do a satellite map search for dewitt county texas. see all those frac sites? see the waste pools sitting next to them? this is the legacy of modern drilling. not much different from the oil well farms of old tech.
also look up the earthquakes in oklahoma.
I bought three acres in Southern IL for $12k, and got a small house built for $90k for my mom to live in. I did this in 2009, and it has worked out well. In my situation it gives me a break from Chicago, and my mom has a good place to live. Next door is a church and cemetery, and the lot next door (3 acres) is up for sale. Iāll probably pick it up. Just so we donāt get the guy with the trailer who collects old cars moving in. It is also a place for me to downsize for my wife and I to retire.
We donāt have the mineral rights, and there are some oil pumps/roads near by is the downside.
Drilling is governed by state law. I do not live in TX. But where I live a huge percentage of the land is underlain by shale and has been drilled. There are no waste pools, which are illegal here. There are scant few wellsites because, with modern drilling, laterals can be more than two miles long. Even in the āold daysā here, there was only one wellsite per square mile of land. That was seven or eight years ago and was not, quite frankly, a problem. Regardless, today there are even fewer wellsites per square mile. Produced water (frac water) is required here to be purified and then re-cycled. Drilling safeguards are extremely rigorous, and are codified into law. As for minor earthquakes, those are attributable to injection wells. We have none of those here, no injection wells and zero earthquakes.
Texas was on the ābleeding edgeā of the fracking revolution in America. What happened in Texas early on is not representative of what is happening today . . not even in Texas and certainly not in states with strict laws regarding drilling and fracking.
If NY ever does allow fracking Iām certain safety and environmental protection measures will be world class. And that is how it should be IMO. But a ban on fracking? No, that is not how things should be.
Texas and Louisiana have strict rules regarding wastewater management and disposal. The law enforcement arm in Texas that deals with drillers is the Texas Railroad Commission (Rangers!) and the penalties for violators is said to be most severe.
The wild areas of North Dakota and Pennsylvania, however, are prime examples of environmental abuse. Thereās one story I recall where some frack-water disposal guys decided to open their truck spigot next to some farmland, while eating lunch, thereby sterilizing some dozen acres. It takes big screwups like that to get caught.
Thereās no reason to expect New York to be any different.
What people donāt realize is the fracking revolution is but a replacement for the declining Prudhoe oil which we managed to burn up in just a few decades. Once the Eagle Ford, Bakken, Marcellus, etc., have all been exhumed, weāll be entirely dependent on imports. (Today we import 9 million bopd, burn 8, and export 1 - makes us the net-exporter).
One chart I saw had priced all the wells in an area of Texas with the approximate cost per gallon of fuel based on cost of production; so one station had 1.19, the other had 4.66, and yet others had even upwards of 20 dollars per āgallon of gasā and showed how, over time, the spreadās minimum had moved towards the spreadās maximum - a steady shift in cost of production that easily outstrips what Americans are willing to pay.
The future is tied not to oil, but to abundant, low polluting, natural gas (NG). The estimate is that we have enough NG to last the next 200 years in the Marcellus and Utica fields alone. But there are other fields in other places as well.
In the USA in recent years, almost all the progress we have made with pollution reduction has come because of a shift from coal-fired energy sources to modern, NG-fired, sources. And this progress has come, as well, while actually saving consumers money!!
Natural gas will be the most important American energy fuel well beyond the end of this century.
Iām in the industry. NG may not be the long term answer, not because itās not plentiful but because it may not be whole lot better than coal in term of warming potential.
The future trend is more energy storage technology.
NG for 200 more years is a fantasy - if anything, NG will help slow down the die-out thatās bound to come. Take the lesson of the Black Rat in the Northern Indian bamboo forests - weāre in for the same shock of overshoot.
The story of the Black Rat is interesting in that the consequences of bamboo blooms in that area which occur once every 65 to 120 years, with respect to the Black Rat, was not known until the most recent massive bloom.
What we know now, but didnāt before, is that with each blooming of the bamboo and seed droppings, the rat population explodes as the bamboo seeds are eaten, nourishing hordes of offspring. Once the seeds run out the rats have nowhere to go, except into the farmed lands nearby. Why this was recently discovered is because someone wanted to solve a mystery of something that happened just beyond the periphery of memory, and questions had been raised as to what had happened to an entire generation of people that lived in those hills. The horrible truth, it turns out, is the rats had eaten all the food, and the subsistence farmers and their families had perished to starvation.
This experience is likely similar to what will happen as the oil supplies dwindle and NG doesnāt come to the rescue - the black gold that sustains our way of life is like the bamboo seed, weāll soon enough find out who the rats turn out to be.
Good lord, not that die off BS. Do some basic energy balance first for rats sake.
Warming potential? Do you mean non-existent AGW? And you say you are in the industry? And you believe in that foolishness? Here is a hint for you:
Carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant.
Uh, I do not think so. We have so much NG in America it currently is being exported. Other nations have not even BEGUN to explore their shale beds. A 200 year supply is an entirely conservative estimate. It likely is MUCH longer than that!! In addition:
Drilling technology and engineering is improving at a breakneck pace. Itās not just horizontal drilling alone. Far from it. Just in the last ten years that technology has progressed markedly. And improvements to discovery and development technology are being racked up nearly on a daily basis. Wells drilled and fracked years ago, and tapped out with the old technology, are being re-worked with new technology bringing forth even greater amounts of NG.
Never underestimate the ability of American ingenuity to drive progress. This thing is only just getting off the ground!!!
Are you seriously trolling us?
Iām having a Poe moment
Iām having a āMerry Christmasā moment. AGW is total BS. No troll. Just fact.
How did this thread digress so much?
Suffice to say there are ridiculous sources of energy available for >10 lifetimes. Conservatively speaking, CO2 producing or not.