Ohio gas well blowout leaked more than many countries do in a year
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
There were exactly zero write-ups of this in the local papers.
The Radio stations in the area are generally owned by one entity (AVC Communications), and there really isn't a lot on their website about it: not really surprising, because 25+ years ago they went Satellite Only and only someone in the news room from 6A-4P.
My biggest complaints about the Oil and Gas industry taking the SE Ohio area and turning it into a cash cow are two-fold: 1.) We're basically treating nature like a resource and stripping it all back to nothing (like AEP did in the 60's and 70's), and 2.) this has basically zero benefit to the locals: most of the jobs in the Oil and Gas industry are specialized and workers imported (leading to stories of welders making $140/hour in Ohio: just simply not true).
I could go on and on about growing up in the second poorest county in Ohio, but, I'll just leave it at this: not surprised that it happened but very surprised that nobody has really reported on this until now.
You can't, because it's purposely framed that way. You think the ones starting that think they're actually bringing jobs back? Hell no, they just say it b/c I'm sure they're getting benefits and contributions from the oil/gas companies, and unfortunately much of the less educated people in these areas aren't the wiser.
I'm sure this is another reason for systemic neglect of the education system. Less educated people are easier to control and brainwash.
Ie, verified number of jobs delivered to said community etc.
It would be also nice to have donations clearly labelled against a politicians profile.
The major issue for me is there is a major lack of transparency and accountability in politics right now, globally.
Honestly, I feel like the old four year term system is just way too out of date with the current crisis we need to solve.
Go back further.
This [0] is a picture of what used to be a stream in Southeast Ohio. Coal mines shuttered 100 years ago are still leaking acid drainage into it.
Southeast Ohio is rife with acid mine drainage like this from coal mines active in the late 1800's and early 1900's. These negative externalities weren't priced in any more than those of AEP in the 60's and 70's or the natural gas industry today.
A few miles across the border it’s been all over the Pittsburgh news —- the mayor here has even been tweeting about it!
> Or, for another kind of context, the researchers point out that this Ohio well released more methane in 20 days than the oil and gas activities in most nations around Europe do in an entire year—save only the UK, Germany, and Italy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
Most European countries other than Norway have orders of magnitude smaller petroleum industries than the US, and many have near zero production. While leaking oil and gas is bad, this kind of journalistic sleight of hand is neither necessary nor productive.
To better put this leak in perspective, the US alone apparently leaks 13 million tons of natural gas yearly [1], and 440 million tons are annually leaked world wide from both human and natural sources [2]. So this leak accounted for 0.5% of nation-wide gas leaking in a given year and 0.014% of global methane emissions in a given year.
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oil-and-gas-facil...
2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-siberia-c...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populat...
Isn't your comment an equal slight of hand? The article isn't about total leaks in the US compared to other countries. This is about one specific gas leak in Ohio, which they compare to other countries.
> Isn't your comment an equal slight of hand? The article isn't about total leaks in the US compared to other countries. This is about one specific gas leak in Ohio, which they compare to other countries
The comparison to other countries, many of which have little to no petroleum industry, is the sleight of hand I'm addressing.
Putting this leak in respect to the total amount of natural gas leakage in the country and the world is a straightforward was of representing the contribution of this leak to total natural gas leakage.
My point is that failing to mention that they are comparing 20 days of leakage to an entire year, is also a slight of hand.
20 days is about 5% of a year, so the comparison still works for any country producing even 5% of the amount of oil & gas as Ohio. Ohio drills about 88k barrels/day [1]. 5% of that is 4.4k.
European countries that produce more than 4.4k barrels/day, according to your Wikipedia link, are: Croatia, Hungary, France, Netherlands, Ukraine, Romania, Denmark, Poland, Serbia, Austria, Albania and Belarus (along with Norway, UK, Germany and Italy already mentioned).
[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
Let me make my point even clearer: go pour a glass of gasoline out in your yard (hypothetically, don't actually do this). You have now polluted more than over a hundred countries' oil production industries. Because out of the ~200 countries on Earth, only 96 have oil industries. I could turn around and write, "one man contributed more oil spills than the oil industries of hundreds of countries!" and in a purely factual sense this is correct. But anyone who bothers to scrutinize this statement will see that it is very misleading.
Looked it up to confirm about how waste from Pennsylvania gets dumped in Ohio:
https://environmentohiocenter.org/programs/ohc/ohio-fracking...
Even caused a earthquake in Youngstown, which isn't where you'd typically expect earthquakes. https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2018/10/12/fracking...
Then it gets into the water supply too. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/ohio-communities-are-becoming-d...
Remember seeing a video once where someone could light the water coming out of their kitchen sink facet on fire. https://youtu.be/4LBjSXWQRV8
I don't know why state leadership allow this stuff to happen. Then you have the brain drain problem, Ohio is losing highly educated residents to other states with more opportunities, especially when it comes to tech. I feel like Ohio is moving backwards and not innovating. Maybe in Columbus or Cincinnati, things are better but still probably dwarfs in comparison to opportunities in Silicon Valley or Austin.
Ohio is an incredibly "business friendly" state, Common Sense Initiatives are the euphemism now. There's almost no taxes on businesses, property tax abatement are handed out to developers like candy, yet the state still wants to fund massive highway projects and employ lots of government workers. Only so much of these costs can be pushed onto the workers, so they have to look for money in other places. Hence, turning the state a for profit garbage dump.
Note that this happens more often completely naturally than as a result of any drilling operations. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep for more info.
Oil and gas in economically useful amounts is generally deeper underground below https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprock that prevents it from flowing upward. If that caprock was not there, then the oil would not have accumulated in that location in the first place. Oil wells generally have multiple layers of steel casing and cement between the wellbore and the shallow water table at the time. This is necessary to protect the integrity of the wellbore throughout the drilling process and to ensure that any produced oil goes to the surface collector, where it can be used, instead of leaking all over the place. It is also mandated by regulations in most jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, the same natural processes that cause oil and gas to be produced and migrate upwards happen in many locations. In some, there is caprock deep underground that causes them to accumulate in volumes that make sense to drill wells into. In other locations, they may naturally flow all the way to the surface, or flow into shallower underground water tables and end up in residential water supplies.
If I were to bet, it is unrelated. Methane and natural gas are not the waste products you would be pumping into an old well.
Edit: sure enough, in 2017 the percentage of out-of-state waste has increased to 21.5% [2].
[1] https://epa.ohio.gov/portals/47/facts/2005_out_of_state_wast... (PDF)
[2] https://epa.ohio.gov/portals/34/document/guidance/gd_1008.pd... (PDF)
The only thing that will save us is decisive and collective action. Think about that when you think about your vote in the next election in your area.
I particularly like the suggestion in one of the comments on the original article:
>I wonder if it would have taken 20 days to stop if they were being fined by the pound.
> Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.
it's easier to have this kind of thing voted in a "climate-change-aware" nation, which is easier to have if all your local government are climate-change-ware, which is easier to have if all your neighborhood are climate-change-aware, which is easier if all the familly in it are climate-change-aware which is easier if you are climate change aware.
and once your country, regardless of how small it is, is climate change aware, it's easier to make bigger, more polluting country, to change, as they can't hide anymore behind a "your first"
but yes I agree with you that you can't stop at your individual level, but it has to start there
That's the point: understanding that individual virtue does absolutely, totally, precisely nothing. Only collective actions count. At all.
Understanding orders of magnitude is not something that comes easily to humans but it must be understood to work on large problems.
Collective actions start out as individual actions and like that they set the stage for change that is real and measurable.
By your reading Rosa Parks should have just shut up and sat in the back of the bus because 'individual virtue does absolutely, totally, precisely nothing'.
Understanding orders of magnitude is indeed not something that comes easily to humans but it must be understood to work on large problems, right alongside understanding how social change is engendered.
If you take one less flight this year, you've considerably lowered your carbon footprint. Congrats. If every single person that flies reduced their carbon footprint by one flight this year like you did... it would make absolutely no meaningful difference with respect to climate change. You might as well whistle in the wind. On the other hand, if all of those people had actually taken political action, meaningful change would be practically inevitable.
The narrative that encourages recycling, buying green brands, and generally expressing how much you care about the earth by how you choose to shop (making your environmentalism part of your identity as a consumer rather than as a citizen) serves only the status quo, and dissipates energy that might otherwise be channelled into making an actual difference.
One is forced to wonder why people who think this way bother to get out of bed in the morning. On a global scale you are insignificant approaching nonexistent, so by your own reasoning nothing you do matters and therefor you shouldn't bother doing anything.
Because they get hungry. You are animal, you don't need a noble cause to do things.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallekhana
[1] https://compassionandchoices.org/end-of-life-planning/learn/...
As I said: Not for very long. Besides, I wouldn't call that reason (except for people who do that to die, it's pretty efficient for that purpose).
In fact, even literally throwing up your hands is a waste of energy.
Quite a few philosophers of politics and radicals would agree with that statement; from SEP[0]:
>There is some debate among economists and political scientists over the precise way to calculate the probability that a vote will be decisive. Nevertheless, they generally agree that the probability that the modal individual voter in a typical election will break a tie is small, so small that the expected benefit (i.e., p[V(D)−V(R)]) of the modal vote for a good candidate is worth far less than a millionth of a penny (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993: 56–7, 119). The most optimistic estimate in the literature claims that in a presidential election, an American voter could have as high as a 1 in 10 million chance of breaking a tie, but only if that voter lives in one of three or four “swing states,” and only if she votes for a major-party candidate (Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan 2007).
Chances are, you can use the time to do other things, things that gain you more benefit than "a millionth of a penny" (if we must use the economism of time = money).
It's important to do both, but saving the planet will only be accomplished through collective action.
I'd agree if you said enforced collective action. We cannot rely on companies to self-regulate. There needs to be severe consequences for companies that damage the environment like this. As long as profits far exceed penalties, companies will continue to take the easy path.
Any collective, corrective action must include corporate action, or it is futile.
In the US it got blown into something completely different, about sticking it to the libs or whatnot. So we went ahead and did it because our president has the personality of a toddler.
The oil company could use Star Trek teleportation technology and people would still protest it. They don't oppose the pipeline, they oppose what runs through it. Yet, they didn't all get to those protests in electric cars on on bicycles. They didn't tweet about it on stone tablets -- they use the very product they don't want people to use.
Don't like oil? Stop benefiting from it while simultaneously hating it.
You don't have a particularly compelling argument, as illustrated in this humorous cartoon: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha
As someone who doesn't drive and has opposed oil and natural gas based energy solutions thank you, I will.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130513055956/http://www.iisd.o...
Which in turn references this:
https://www.nirs.org/wp-content/uploads/neconomics/weltstatu...
Which basically says they have crappy data but then proceeds to lump in a lot of historical costs, like the sum of all taxpayer-funded fission R&D, including things like weapons and nuclear submarines that have little to do with civilian power generation, "liability caps" even though there hasn't actually been a reactor incident in the US that reached the liability cap (and fossil fuels and everything else also has de facto liability caps because of corporate limited liability), and "stranded cost" rules in deregulated energy markets that also apply to fossil fuel generating plants but aren't included there because the numbers are coming from completely different sources. Moreover, even some of the legitimate costs (like the R&D actually used for civilian power generation) are fixed costs that stay the same, and thus decline per kWh, if you build more plants. And that's what I could find in a few minutes of glancing at it.
This is par for the course in these comparisons. People want nuclear to look bad, so they lump in every cost they can find to the calculation, even ones that don't even apply, without doing the same for competing generation methods.
And this is before we even count the massive subsidy fossil fuels get from carbon not being priced.
de: https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...
fr:https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...
The prices you are quoting have sunk costs into them and don't represent total system costs of the initial build for example. As French nuclear plants from earlier investments reach end of life, France itself is estimating the need to introduce a higher portion of renewable and expects to save time and money from it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po...
"France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace all its aging atomic facilities."
Name one nuclear power station that has ever been successfully completely replaced by renewables.
[1] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/09/23/energy-subsidies-re...
I'm not convinced by a graph like you presented though. That's a measurement of subsidies which were spent, not subsidies which were available. In other words, if more nuclear power plants were built we'd be seeing a much higher amount being spent on subsidizing nuclear power. Since no one is building nuclear (thus taking advantage of available subsidies) and we are dropping wind turbines all over the place, it's only natural that renewable subsidies would far exceed nuclear.
Then you'd get more nuclear for baseload and in areas with less sunlight or cold winters, more solar for loads that align with its generation curve (like air conditioning) or are easy to time shift into sunlight hours (like charging electric cars) etc.
And the fossil fuel energy companies would lobby the national power utility to carry on burning fossil fuels, which they could do more easily than lobbying against a carbon tax because then there would be fewer private companies wanting to sell fossil fuel alternatives lobbying on the other side of the issue.
It can work at the local level because the local government is much more accountable to the local people, because the people getting screwed over by specific bad decisions are a larger percentage of the voters there.
A national power utility could do things like declare that all new power will be generated from solar because it's popular in and works for enough swing states and big states like Florida and California that people getting screwed in Minnesota or Alaska can't do anything about it. And then a different flavor of nonsense when the other party gets in and it's Pennsylvania and Texas wanting them to stop phasing out coal or stop building electric car charging infrastructure.
This is also one of the reasons why the healthcare systems in Europe are more efficient than the US -- their programs are not operated at the level of the EU and none of their member states are anywhere near as large as the entire US. And even their efficiency can be best classified as only tolerable rather than the hot garbage created by federal rules in the US.
But a power grid doesn't really work at a local level because it's an interstate grid, so it inherently implies a scale of bureaucracy that has historically led to high levels of government inefficiency.