the Australian government are promoting these mines and we now have at least ten thousand of these mines in Queensland alone and there is talk about chemicals polluting water wells from this fracing
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the Australian government are promoting these mines and we now have at least ten thousand of these mines in Queensland alone and there is talk about chemicals polluting water wells from this fracing
The price of oil and gas is the prime motivator -oil and gas in shale are found all over the world but are not normally thought to be commercially viable. There was a Scottish Shale Oil industry in the 19thc which lasted until the 1960s when what we think of as 'conventional' oil and gas replaced shale and coal as the primary sources of energy in the industrialised world.
Hydraulic fracturing has been used in wells since 1940, but the development of multi-directional/horizontal drilling has given companies a quantum leap over the volume of gas they can now recover, compared to say 30 years ago. The commercial case makes sense within countries like the USA and Australia if it reduces imports, the largest volumes of gas in the world are in Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. I suppose its ironic that most Australian gas from the North West shelf goes to Japan; otherwise I would have thought Australia is meeting its needs and doesn't need fractured gas - someone is making enough money from it or it wouldn't be done.
The counter argument is that fracturing the shale containing the gas, allows gases to seep into the water supply - there is a lot of debate on the accuracy of these claims.
There is an simple introduction to the technology in this Shell video:
http://www.shell.com/home/content/in...al_challenges/
yes there is talk of polluting of under ground wells and of these big companies walking onto prime agricultural land without the farmers permission and destroying the land i don't know to much about this, living in the city. but there is a lot of resentment from the local communities in these areasQuote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
But if you read the growing reports on this in the press, you will find that there are claims and counter claims on this issue. My own view is that companies are doing it because they can now make a profit from it; no technology is 100% safe; and there will be cases where, because of he environmental geology, seepage and contamination takes place. If the price of gas fell dramatically, the wells would shut; that simple. The best option you have is monitoring, and compensation schemes if seepage occurs, although I don't see how you can then put it right; guess people will have to sell the house and move.
Stavros this is the bread basket of Australia we don't have a lot of fertile land once you get away from the coast so i hope this is worth it
Oil and gas companies claim fracking has a clean record and the practice has never contaminated ground anywhere. It’s true, literally. A recent independent study conducted by Duke University agrees that fracking per se is safe.
Yet the EPA has repeatedly documented and fined the practitioners for contaminating ground [water]. Often residents in contaminated areas demonstrate the contamination by turning on their taps and igniting the methane that issues forth.
So how can the EPA and the Gas companies both be right? The resolution of the paradox rests on the technical definition of fracking. The industry identifies fracking as a process by which chemicals are forced under pressure into underground shale (a mile or more below any ground water and then the shale is blasted to release the trapped natural gas. It’s true that the process never directly contaminated ground water. The industry maintains a verbal wall between drilling and fracking. The cases of ground contamination so far were all technically due to poor drilling procedures, which include improperly constructing the well from which the gas will be extracted.
In Pennsylvania a well blew out during the fracturing procedure. The industry engineers and lawyers count it a well failure due to poor well construction, not a failure of the fracking process. Moreover, this incident contaminated the surface water but not the ground water. However, there are scores of other examples where the ground water was contaminated. But in all these cases the industry engineers blame the well, not fracking.
According to the industry, fracking is getting a bad rap. But the number of incidences of ground water contamination is significantly higher among those wells where fracking is used to free natural gas from ancient shales. Those who are affected don’t give a damn whether fracking was directly to blame or whether [the] well wasn’t constructed well enough to sustain the pressures, stresses and strains associated with the fracking procedure.
New developments have made fracking technologically feasible, though it is still an expensive process. St[]avros is probably right, that the cost of oil and natural gas crossed a corporate cost/benefit threshold and made fracking economically feasible. Of course as a citizen I have a different cost/benefit threshold. I think fracking is particularly dangerous when there is a possibility of contaminating a fresh water aquifer the size of a great lake. Water is the oil of future and we should be careful now to protect our vital supplies.
In the U.S. we’re stuck with indiscriminate fracking and sloppy well construction until EPA is given the resources to regulate it properly. Industry won’t do [it] itself, their cost/benefit threshold doesn’t match that of the ordinary citizen.
I don't know how you anti-government people in Australia propose to control it, but I suggest that people get together in the form of government and regulate the practice, even if some historically and politically ignorant assholes call it socialism.
Trish I think you are right, its not about the ability of the technology, but what happens when it goes wrong -in this case the kind of contamination that can take place is too high a price to pay. There is plenty of gas in the world, the money being spent on fracking could be spent on the practical solution of bringing Alaskan gas to the Lower 48. There is plenty of gas in Australia's NW Shelf province, and elsewhere, there is no urgent need to get it from shale. Its one of those 'follow the money' issues.
Trish the Australian government is promoting this fracking and whether it's a socialist or conservative government that is beside the point,if the moneys there the greedy bastards will grab it .Once a mining company has started operations on some ones land, the land is taken from that individual and there is not a thing they can do about it
That's what I said. But government is your best alternative. But government won't do anything if you don't make your voice heard in an organized way.Quote:
it's a socialist or conservative government that is beside the point
over here there is organised opposition but our government is doing it's best not to hear and letting the mining companies spew their propaganda . people in the cities don't have a lot of interest in what's happening in the country
Gee, perhaps people should have more empathy with each other and look after each other's interests, regardless of race, origin, religion or lifestyle be it urban or rural. Perhaps they should show more sympathy with your cause than you are inclined to show toward others.
i show lots of empathy to Australia not much to the rest of the world.quite truthfully the rest of the world can get fucked
That's what I'm saying, you want sympathy from the rest of us all the time, and yet in your honest opinion we can all get fucked. Sorry I can't say "get fucked" in return. I can only say that once again you disappoint.
i am only interested in the problem not sympathy.fuck sympathy does fuck all like the UN
Too late to take that line, you already admittedQuote:
Originally Posted by russtafa
Quote:
i show lots of empathy to Australia
i wanted to know if other countries had this problem not bloody sympathy and i love Australia i it all ways comes first for and any other place in the world comes a good third and any way i am the most hated guy on this site for expressing my views and not pretending i am Jesus Christ most of these wankers pretend they can walk on water:dead:Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
Russtafa I don't think you will find many people energised by the issue of hydraulic fracturing -it doesn't show up on their radar: there is a major project under way near the holiday resort of Blackpool, but while there was a 'For and Against' article in The Guardian, most people in the UK do not read that paper. If the project creates jobs, people are so desperate they will overlook any potential issues and, in any and every case, it remains to be proven if the fracking process has caused pollution. More people will continue to be killed and injured in road traffic accidents, but the car has not yet been banned.
Mining has always had a higher and more controversial profile in Australia, be it coal or uranium. The Four Mile mine is owned by an American firm General Atomics which makes the drones that are used in Pakistan and Afghanistan and most recently in Libya. Anyway, like many people on this board, you complain a lot about political issues and politicians, which is your right, but its obvious also you are not going to do anything else about it -its probably too much to ask you and the others on HA with political gripes to protest, join a party -at least we all have the vote; and often it doesn't go our way; and one side always thinks the other side when in power is destroying the country, I have heard it for decades but for all their faults, neither the UK nor Australia have disintegrated, collapsed, and disappeared from the map.
i still go to protest marches and you are right i should join a political party. i was going to join Bob Katter's party but he is anti gay so no way.i am still looking for a good one maybe One Nation
Awww... Russ cares. Such an empathic softy. Next we know, he'll become a pillar of philanthropy & start volunteering at the soup kitchens. :D
Russtafa, the real question is, if you become politically involved, but fail -what do you do then? So many people have dropped out of politics because a) it was too much like hard work, and b) they didn't get the result they wanted.
keep trying mate just like the wallabies rugby team that's what i will do
This review of books on fracking was published in the Financial Times weekend edition and is, I believe, a judicious assessment of the arguments for and against. One thing I found out this week is that in the USA a land-owner who has or may make a lot of money selling drilling rights on his land can do so because he owns the sub-surface environment, whereas in the UK even if you own a plot of land the sub-surface environment is owned by the Crown.
The list of books is at the end with the link the article.
The fracking debate
By Ed Crooks
Some see shale energy as an economic miracle, others as an environmental disaster. But could the two sides be closer than they think?
What is the most important innovation of the 21st century? The iPhone? Facebook? It is hard, really, to make a case for anything other than the process popularly known as fracking: the extraction of previously inaccessible oil and gas from shale rocks. Over the past decade, the US shale boom has transformed the country’s energy outlook, ending a decades-long decline in oil production and cutting natural gas prices by two-thirds from their 2008 peak. The income, jobs and tax revenues that the shale revolution has created have revived moribund industrial and agricultural areas, and encouraged hopes of a sustained recovery in US manufacturing based on cheap energy. Meanwhile, a shift in power generation away from coal towards gas has cut greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution.
Most profoundly of all, the boom has changed Americans’ perceptions of their place in the world. No longer doomed to ever-growing dependence on imports of oil and gas from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, the US can speculate about a future of self-reliance in energy. And although it started in the US, the shale revolution is now spreading around the world, with countries from Argentina to China beginning to develop their own reserves. Seeing all this as the result of fracking is something of a misperception. Hydraulic fracturing, to give the technique its proper name, is just one of the advances of the past 15 years or so that have made production from shale reserves possible. Fracking – pumping water, sand and chemicals into a well at high pressure to open up cracks through which the oil and gas can flow – has been spectacularly effective only when combined with horizontal drilling. Modern shale wells are no longer sunk like straws poked into the earth, but drilled down and then sideways for a mile or more, to open up a much larger hole through a layer of resource-bearing rock.
Still, with its euphonious snap and vaguely obscene resonance, it is “fracking” that has captured the public imagination, and become a synecdoche for shale production as a whole. Many in the oil and gas industry dislike the word, because of its enthusiastic adoption by their opponents in the environmental movement. One executive describes it as “hate speech”, and it lends itself all too readily to coinages such as “frack off” and “no fracking way”. Some in the industry have tried to establish the spelling “fraccing” as a handy piece of neutral jargon, but they are fighting a losing battle: it is “fracking” that has entered the Oxford English Dictionary and is ubiquitous in non-specialist usage, including the first wave of books explaining it for the general reader.
Even Ezra Levant, in his unabashed pro-industry polemic Groundswell, subtitles his book “the case for fracking”. In spite of the manifest benefits that shale production has delivered, it is still vigorously opposed by environmental campaigners. Concerns about possible contamination of water supplies by the chemicals used in fracking has prompted bans in some places, including France, Bulgaria and New York state, and stirred up protests in others, including Britain. The anti-fracking documentary Gasland (2010), by New York film-maker Josh Fox, attracted a worldwide audience with its alarming depictions of poisoned families and its dramatic footage of a man who can set the water from his kitchen tap on fire.
Levant, a television commentator who is described on his website as “Canada’s foremost freedom fighter”, tackles those opponents of shale production head-on. Fracking, he argues, is “the beautiful technology with the ugly name”, creating “plentiful, cheap, clean, democratic energy”, and concerns about its threat to the environment have been wildly overstated. His style is pugnacious, making little effort to win over sceptics with charm, and the book is littered with tendentious assertions. But his jabs hit more often than they miss, and his overall thesis is convincing.
His detailed, almost scene-by-scene rebuttal of Gasland is particularly compelling, and it would be interesting to see an equally detailed response from Fox. Another strong chapter gives a whistle-stop tour of debates over fracking around the world, including a telling section on Ukraine, written before the latest crisis, explaining how shale production could be a “turning point” for the country’s attempts to break free from Russia’s hold over its energy supplies.
Levant has a gift for the catchy phrase, describing shale gas as the “fair trade coffee” of energy because it is produced in the US and Canada rather than countries such as Russia and Qatar. His description of the headquarters of Gazprom, Russia’s gas export monopoly, with its penthouse “like a mash-up between a Studio 54 lounge space and Khrushchev’s cabinet room” is also entertainingly vivid.
If you are looking for ammunition for a dinner-table argument with ecologically minded but under-informed friends and relations, Groundswell is the book for you. For a more rounded account, you need Russell Gold’s The Boom: the best overview available of the history and consequences of fracking. An energy reporter at the Wall Street Journal who has been on the beat since 2002, Gold has seen the whole story from the beginning. His knowledge of many of the central people and places in the shale revolution from before they hit the headlines gives the book a greater depth than any other account yet published.
He also has a personal connection to the people affected by fracking. In an echo of Gasland, which begins with Fox telling a similar story, Gold opens The Boom with a letter to his parents from a gas production company, asking if it could drill under the land they owned with friends in Pennsylvania, in return for $400,000 upfront and royalties on any gas produced. When later on Gold describes debates in communities worried about the disturbance caused by drilling and the feared threat to water supplies, he can report the arguments from the inside.
He tells the broader story well, with sharply observed portraits of pioneers such as George Mitchell, the son of a Greek goatherd who spent decades trying to “crack the code” of the gas in the Barnett Shale of north Texas, and eventually succeeded. There is an appropriately colourful depiction of Aubrey McClendon, the charismatic Oklahoman who used a campaign of land deals to take his company Chesapeake Energy from nowhere to being the second-largest gas producer in the US, behind only ExxonMobil.
Much of the same material is also covered in The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman, a colleague of Gold’s at the Wall Street Journal. Zuckerman has had the smart idea of focusing principally on a few of the central personalities in the rise of the shale industry, capturing the entrepreneurial and often haphazard nature of the revolution. As he rightly observes, it is a classic American story. “The successes of the architects of the shale era are attributable to creativity, bravado, and a strong desire to get really wealthy,” he writes. “It doesn’t get more American than that.”
His approach, filling the book with colourful detail and anecdotes, is not always successful. The jacket promises an “outrageous” story, which oversells it a little: arguments over rock porosity are not exactly The Wolf of Wall Street. But at times, such as his account of the discovery by Mitchell’s team that “shale could be a gold mine”, it is genuinely gripping.
To varying degrees, Levant, Gold and Zuckerman are all supportive of the shale revolution. For a comprehensive rejection of its claims, you need to go to Bill Powers’ Cold, Hungry and in the Dark. From its title onwards, the book makes clear that it is not going to be fun. In place of the colourful characters, there are complex monochrome maps, charts and tables, including a double-page spread solely of numbers on well performance from the Gulf of Mexico.
It is worth persisting, though, because Powers has looked deeply into the potential of shale gas, studying the data from individual states and gasfields, and concluded that claims that the US has resources to provide more than 100 years of supply, which are often cited by the industry, are grossly exaggerated. He predicts a severe “deliverability crisis” for gas by 2015, as the industry struggles to keep up with growing demand.
This kind of analysis can be misleading. One of Powers’ models is Twilight in the Desert by Matthew Simmons, a detailed study of Saudi Arabia’s oilfields that caused a furore in the oil industry when it was published in 2005. Simmons was right in his conclusion that the kingdom would not be producing more than 13m barrels a day in the early 2010s, as other forecasters had predicted, but his warnings that Saudi production would fall and oil would rise above $200 a barrel have been wide of the mark.
Nevertheless, such debates are a reminder that forecasting is no easier in energy than it is in any other field. The spike in US gas prices caused by cold weather at the start of the year, while not confirming Powers’ thesis, is at least a reminder that expectations of unlimited gas at rock-bottom prices forever were overblown.
Powers’ answer is to develop other sources of power including nuclear and renewables, and to make more efficient use of energy. As Michael Levi, one of the most thoughtful US energy analysts, points out in The Power Surge, quite a bit of that is already going on: there are “two unfolding energy revolutions”, not just one. While the “shale gale” has been blowing, there have also been significant advances in solar power, electric cars and vehicles’ mileage per gallon, and Levi, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, does an excellent job of setting the fracking boom in the wider context – in particular, its connection to policies for tackling the threat of climate change.
His conclusion is that, like the farmer and the cowboy, environmentalists and frackers should be friends, or at least recognise mutual interests. In spite of all the uncertainties over climate forecasts, Levi says, it is clear that global warming is a threat, and gas produced by fracking is cutting greenhouse gas emissions right now by displacing coal. Both sides, he argues, should make compromises to embrace old and new energy sources.
The idea of gas as a “bridge” fuel that can sustain energy supplies while cleaner alternatives are scaled up has been criticised by many anti-frackers, who describe it as “the bridge to nowhere”. They should perhaps reflect that if you kick away the bridge, you can end up standing on nothing at all.
Ed Crooks is the FT’s US industry and energy editor
Groundswell: The Case for Fracking, by Ezra Levant, Random House Canada, RRPŁ19.99/$27.95, 272 pages
The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World, by Russell Gold, Simon & Schuster, RRP$26, 384 pages
The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, by Gregory Zuckerman, Portfolio, RRPŁ14.99/$29.95, 416 pages
Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Supply Myth, by Bill Powers, New Society Publishers, RRPŁ13.99/$19.95, 336 pages
The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future, by Michael Levi, OUP, RRPŁ18.99/$27.95, 288 pages
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0d830306-e...#axzz32rh19eOa
I was reading The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman. It was a breezy read about the people involved in the oil industry and about how the fraccing revolution came about. I read about half of it and realized I wasn't going to learn much more about the technical side of the industry from reading it and the people weren't interesting enough to warrant reading their stories. As the article above indicates, it would be much more relevant to read something skeptical about fracking. From a business standpoint, if you own mineral rights, of course it makes sense to exploit them in any way possible...but from a policy standpoint, there's a lot to be said about the costs of doing so.
Anyhow, I don't recommend The Frackers except for very light reading. Actually, for light reading you can do better.
There is a lot of material out there. Two studies are of interest -one The Shale Gas Shock by Matt Ridley has some clearly stated descriptions of the technology involved; but you should by aware that his paper is published by the 'Global Warming Foundation' whose mission in life is to prove that global warming is a 'hoax' although the usual disclaimer about the GWF and the author's views pertains. The study is wholly positive, denying any connection between the contamination of local water supply and fracking activities, it also claims that the volume of water required to operate a well -1-5 million gallons, is not so much when seen in context, thus "A single shale gas well uses in total about the same amount of water as a golf course uses in three weeks" (page 24).
Ridley does not look at specific examples of drilling in places where there is already a water shortage, to ask if there is indeed an environmental dimension to fracking that is 'unacceptable' -as mostly this whole argument is driven by money.
The Shale Gas Shock -Matt Ridley, 2011
http://www.shell.com/content/dam/she...ion-report.pdf
Contrast that to the comment in the second paper that looks at both sides which also has some useful technology material which points out the short life-span of wells in shale gas production -where 10,000 wells were operating in 2011 alone in the lower 48 (page 5). This paper also makes more of the potential pollution of the air and also disputes the confident claims made by the industry about the treatment of wastewater.
Shale Gas and Tight Oil: Framing the Opportunities and Risks -Tommy Inglesby, Bob Jenks, Scott Nyquist, Dickon Pinner, 2012
There is a link to an article in Scientific American in 2011 but I have not seen it.
http://www.nature.com/scientificamer...an1111-80.html