Report: Fracking raising water supply worries | Hacker News Reader

Report: Fracking raising water supply worries

usatoday.com

59 pointsck232 comments

So this is what, about $10^11 of GDP out of 10^11 gallons of untreated freshwater? Am I the only one with scope sensitivity, or are people valuing natural water at +∞, or what? Because I'm not even slightly outraged.

edit: The 10^11 gallon water figure is "since 2011", so maybe 30 trillion cubic feet of shale gas since then, eyeballing this chart [0]. That would have been around $100 billion, at the (insanely depressed) price of $3/thousand ft^3 [1].

You could replace (literally) that water at a cost of <1% of the shale gas. Literal as in, that's the energy cost to desalinate ocean water in the Gulf of Mexico and ship it to the center of the continent by freight rail. Going by the least efficient numbers in [2], the desalination cost is <150 billion ft^3; and by the numbers on [3], for 400 million tons of liquid cargo, and a 1,500 mile distance [4], is about the same.

I mean this is completely insane of course, it's just for perspective.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Natural_Gas_Production...

[1] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...

[4] https://www.google.com/#q=distance+from+fargo+to+gulf+of+mex...

Sorry, we need the cheap energy, and it can't be coal. The US oil crisis is 40 years old. I think every US President since Nixon has talked about energy independence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

I guess we're getting there but I was hoping for a much better solution.

Yes, fracking sucks. But it sucks less than depending on the Middle East and Russia for our energy needs.

Does it? I don't see what sort of changes fracking has had on our foreign policy? I cannot think of a SINGLE foreign policy that has changed now that we've begun fracking.

Fracking has been going on for a looooonnng time, so the relatively recent attention and/or uptick in activity wouldn't necessarily propagate in foreign policy changes, at least in easily noticeable ways.

Another thing to consider: fracking is providing energy to meet the U.S.'s continuing growth for energy...I think foreign policy impact would most definitely happen if additional domestic energy production coincided with a national reduction in energy usage. As it is, though, fracking probably just maintains the status quo, and fracking proponents would argue that things would be much worse if we didn't have fracking at all, and energy consumption continued to grow.

I'd rather use their resources now, and save ours for later ;)

This may blow up in your face.

You'll end up paying higher prices for their stuff now due to decreased supply, have some new technology come about that makes fossil fuels worthless, then get stuck with a bunch of useless fossil fuel in the ground.

Not likely within the next few decades, but very possible over the span of hundreds of years. Remember, we've only been using fossil fuels for only about 150 years. Before that, it was considered an absolute disaster to hit oil when digging a well.

You are aware that the bulk of foreign oil in the US is actually Canadian?

If we need cheap energy they should stop burning the $1 Billion of natural gas every year in North Dakota to get to the oil SO THEY CAN EXPORT IT.

We are only using a percentage of the oil, the reason why they want to get to is because it is cheap and they can export it to where it is expensive.

Like other resource misallocations, this would be a non-issue if water were priced at market rates.

Yes, It would totally be a non issue if poor people just got outbid for the essentials of life and just died.

We're so far away from that being the problem that it's just absurd and irrational to even bring it up. The problem is a fight between industries and what we may want for the future, the problem is not people dehydrating in the street, Arrakis-style.

Who says residential uses have to follow that trend?

Residential use (outside of public works) is typically trivial, so could stay with its existing model.

Industrial use in contrast is much different so is a more interesting thing to model.

If this were truly a concern, the trivial solution is to have tiered pricing which steps up the price of water after the "essential" quantity has been dispensed. This could be implemented as a yearly rebate.

ND isn't mentioned mainly because we are having flood problems in the east and the Army Corp of Engineers are doing there usual cruddy job.

At some point we need to get the whole desalination plant thing going since California has and is going to have problems with its agriculture and I am a bit more worried about that.

There are also non-hydrualic forms of fracturing. Back in the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission partnered with utilities to explore the feasibility of releasing natural gas with underground nuclear detonations.

As crazy as this sounds, it actually worked quite well. The problem, of course, is that it created an enormous amount of underground radioactive debris and the natural gas that was extracted was itself radioactive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rio_Blanco http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy

The article says far more water is being used by agriculture. Probably not a good idea to have agriculture, which consumes vast amounts of water, in regions where there are water shortages. Alternatively, the nation does need lower cost oil and gas and the fracking should be encouraged.

I'm going to complain about the relevance of this post just to get to read the rationalizations for why this sort of thing belongs here. It's like "hacking" the earth? Hackers live on the same planet as the rest of us? Fracking rhymes with hacking?

I flagged this, like I flag all the political flamebait topics that recur here (minimum wage, mincome, health care pricing, etc.), but I think the Snowden/NSA articles kind of permanently tipped the balance here. I definitely understand the argument that they were on-topic, but they mainstreamed political discussion, and now having stupid partisan flamewars here is commonplace.

Maybe you can start with the HN Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In what sense does this article "gratify intellectual curiosity"? I mean any more than anything else on the typical USA Today environmental beat.

I believe Zikes is referring to this:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

IMHO hackernews is for the thought leaders of the world who are objectively smarter and more visionary than the rest (this is not a value judgment, and I mean "objectively" literally), while operating machinery in a capitalist system that hugely leverages their power so that they are, or can be, like philanthropist robinhood-tycoons, who do not need to exploit anyone or anything, but can create value out of thin air. (As, indeed, they do, starting by using their own labor to produce value far, far in excess of the market price of that labor.) That's how I see startups, at least.

You might have a different opinion of course. If you don't want to be powerful, don't found a startup, or read a site dedicated to this. If you do, then get a conscience while you do it.

On the other hand, there is a bit of a dearth of actual startup news these days.

I too enjoy sharing this space with fellow thought leaders Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Randy Cohen, Peter Singer, ...

There are indeed some people of the likes of Larry page and Mark Zuckerberg who know about this site. It is, after all, the new Slashdot. That is one of Paul Graham's goals.

Of course, you are right in that he's not doing well at it these days.

I will just say that Mark Zuckerberg spoke numerous times at YCombinator. I doubt very much that he hasn't read this site.

Were you hoping someone would be proud of your snark while missing the point?

I read it as, boy do people here vastly overestimate themselves.

It's about the goal. I think the site is not doing well at it at the moment.

However the original link is more than justified.

"who do not need to exploit anyone or anything, but can create value out of thin air."

I think this now takes the title for "stupidest thing I've read on HN."

If only the world's industries could run on bitcoins and puppies.

...or on snarky Hacker News comments.

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