Stanford researchers show fracking's impact to drinking water sources
news.stanford.edu
news.stanford.edu
It seems to me that the whole thing is a mess that doesn't work very well.
Here is my alternate proposal. Corporations who engage in risky long-term behavior should have to purchase long-term insurance to cover liability for what they are doing. These insurance contracts would be on terms set by insurers.
Behind the scenes insurers could cover these contracts by putting money into index funds. The fund would cover liability, the cost ensuring compliance with insurance terms, and after the period was up, would pay off investors.
These funds would therefore trade at a discount to regular index funds that represents market estimates of the present value of future liability. Therefore the insurance costs to companies would be a free market estimate of the cost to others of what you are doing.
And voila! Very little regulation. No regulatory capture. And people will get compensation. (And LLCs can remain limited liability.)
No. The whole point is that these "risky behaviors" are quite capable of inflicting damages (such as the permanent contamination of water tables in certain areas) that can't possibly be compensated by the any conceivable "insurance payout". Such behaviors (once identified) should be strictly prohibited. Economic penalties against the corporate entities (aka "regulation") will of course never be sufficient. The only effective deterrent is jail time for for the decision makers (in addition to complete confiscation of their personal assets).
And BTW by "jail time" I mean serious jail time, as in multiple decades of jail time, and/or life sentences if necessary.
Flipping back in the chronology of your post a bit:
We lurch between economically damaging regulations after something really bad happens, to regulatory capture after industry lobbying gets the attention of politicians.
I agree with you wholeheartedly about the need to stop lurching. That's why we need to get serious about criminal penalties for this kind of behavior -- not to throw in the towel and entrust the safety of our irreplaceable freshwater resources wondrous self-regulating powers of the insurance industry.
The environment is not a casino, in other words. This is the health of uncounted generations we're talking about -- which will come into being long after any of these massive insurance payouts your proposal would seem to bank on could have possibly had any ameliorative effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_groundwater_contaminat...
http://www.damninteresting.com/undark-and-the-radium-girls/
http://www.southernstudies.org/2011/10/koch-industries-plant...
http://www.democracynow.org/2004/12/6/yes_men_hoax_on_bbc_re...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
and plenty more
The moral of the story is libertarian idealism (sans facism/authoritarianism) is simply the mirror opposite utopian extremism of communism... ever-refined balance is needed, which tends towards democratically-elected, semi-socialism: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." - James Madison
We just had a nuke plant melt down? That's going to just cost a lot of money! We want to provide universal top quality free on-demand healthcare for everyone? Just quadruple spending and change absolutely nothing else! We want to colonize mars in 10 years. That will just be a few trillion. No problem! Nine women working together to have a baby in 1 month? Just a few billion in government R&D bucks and we'll have it solved in a jiffy!
In general terms, effectiveness and affordability of budget outlay should be the primary concerns. Instead, budget is typically orthogonal to effectiveness of quality of problem characterization, planning, procurement, execution and follow-up. Oddly, better results can sometimes be paradoxically realized by reducing budgets where there are capital-inefficient organizations by teaching resourcefulness... many bad habits emerge when people have too much cash available to spend frivolously. There are many instances where greater outlays are cheaper TCO-wise in the long run, so the "penny wise, pound wise" mantra tends to be a good guideline.
Also, in the US, defense spending, education and social security are sacred cows for various reasons.
Question military-industrial complex spending and be prepared for accusations of unpatriotism and treason for "not supporting the troops." These are completely specious but used to guard the hen-house. Robert Gates was the most recent, effective reformer of DoD, but the honeymoon didn't last long.
Education is seen as important human right however NCBLA has foisted short-term pseudo-results upon teachers. So the problem is still seen as not enough money, usually because administration bureaucracy typically consumes a disproportionate fraction of total budget (or in extreme cases, embezzles cash outright).
Social security is a tough one because many people have no direct retirement savings, and no one humane wants to go the way of Korea, where the elderly are de-facto shunned and have nothing.
I don't have an answer here - it's the stuff of Adam Curtis films. He's hardly perfect, but has an interesting way of constructing frameworks to look at these things.
The oil industry isn't even a close second to agriculture in terms of risk to freshwater resources in the American West ( where the story takes place ). After a while as you read about our West, you realize that people may actually not be all that much supposed to live there at all, at least in parts of it. Trying to elevate freshwater to "irreplaceable" ignores almost all the behavior that actually surrounds it.
No, really - there's a book - "Cadillac Desert" which provides much context for this.
The fact that regulation seems always end in capture tells me something. For one, it's very hard to do. Think about how hard it is to assemble 100 people who truly understand something that is very complicated deeply. Something that takes dedicating your life to. Now think about how you'd assemble say, 200 of them. It's be some exponent or power harder, wouldn't it?
Criminal penalties may sound like a good idea ( to some; not to me ) but I don't really have a way to take such statements at face value. I'm not prepared to take what is generally considered legitimate activity and round up certain classes of mistakes to "go to jail."
Investing groundwater with "rights" and the ability to suffer "criminal torts" ( regardless of the horrors that may be inflicted on it ) seems a bridge too far. Even if we sum the rights of all the people who depend on it, it's difficult. After all, people have had to leave places before.
There could ( and perhaps should ) be some authority that must approve such activity in certain places. In the example, there should be no messing with formations that are that shallow. But that approval process sounds easier than perhaps it is.
Those are the extreme exception, not the rule. That might be true of nuclear operations, but everything else can be fixed at some cost, with maybe ~$1 trillion for tail end risks, easily coverable by reinsurance networks.
Environmental damage is bad, but it's not infinitely bad. If the costs were anything like you suggest, that would justify vigorous bans of most industrial operations, not some mere regulatory enforcement as could be accomplished even with jail time.
Right, it's not the average case we're discussing here. But I think we can both agree that wrecking a water table in a geographic area of significant size (for example) would qualify as "extreme."
Everything else can be fixed at some cost, with maybe ~$1 trillion for tail end risks, easily coverable by reinsurance networks.
No - plenty of things in life cannot be fixed at any price.
Environmental damage is bad, but it's not infinitely bad.
Between "bad" and "infinitely bad" (the latter being obviously a red herring) there's another category which would seem to apply for the scale of mishap here: "unacceptably bad."
If the costs were anything like you suggest, that would justify vigorous bans of most industrial operations, not some mere regulatory enforcement as could be accomplished even with jail time.
Again, you're arguing by referring to extremes: "Yeah, drunk driving carries risks, but so does sober driving. If we really want to eliminate risk of death and dismemberment in horrifying accidents, then, we should ban all forms of driving."
No -- I'm just saying we should ban drunk driving. Which -- the more we get into the basic research behind these activities -- (certain classes of) fracking and other forms of large-scale resource extraction are increasingly looking to be aptly analogous to.
No, we can't. In the context of the specific point you were making, extreme means "no feasible amount of money could undo the damage". That's not true of damage to a water table, which can be remediated with a feasible amount of money.
>... I'm just saying we should ban drunk driving.
No, the point here is that, if drunk driving's effects were as uncountably bad as you claim the potential environmental damage is, we should ban driving, because the effect would wipe out all the benefit of driving, since the insurance cost would make it infeasible. But that's absurd, so we must conclude that your estimates of the harm size are as well.
Remember, you're the one arguing that the extreme cases dominate the risk calculation (to the point of uninsurability), not me!
Well, we disagree then.
As to the other stuff -- it seems you're doubling down on extremification techniques, attributing words ("uncountably bad") to me that aren't mine. All I can say is I don't find that line of reasoning helpful, and I don't know what to say to it.
My point is that this claim cuts both ways -- in order for the environmental damage of industrial disasters to be that bad (above the ~$1 trillion that a reinsurance network could cover), it would also have to be so bad as to justify banning most classes of industrial activity -- not allowing them even with regulation. Since you probably don't believe that, then you're probably overstating the mangitude of this tail risk, and dismissing its applicability to your own alternative.
(Remember, regulation doesn't turn off the extreme events; it's just one way to reduce their likelihood.)
Which technique do you think that argument is unhelpfully using?
"typically (at their worst)"?
I'm not even sure what you mean by that. (I have some guesses at what you might be getting at, but they also point to things I didn't say, either).
In order for the environmental damage of industrial disasters to be that bad (above the ~$1 trillion that a reinsurance network could cover), it would also have to be so bad as to justify banning most classes of industrial activity.
(1) I don't agree (nor do I think most people would agree) that all environmental or human disasters have measurable impact (let alone have a dollar value -- even a very high one -- which would suffice to repair or compensate for the loss the incur).
(2) The second half of your statement does not follow from the first.
Which technique do you think that argument is unhelpfully using?
>I'm not even sure what you mean by that.
Then review the original usage, which should have made it clear -- I was distinguishing operations where (I claim) the worst case is insurable from the cases where it isn't. I remarked that the worst case is rarely uninsurable, and gave the example of nuclear operations (which means nuclear power and nuclear weapons).
So, typically (across the set of environment-risking things), the worst case (within one of those things) is not beyond the reach of insurance.
Sorry if that whole "typical extreme" thing threw you for a loop, but I thought it was clear from context. Let me know if you know of a better way to communicate this concept. You seem to be deeply familiar with these kinds of considerations, so I bet you have one.
>(1) I don't agree (nor do I think most people would agree) that all environmental or human disasters have measurable impact (let alone have a dollar value -- even a very high one -- which would suffice to repair or compensate for the loss the incur).
Well, then you've inserted infinities in your model, which fundamentally breaks things and renders further debate pointless. The moment you say "this outcome is so bad that it dominates all other outcomes", then even small probabilities of it are unacceptable -- the Pascal's Wager dynamic. But that equally cuts against regulatory approaches, and it's not a reason to favor top-down regulation vs the insurance system advocated in the thread.
Generally speaking, the moment you refuse to quantify the damage, it's no longer in the reach of reasonable debate. "This thing is infinitely valuable" makes for nice platitudes, but not sound policy.
>Reductio ad absurdum
It's valid to point out how someone's claim implies an absurdity they disagree with :-p Certainly, you can dispute that the implication follows, but I'm not sure where you're coming from with a categorical dismissal.
Right -- I think I've been making it pretty clear, though, that I was referring to high-risk industrial activities, not to average case ones.
Generally speaking, the moment you refuse to quantify the damage, it's no longer in the reach of reasonable debate. "This thing is infinitely valuable" makes for nice platitudes, but not sound policy.
I disagree; I find that qualitative reasoning can often be quite useful. Especially to avoid the pitfalls of purely quantitative reasons, which can often lead one to either-or arguments (such as you are invoking above), reduction to extremes, or other cul-de-sacs of the mind.
In particular, you'll note that I've never used the phrase "infinitely valuable" (or "infinitely bad"), and have in fact specifically eschewed it, despite your repeated attempt to assist the contrary.
All I'm referring to, basically, is the fact that some forms of damage are basically irreparable -- which is quite different from saying "the thing is infinitely valuable" (or that wrecking it is "infinitely bad"). In other words, it's a distinction of kind, rather than simply degree. And all I'm saying, policy-wise, is that industrial activities which carry a high enough risk of large-scale, irreparable environmental damage are of a different kind, such that it is no longer reasonable to believe that insurance requirements (or any threat of civil penalties against the corporate entities engaging in them) will provide adequate protection; instead they should banned outright.
Like, you know -- drunk driving.
I don't see this as an unreasonable position, not does is it (as you would seem to suggest) undermine our axiom systems to such a degree that everything becomes unknowable and all debate becomes pointless. Rather, it's just common sense, qualitative reasoning -- that's all.
Otherwise, it'd be like telling drunk drivers "Hey it's your call, bro! You just need to wear a seatbelt and carry lots of insurance, 'k?"
Or am I missing something?
The fact is environmental impact should be taken into account properly at the licensing stage. That's where the accountability falls.
No, I'm saying that high-risk industrial activities shouldn't merely be "regulated"; they should be banned out right.
It's when you violate the ban that you get handed a jail sentence.
Have severe jail sentences rid the world of illicit drugs users, murderers, cutpurses, burglars, vandals, fraudsters, rapists or anything else?
If the chance of being caught and going to jail is lower than the expected gains of not getting caught, criminals gonna criminal. How do you aim to stop that with a threat? Throwing someone in jail is "too little, too late".
No, but you have to put things into context. Prison is a lot worse for a 50+ year old with a few million in assets than someone who's only other alternative is working at a fast food restaurant for minimum wage. When the choice is deal drugs or simply not make enough to survive there really isn't much of a choice.
One, you say 'risky long-term behavior'... so how do we define something as being risky? If I am a corporation who wants to take risky long term behavior, why wouldn't I just hide the risk? If the bad thing happens, oh well, they have limited liability... if the bad thing doesn't happen, sweet we got to take the risk and not pay for insurance!
If we say every corporation needs insurance, and that insurance company is supposed to take unlimited liability for the corporation that they are insuring, then this insurance is going to be CRAZY expensive. The insurers are running huge risks, since the possible liability is infinite. If we say the the liability is capped at some number, then we are back to the same issue where the company taking the risky behavior is not liable for the full damage.
Obviously in practice there needs to be a cap. But the cap should be set high enough to cover the upper limit of the claims that reasonably could happen. Which means that the cap needs to be astronomically high.
For example if you're potentially affecting the health of a town, you should be able to compensate them for their actual losses. Including the cost of supporting sick people on disability for the rest of their lives. Like it or not that is the actual potential liability of your action. You shouldn't have to pay anything like that up front. But if 1% of fracking wells leak, and 1% of those leaks get into a town's water supply, then yes, you may have to be ready to compensate dozens of people for the cost of medical care and years of disability.
A balance has to be achieved that allows productive activity to make our lives better, while providing incentives to make the side effects of that activity not harm us.
Would you mind expanding on how the first part of that sentence relates to the second part?
Are you proposing the argument "We can't have cars because they might kill people" is valid? I don't think so.
Whereas "We can't have fracking because it poisons the ground water" seems reasonable. Benzene is a known human carcinogen[1][2]
You write of a balance and propose that a way to achieve balance is to financially compensate, via an insurance, people, but how do you limit the liability of the insurance? Can people four generations hence make a claim too?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_1_carcinoge...
2. http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/g...
How many people die in auto accidents as compared to Benzene originated cancers? Cars kill humans on a vast scale. They even sometimes kill people who want nothing to do with cars, like pedestrians, or cyclists. If your success metric is "lives saved", then pulling cars off the road is the sure winner, no?
I'm not saying deliberately leaking Benzene into the water system and vehicular accidents are the same. I'm saying this problem is difficult.
Fritjof Capra discusses how areas of science have transitioned from a reductionistic / mechanical approach to a more systems approach - but law has not kept up and still treats parts of the world as disconnected, an individual's right, protected by the state.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ecology-Law-Toward-Community/dp/16...
FWIW, there IS very little risk of operating a nuclear power plant. Incidents, while spectacular, are extremely rare. They say ( whoever "they" is ) that molten salt and other technologies are safer yet.
This seems ultracapitalist - someone profits from estimating risk and leaves the injured free to sue.
It depends on the risk, but for frequently-encountered circumstances, you'll have significant amounts of historical data on risks, usually expressed as financial costs, associated with various scenarios and outcomes.
Where things get tricky are where you're dealing with small n or very-large-impact, or both, events.
It's easy to get insurance for automobiles, or homeowners, or healthcare, as there are large numbers of policies and extensive history. The risks are known.
Insurance companies typically exclude coverage for acts of war. Some events such as floods or major storms (hurricanes / typhoons) or earthquakes cover large areas and may overwhelm even large insurers.
Rare instance risks -- tech, industry, spaceflight -- are also hard. But such projects do usually get underwritten.
The OP proposed regulation to force "risky" businesses to have insurance.
The question remains - who gets to decide who is risky and who isn't?
In this scheme, does every enterprise require insurance in totality, not just the risky ones?
What prevents them from starting a subsidiary insurance company, who can go bankrupt with them in the case of a catastrophe?
You regulate where and from whom they're able to purchase insurance from. Maybe they buy it from the government.
Startups engage in "risky long-term behavior" all the time. It would be prohibitively expensive for them to have to purchase insurance, especially when they're insuring against risks that aren't well-defined in the first place.
And you see nothing wrong with this???
If you want to reap potential rewards for your behavior, you also need to take responsibility for the potential costs.
You're putting a lot of words in my mouth.
> If you want to reap potential rewards for your behavior, you also need to take responsibility for the potential costs.
"Potential costs" (ie, risks) are very difficult to define in advance. You can sometimes identify them after-the-fact, but having to wait until afterwards defeats the whole point of insurance in the first place.
Financial risk is not the same as health or environmental risk.
... So it isn't the fracking per se, but toxic waste disposal and leaking in transit.
[1] http://trib.com/business/energy/fracking-absolved-of-blame-e...
Still, this is an excellent example to point out that current regulation fails.
So I just recently left a job doing downhole tool design and everything I was hearing was high temperature, high pressure, high shock & vibe. I saw plenty of well plans that were 10k feet down and then 15k feet sideways, and little else.
I'm not saying that other things can't exist, but the cookie-cutter wells that drillers were doing as of a year or two ago were largely down deep and long sideways.
I will say this: I spent years reading geological logs looking for bypass pay and I know there's plenty work being done or to be done in the depth range I mentioned. So in my mind the worry is real and people do need to get their heads wrapped around it.
There are 475 oil and gas drilling rigs running in the US today. The shallowest well is permitted to 1600 feet. The next shallowest is 2600 feet. In all, only fourteen of these actively drilling wells are permitted to depths shallower than 5000 feet.
All of this ignores the salient point I've made - That the risk is very real. If not from wells drilled today then from past or future drilling.
Note I'm not suggesting that people should freak out, but I am suggesting that industry players are spending too much time downplaying the risks and not taking a serious look.
Fracking is like setting a bomb off underground, but you can imagine there being something a city block or two of solid rock between where the bomb's going off and the water table.
Which is terrible but also easily controlled through technology and regulation.
The statements by the researchers are intended to give the impression that fracking is inherently dangerous. Their data do not back that up; rather, their data show that fracking is a process that can be very dangerous and environmentally damaging when not done properly and regulated to ensure it is done properly.
So yes, if you do fracking nicely and care about the impact then there is no problem. The reality is that no one involved in fracking cares and it's all about the bottom line so screw the environment.
But yes, it's totally safe otherwise.
I specifically said, "and regulated to enforce it".
> The reality is that no one involved in fracking cares and it's all about the bottom line so screw the environment.
That is not the reality, and I challenge you to demonstrate that.
I was told that fluoride is a by product of aluminum production, and it is extraordinarily toxic/acidic...
They can't dispose of it... So they found that small quantities in water wasn't toxic, per se, but helped with "tooth health" - but what I was told next stayed with me to this day "what better place to store it than in your liver"...
The earth is a lot more - but it's certainly the liver of humanity.
Basically they use toxic waste to force out the profitable product.
My point was that you take toxic waste, Flouride, and distribute it amongst a massive population of deposits (people) - even if its beneficial.. and you find a way to dispose of waste.
I personally dont have an opinion on the safety of fluoride in water - I just know that in the early 80s this is what I heard hanging around the CEO of ALCOA...
Fracking fluids can basically be made from anything, so just randomly pumping random chemicals into the ground to store them there is the same as spreading the volume of aluminum production byproducts across a vast population is the same thing.
Further, with respect to fluoride - like I said, the CEO of Alcoa said this to my dad... So that comment holds some fucking merit.
The problem is a few local producers disagree on how much salt water can be reinjected. No its not going to cause a california style earth quake, the midwest doesnt have those kind of fault lines. Its likely to settle itself out over time, if regulation in this particular part of the state doesnt hit first.
But to be clear, it has nothing to do with fracking. Fracking actually stablizes rock layers (they inject porous sand into formations) rather than slickens them. Why would a producer want his formation to move and close off his production
http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features/usgs_top_story/induced-ea...
But we all know it's a dog whistle.
"As a result of the magnitude 5.6 earthquake on November 5, 2011, an estimated one million dollars in damage occurred in and around the Prague area.[51] So far, there has not been a significant amount of damage reported from other earthquakes"
Most industries cost the community 1 million $ (assuming this particular earthquake was even due to fracking)
This is why they pay tax.
You're not in a movie, fracking is not going to cause some sort of earthquake catastrophe.
Ever company that uses trucks could and does kill people.
I have in-laws that live north of Edmond OK and the almost daily tremors and quakes there have changed their lives to a certain degree...
My father-in-law goes out to check the brickwork on his house on a regular basis now, paying special attention to his chimney...things occasionally rattle off shelves and fall to the floor...
Injection well frequencies and volumes have now been reduced or entirely curtailed in certain areas of the state...
So, maybe life does indeed seem a bit surreal if you live in an affected area...
Drilling, fracking, and the use of injection wells to dispose of waste-water have apparently led to Oklahoma becoming as quake-prone as California...
The USGS quoted in a NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/us/earthquake-risk-in-okla...
Actually, its even worse than a movie: "New Concern Over Quakes in Oklahoma Near a Hub of U.S. Oil"
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/us/new-concern-over-quakes...
And meanwhile, the rest of the US is extremely car-centric, so we do our part to increase demand for oil.
It will only change when the "jobs" are cleaning up the mess, which has already started, but most roughnecks aren't qualified; cleanup requires educated city-folk from out of town, which widens the us vs. them gap even more.
I'm generalizing, but the above is often exactly the case.
[1] http://www.texastribune.org/2013/10/14/7-billion-crez-projec...
Ideally, you would be able to detect pollutants moseying off the property underground, just as you would cattle wandering off the ranch above ground, and your property system would work fine ("Bob, yer frackin' byproducts done cross over into mah property yesterday, an I cain't abide by that") , but presumably it's not easy.
Seriously though, water tables don't respect property borders, and runoff doesn't stop at fence lines. If that happened, there would be no issue.
These people aren't stupid, and the last thing they want to do is ostracize themselves from their peers by raising environmental concerns. They're forced into these positions by a lack of alternatives.
Edit: The owners of mineral rights may legally drill a well in your front yard, if they comply with current laws & ordinances.
This is the one thing I'll never understand.
We always talk about getting off of foreign oil so we don't need to invade middle eastern countries for their oil (a crazy conspiracy theory, but a belief held by many) and other things yet we. . .
1) Don't support US oil companies when OPEC floods the market, crashes the oil markets here and puts American companies out of business - keeping OEPC's grip on oil production intact.
2) Absolutely refuse to build more refineries or seek out new areas where we can drill for oil to create our own supply
3) Are totally against new technologies that make drilling for oil easier (not necessarily fracking but other technologies as well) and thus do not support an industry trying to find a better way to create a US oil supply and compete with middle eastern oil countries.
Everybody in the US complains about gas prices being so high, but literally everything we do to try and get off of foreign oil gets killed by environmentalists, lobbyists and other special interest groups because of some reason or another. It's such a contradiction, it's maddening at times.
We want one thing, but we do everything to make sure it can never happen.
Bailing out companies is generally fraught with problems and there are good reasons to avoid it. It quickly becomes very political.
> (a crazy conspiracy theory,
but it remains
> a belief held by many)
because it is more consistent than the false claim of WMD (while ignoring those in nearby Israel), or the justification after-the-fact of defending the rights of women (while ignoring nearby Saudi Arabia)
We're friends with Israel. We want them to have weapons. What does being nearby have to do with anything?
edit: If our government, in order to act, has to rely on the majority of the population both understanding every critical subject and forming a similar opinion on those subjects that is in opposition to current policy, then our government has become purely parasitic.
Honestly, it's called policing, and it doesn't just have to happen to poor people.
Granted that estimate was for tax breaks specifically, but it rather suggests big industries can't afford /not/ to lobby.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forge...
I don't think you realize how pernicious the long term consequences of USA v. RJR will turn out to be. Fracking looks like one front and CO2 another for similar with respect to oil operations.
And I don't mean there aren't oil operators that do things wrong ( Macondo much?) . But that's really not what we're talking about here, is it? Vanishingly few stories about "fracking" are not essentially terrorism stories with "terrorism" lined thru and "fracking" substituted.
The problem is that neither you nor I know as much as the "corporate funded influence" and we don't have anyone who works for us who does . The information asymmetries are profound. So the easiest thing to do is to cooperate with regulators, and have regulators cooperate with the regulated , which affords influence.
The best example of this is perhaps the IBEW.
It's as if "the system" knows that without fracking, oil sands, and enhanced oil recovery technologies, with conventional crude and gas having peaked a decade ago, we would be facing a fairly significant energy shortage today, and an even worse one a decade hence.
Everyone wants to eat the bacon but nobody wants to butcher the hog. Energy supply is THE NUMBER ONE THING that enables modern civilization to repel entropy as well as it does. We, as a species, will do whatever it takes to ensure the energy supply remains. We will accept climate change and poisoned water because the alternative, short of a miracle in solar capture, is the death of several billion people.
The Spice must flow.
/s
I wonder if Indian farmers would accept oil instead ?
The point being that fresh water is a infinitely more valuable resource than oil.
And we're squandering it to dig up stuff which we then nonchalantly burn.
I wonder what our grand children will think of these times.
Modern wells with double casings and bentonite seals are far more advanced the loose standards used through the late 70s. Is there a link anywhere to the actual research?
1. Fracking should be banned => oil supply decreases 2. Gas price should stay low => import oil from the gulf 3. We should not support Wahhabist Saudi Arabia => American energy independence! 4. Back to step 1
People want to drive their cars and don't want to pay tax for public transportation. At the same time they want to protect the environment and be called "leader of the free world". They want to tell people they vote Bernie Sanders but deep down they wish Donald Trump wins the election.
What goes into the ground? A proprietary mix of who knows what, and you can't find out because they won't tell you. It's a trade secret.
Where does that stuff go? Again, few if any simulations have been run on the long-term consequences of injecting this stuff into the ground.
It's not that fracking should be banned, it's that it should be understood.
1+1=2