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| Science & Technology |
| Get The Frackin' Gas |
| 2009-12-24 |
| Energy: An oil company wants to invest its profits in clean-burning American natural gas. A Hungarian billionaire and a "green" politician want to stop it. This is the real Climate-gate scandal. While the greenies of the world united in Copenhagen to talk about the weather, emitting a Third World-country-size chunk of greenhouse gases to gather there, the world's largest oil company, Exxon Mobil, was doing something about it. On Dec. 14, Exxon agreed to buy XTO Energy, a natural gas firm, in a deal valued at $41 billion. XTO is one of the leaders in something called "fracking" technology, in which water, sand and additives are pumped into the ground to unlock trillions of feet of natural gas previously thought to be unobtainable. This is what energy companies really do with their profits. They find more energy, then sell it to you. While the technique is not new, the technology exploiting it is. XTO has helped develop new technologies that let it drill a single well 9,000 feet and then bore horizontally through shale formations to unlock the natural gas trapped in the porous rock. The rock is fractured and the gas is pushed into accessible pockets whence it can be extracted with a minimal surface footprint. Because of these new technologies, it is estimated that the U.S. sits on 83% more recoverable natural gas than was thought in 1990. The Barnett Shale rock formations of Texas and Louisiana, the Bakken Shale formation in Montana and North Dakota, and the Marcellus Shale formation running through New York and Pennsylvania and other states may hold as much as 2,000 trillion cubic feet of this clean-burning, domestically produced fuel. We are the Saudi Arabia of shale. At current use, we have an estimated 90-year supply, if we are allowed to get at it. Slam dunk? Hardly. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., one of the sponsors of the job- and economy-killing Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill and no fan of domestic energy, wants to hold hearings on the alleged environmental dangers of the new technology. Soros owns a major stake in a company called InterOil, a company that has discovered a large natural gas field in Papua, New Guinea, with which American shale resources would compete. Soros would rather have us import his liquefied natural gas than develop our own. His allies in the media, the environmental movement and the Democratic caucus are all too eager to exploit public fears to do it. Roger Willis owns a hydraulic fracturing company in the Pennsylvania town of Meadville. He says thousands of frack jobs have been done in rock formations above and below the Marcellus Shale in New York state with no aquifer damage. "This 60-year-old technique has been responsible for 7 billion barrels of oil and 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas," according to Sen. James Inhofe, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. "In hydraulic fracturing's 60-year history, there has not been a single documented case of contamination." Whether some are trying to hide the decline in global temperatures or the abundance of clean-burning domestic natural gas, it's a scandal. If we're serious about both carbon emissions and energy independence, let's stop this nonsense and get the fracking gas. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #6 I think contamination, according to the environazis, means making a profit, living in a house rather than a cave, having in door plumbing and driving a car...how do they reconcile the supposed environmental damage that bovine and equine flatulence has on the ozone layer with their implied advocacy of "natural" means of transportation...won't that make the animal rights groups angry? Okay let's be vegans...but eating lentils and beans will make you very...uh...gassy...so what does humanoid flatulence do to the ozone layer. See its a never ending shell game. Solve one environmental complaint and another group spins it in another direction...conflicting goals, standards and vision. Let's see, we can't use fossil fuels, but nuclear is off the table, we can't drive cars but we can't ride horseback since we are either exploiting Mr. Ed or he's damaging the ozone layer. If we eat meat we are barbarians, if we are vegans we die of protein depletion and malnutrition...and we damage the ozone layer. So we live in caves, since we can't cut down trees to build homes..makes the tree people angry...and since we live in caves, we can't go to Los Angeles or even to Pomona to work so we disintegrate into a bunch of cave dwelling hunter gatherers again...wait did you say "hunters"? These clowns are communists, damage the system, destroy the system...start a big brother approach to government and then screw the environmentalists as "useful idiots". I just love the left, they are so self righteous and so self satisfying. They ask us to make sacrifices to save the environment...so they can go to conferences and make a small group of their financiers rich. We wind up living in hovels and they go to Copenhagen and eat caviar...don't tell PETA where caviar comes from |
| Posted by: Karl Rove 2009-12-24 16:14 |
| #5 than your neighborhood mechanic Not only is our profit margin usually lower, our pollutants released per gallon of petroleum handled are far lower than either your mechanic or YOU. And of course the famed La Brea tar pits are nothing but a natural oil spill that trapped and killed thousands of defenseless (stupid) critters. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-12-24 16:08 |
| #4 Soros is a modern socialist. He uses the power of the state to make him richer and others poorer. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2009-12-24 15:24 |
| #3 Soros is looking after self-interests (another way of saying bottom-feeder"). He had never had the best interests of the U.S. at heart. As an aside what does "contamination" mean in this article? What are the implications? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2009-12-24 14:45 |
| #2 That's crap. The oil industry has been more forthcoming with information than either the EPA or the climate goons. The goons essentially shut down a major oil field off Santa Barbara claiming oil spills, pointing at the blobs of tar washing up on Santa Barbara beaches...it worked. The stinker is that the local Native American tribes used tar to caulk their canoes HUNDREDS of years before drilling began, the tar is reduced oil that has seeped out of the fractured strata underwater (the oil is very very shallow and the rock is busted up because of EARTHQUAKES). We have methane leaking out of the ground in West LA and sidewalks catch on fire. It is interesting that Yahoo reprinted an article about the ten cities with the best drinking water and four of them are in Texas and two of them are in areas with lots of drilling. They've been using Fracking, steam and high pressure water to wring oil out of the local chalk and limestone strata in west and central Texas for over sixty years...how can you have clean drinking water if this technique is a pollutant. Some people just want to obstruct and bash. The Oil companies spend more money on exploration and technology as a percentage of their gross revenue than any industry out there...and their profits, in the eight percent range, are lower than you neighborhood mechanic. |
| Posted by: Karl Rove 2009-12-24 12:43 |
| #1 has not been a single documented case of contamination." I don't believe that statement. If it is actually true, then the truth lies in the 'documented' modifier - perhaps cases have been settled without admission of guilt somehow. I do know we work very hard to avoid contamination, whether due to fracking or other processes, and I do know that contamination does sometimes happen anyway. Still, it's rare, and (especially with gas) not all that big a disaster. (We had an underground blowout offshore of Mobile some years ago and charged a shallow sand (possibly connected with an aquifer) with a lot of natural gas; we then drilled a bunch of wells into that shallow sand and produced the gas before it could get to any water wells.) |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-12-24 11:39 |