates streams with hazardous waste, natural gas drill pads occupy only a few hundred square feet, and there are only a handful of cases of groundwater contamination by fracking chemicals. Whereas innovation in coal mining resulted in greater landscape degradation, innovation in gas fracking has resulted in less-toxic fracking chemicals, fewer drill pads, and better drilling practices.
It seems pretty straightforward at this point: the more natural gas we burn, the less coal we burn. That leads to lower carbon emissions and less harm to the environment and local communities.
Many greens have one final quibble: that the increased share of shale gas in our energy mix will come at the expense of the fledgling solar and wind industries.
Breakthrough has an answer for that as well. Gas plants are a lot cheaper to build than coal plants, and cheaper to scale up if needed. Surprisingly, this is actually good news for solar …
Watch Now: Climate Depot’s Morano on Fox with Neil Cavuto on Electric Cars and the War on Coal: ‘The avg. household can increase their electric load 50% (when charging electric cars)
Related Links:
NYT’s Andrew Revkin suggests that Marc Morano’s ‘prime interest appears to to be sustaining the fossil fuel era as long as possible’
…The Scare Story of 1881: ‘Back in the 19th century, newspapers declared that something had ‘gone wrong” with the climate. The public was told that the telegraph system might cause the destruction of the human race
…‘Why The U.S. Is Cutting Carbon Faster Than Europe: ‘Who would have thought a few years ago that the U.S. would be curbing carbon emissions faster than Europe?’
…Bjorn Lomborg on Earth Day: ‘In wealthy countries, most environmental indicators are getting better. We have cleaner air and cleaner water, and we suffer fewer environmental risks’
Excerpts from Lomborg:
it was ultimately the shale gas revolution thatcurtailed U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
Fracking has caused a dramatic transition to natural gas, a fuel that emits 45% less carbon dioxide than burning coal. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed that in 2012, carbon dioxide emissions was 12% lower than the peak in 2007. The shift from coal to natural gas is alone responsible for a reduction of between 8%-9% of the entire U.S. CO2 emissions. In fact, it amounts to twice the reduction that the rest of the world has achieved over the past 20 years.
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German taxpayers have poured $130 billion into subsidizing solar panels, but ultimately by the end of the century, this will postpone global warming by a trivial 37 hours. The electric car is even less efficient. Its production consumes a vast amount of fossil fuels, and mostly it utilizes fossil fuel electricityto be recharged. Even if the U.S. did reach the lofty goal of 1 million electric cars by 2015 — costing taxpayers more than $7.5 billion — global warming would be postponed by only 60 minutes.
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