Junk Science War: Fracking Quakes and ‘Dirty Faces’
According to the American Lung Association’s 2010 report, Chesapeake Energy provided the funds that allowed the American Lung Association to create a new public service campaign (called “Fighting for Air”). It includes junk science-based fearmongering about premature deaths, asthma, and other heart and lung effects allegedly caused by ambient air quality. The Lung Association uses the campaign to help defend the EPA’s war against coal.
So while Chesapeake fights environmentalist junk science on fracking, it actually funds junk science to use against its rivals. To some people this may make business sense, but it’s shortsighted.
Helping the EPA defeat coal will win the gas industry no brownie points. That’s not how the all-powerful and unaccountable EPA needs to operate. Plus, Chesapeake is aiding and abetting enviro-radicals who, as soon as they have finished off the coal industry, will set their sights on shale gas. Divide-and-conquer is one of their bread-and-butter techniques.
Knowing that the junk science war against fracking has just begun, it’s more than frustrating to know that the frackers are willing to do the same to another innocent party.
Chesapeake’s problem is not the coal industry. Its problem is the radical environmentalists who are purposefully blocking U.S. economic recovery and growth in part through their war against fossil fuel production. A growing economy would actually require more energy, including gas, and gas prices would rise as demand increased.
We need to develop all forms of energy: coal, gas, oil, nuclear, wind, solar, whatever. Energy is not the zero-sum game — swap coal for gas — that McClendon seems to think it is. And paying the enemy to employ junk science is not the right way to gain friends and influence people.
It sounds like the Natural Gas industry is hoping that the crocodile eats them last.
Agreed. American business is too ready to use the ever willing state against competitive industries or companies. They think they are being pragmatic and smart, but they undercut their own moral standing to fight when that they state comes after them. It devides people, which is probably by design. The business community need to band together and defend property rights principles together. Ben Franklin’s famous quote at the signing at the Declaration comes to mind:
“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
They’re more than willing to use government to prevent new companies from sprouting up in the first place since most regulations have minimal effect on the larger corporations compared to small businesses that can’t afford to make all those changes. It’s the same in pretty much every industry. Crony capitalism at its finest.
“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
“If men were angels they would not need government.” Nor, like our friend David ,would they ever err in their words or actions.
Very well put!
(warning: here there be Anecdotal Evidence) I’ve noticed in the last several weeks that “fracking quake” is the happenin’ nom du jour which is being used in the expected places by the expected persons. It seems leftie HQ has passed the word that there is no such thing as seismic activity which is not caused by fracking. an
There is no such thing as leftie headquarters, Sardoni. The Green movement arose out of disgust with the Marxist elevation of technology as the route to human emancipation from toil. They are busy in humanities department calling conferences to study the baleful assaults of “science” on the natural world. See the call for papers I included in my latest blog: http://clarespark.com/2011/11/17/blood-meridian-and-the-deep-ecologists/. I would call them mystical reactionaries, some possibly pantheists and other New Age variants.
“There is no such thing as leftie headquarters, Sardoni.” (Whereupon followeth a sermon, delivered with great earnestness.)
*sigh* No one can deny the passion of the left or greens or Gaians. But if passion were all tantrum-throwing kids and love-struck teens would run the world.
But, damn, I do so wish science could discover a way to transplant a sense of humor, hell, even just a little common sense. It would prevent so many embarrassing schoolmarmish lectures by those suffering from such a deficiency.
I have a very hazy memory of a practice that forced water down into the ground around the Denver area back in the 1980s was halted because it was believed to create artificial slippage, the kind that creates earthquakes.
Less hazy is the actual mud volcano in Java, Indonesia from fracking that wreacked havoc on a community, destroying a lot of property. It seems that the more fault lines that are in an area, the more problematic the practice becomes.
In Rio de Janeiro rainwater gets in the cracks of the giant granite hill structures and lubricates them, sometimes causing immense pieces to fall off. In 1988, the Saturday night championship Carnival celebrating the winning samba school was postponed because a giant boulder had rolled down the hill of a shanty town causing many deaths.
One can only wonder at the same mechanism deep underground and under enormous pressure. It may not be junk science.
Here’s a link to the US Geological Survey website that discusses the linkage between fluid injection and earthquakes.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/faq/?categoryID=1&faqID=1
“Q: Can we cause earthquakes? Is there any way to prevent earthquakes?
A: Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan, and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the use of reservoirs for water supplies. Most of these earthquakes were minor. The largest and most widely known resulted from fluid injection at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado. In 1967, an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 followed a series of smaller earthquakes. Injection had been discontinued at the site in the previous year once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established. (Nicholson, Craig and Wesson, R.L., 1990, Earthquake Hazard Associated with Deep Well Injection–A Report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1951, 74 p.)”
Related link: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL031615.shtml
“One can only wonder at the same mechanism deep underground and under enormous pressure.”
If it is under enormous pressure, the water can’t get in. Any water in spaces between rocks, under enormous pressure would be squeezed out. If that wasn’t true, there would be constant earthquakes under every inch of every river, lake, pond, and under the ocean. Three quarters of the earth surface is covered by water.
We used to see what would happen when oil was released by drilling. The pressure of the land on top of the contained oil pushes the oil out in a ‘gusher’. The largest land oil spill in the US occured in Bakersfield CA when a gusher got away from the drilling crew.
Not true, Don. All that is required is to push it in with more pressure.
Also, there are places where very little pressure is required, as there are existing fractures which can be lubricated by water.
This is a common occurrence in nature.
You’re thinking of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal earthquake.
Fracking for various purposes is starting to lose momentum, as the technology of oil/gas offshore extraction is becoming increasingly problematic.
Google “NorthSea floor subsidence”, or “Gulf Of Mexico floor subsidence”. You will see that eight feet of floor subsidence is entirely normal for many areas,while offshore Norway has subsided a remarkable 25 feet. Great harm has already been done,and there’s more everyday.
Ah, but lowering the seafloor is good because it offsets rising sealevels from global warming.
So by drilling in the sea we alleviate a major problem caused by the CO2 released by the stuff we drill for.
Or so we could argue against a greenie (with far more logic than they ever will be able to employ or comprehend themselves).
My fear is that elements shoreward of the drilling site could be drawn seaward as
the local sea floor subsides. Ultimately, this will lead to a collapse of the continental shelves and a tsunami. You will note that the periphery of the Gulf of Mexico has become largely employed by what is essentially a project to undermine the continental shelves, which can only lead to disaster. Perhaps some of the professionals reading this will be kind enough to offer a serious refutation; I have brought this up in many venues and no one has.
Aubrey McClendon is shady untrustworthy shiester don’t judge the entire NatGas industry based on him!
There is a law governing any environmental regulation that requires the EPA to issue a Technical Support Document, TSD, as a technical basis for action prior to regulating. On any regulation that the Office of Management and Budget considers will either cost over $500 million in one year, or is “novel, controversial, or precedent setting”, the standard must be at a high level, a “highly influential scientific assessment.” These are fancy words for common sense, if the regs will cause lots of pain, the technical reasons must be solid, well debated, and consensual among peer reviewers.
Recently, the Inspector General of the EPA concluded that the EPA failed to do this, failed to follow its own policies, when determining that green house gases were dangerous (an endangerment finding.) The IG notes the EPA simply met a lower standard, merely ” influential scientific information”, reader friendly good stuff, and deemed this adequate. The EPA acknowledges that,”no weighing of information, data and studies occurred in the TSD.”, but that this was done elsewhere. The IG disagrees.
Hundreds of coal fired power plants, roughly half of America’s electricity, a major industry, will be economically impacted, perhaps made illegal by this technical finding. Scores of world class scientists are on record as holding that man activities, i.e. carbon combustion, are not a major threat to the climate, based on current science.
Junk science is not the correct word. Junk implies something worthless, discarded. It is a buzz word, similar to Saturday Night Special, or Clean Coal, full of sound and fury, but signifying precisely nothing. Lying, cheating quasi-science would be a more precise term. It has the potential to destroy America.
I’ve noticed in the last several weeks that “fracking quake” is the latest expression du jour being used by the usual persons with predictable worldviews in expected venues for the usual ideo-political reasons. So any seismic activity within 100 miles of fracking is now ipso facto the result of fracking. The implicit post hoc ergo propter hoc message being that man’s insatiable blah gas blah destabilizing blah earthquake. Because we’re making Gaia very, very sad.
Something I’ll ask: if fracking can cause quakes, why don’t we see lots of quakes in southwest OK in the region around Fort Sill? When the redlegs are live-firing the big guns, you can feel the impacts for miles, and they’ve been using those ranges for decades.
The two greatest dangers America will face in the coming decades are anti-energy environmentalism and Iran. At least Iran makes no secret that its aim is America’s destruction.
I put 15 years into the drilling industry as an engineer, and this nonsense about the dangers of fracturing,”frakking” would be laughable if it were not so stupid, and counterproductively misinformed.
The short course is that frakking pumps water, sand, sometimes acid/CO2/other stuff to fracture the shale beds to open up the existing channels for production. The highest end psi that I remember is 4,000 psi at 8,000 ft. The well bore is cased and cemented above the frakking zone. Production zones are usually found beneath a layer of solid bedrock. Drilling and production are dangerous jobs, with environmental hazards. Frakking is way down the list.
It’s not nonsense; the recent Java mud volcano is very real. The U.S., compared to Indonesia, is geologically stable. The entirely of the island chain from Sumatra through Java into Bali, Lombok and points east is one giant line of volcanoes; I have slept atop volcanoes on all 4 islands – another volcano is never out of sight. Fracking will have very different risks and results for Indonesia compared to stable structures away from active faultlines.
WOW, You slept on a volcano, that makes you an expert.
Do you have any idea what goes into acquiring a chemical engineering degree?
Unless your fracking for magma why would anyone frack a volcano?
….because when I want advice on Geology, I look high and low for a Chemical Engineer…….or I look in the mirror at a farkking Geologist!
All this crap to demonze Fracking is just so much bullshit! No one with a scintilla of professional credibility has come out in opposition.
A couple of points
1) At this time I know of no documented cases of earthguakes cuased by hydraulic fracturing (fraccing-the correct spelling). The volumes injected are small, the area impacted is very locallized, pressure (fluid) leak-off is rapid and flow-back is started as soon as the frac job is finished pumping, so the ability to affect enough area that will allow movement is likely small (I’ve not attempted to calculate these just an estimate based on experience – several 100 frac jobs)
2) I know of two documented cases of fluid injection resulting in earthquakes, Rocky Mountain Aresenal(see above) during the late 60′s early 70′s and Rangely oilfield waterflood project(Rangely, CO). Both injected fluid for several years (and continues at Rangely) in volumes that are several orders of magnitude greater than a frac job.
The recent earthquakes in oK and VA are unlikely or nearly certain not to have been caused by fraccing. VA too far away and in OK we’ve been doing water disposal, water flooding and fraccing since the late 19th early 20th century and there is no documented case of this injection resulting in an earthquake. OK is very quiet geologically but remember the continents are drifting and stresses do occur, even far away from active subduction zones that occasionally result in relatively small or even very large earthquakes such as the new Madrid fault zone and earthquake near Memphis in the early 19th century. So the frac caused earthquake comments is BS!
It truly is sorrowful that we live in an age of phony science, basically lying to achieve ideological ends, via techo-babble. As noted, injection enhanced hydrocarbon recovery has been ongoing for more than a generation with zero linkage to earthquakes. People who hate carbon combustion work backwards; they link any aspect of this technology with something bad, so as to scare people. Science means truth; they work toward phony truth. Maybe fracking (common spelling) causes dandruff; you can never be sure. As noted, energy involves real dangers, and our limited talent pool is diverted from real concerns.
The USGS, decades ago, considered deep fluid injection, based on the above phenomena, to study possibly lubricating tectonic faults. In concept, multiple small earthquakes relieve stresses from tectonic strain before it approaches the ultimate strength of bedrock. A series of small tremors is far more desirable than one big one. Common structures can withstand mag. 5 shocks with minor damage. Many preplanned tremors could afford protective behavior, and lessen seismic damage. It died due to the unknown risk (liability) of triggering a major quake. Since that time, man has advanced vast areas of detection, drilling, and basic tectonic science.
IMHO, the study of earth sciences, rates higher on ROI, than NASA projects. Educated people should embrace the known advantages of fracking, limit the down side, and explore every benefit of geological behavior. It is bitterly unfortunate that demagogues, e.g. Al Gore, destroy productive industries, careers, and wealth creation, by the use of fear and ignorance. Technology is interactive. Most of what we know about seismic vibration, initially came from hydrocarbon detection studies, seismographs and geo phones.
Our societal problem is that risk taking, and profit gathering, are segregated: Your cost, and risk, my profit. The solution is not more regs; it is stronger and independent professions.
It’s about time that the environmental movement comes clean (so to speak.) They are against any and all forms of energy production that which are not solar or based on magic. If they can’t stop a particular form of energy production out-of-hand (nuclear power or new hydroelectric dams) they will regulate it to death. Fracking causes earthquakes? No proof for this assertion but that won’t stop them.
Solar casts shadows, and is therefore undesirable on open ground (like desert).
So, if it’s not on a housing development or mansion, solar is out.
and wind and tidal generators cause changes in wind and sea currents, which affect the local (and for large installations regional, maybe even global) biosphere.
20. arcaneone
“… 11. chambers
It’s about time that the environmental movement comes clean (so to speak.) They are against any and all forms of energy production that which are not solar or based on magic. If they can’t stop a particular form of energy production out-of-hand (nuclear power or new hydroelectric dams) they will regulate it to death. Fracking causes earthquakes? No proof for this assertion but that won’t stop them.
People are trying to make sense of recent events. The Japanese nuclear catastrophe was greatly aggravated by inadequate design, as by now everyone shou7ld be aware. The Three Gorges Dam in China has been heavily criticized for
increasing pollution and causing major tectonic problems that are likely to remain unresolved. We are supposed to stand in awe of that?
earthquake mcgoon said:
It’s not nonsense; the recent Java mud volcano is very real. You are right mud volcano’s are real.
However they occur all over the world and have always occurred through history. They are nothing new. To attribute them to fracking would seem to be a “chicken little” response, since they occur where fracking is not deployed. The Java mud volcano is probably an unfortunate coincidence.
The Java mud volcano(2006)was linked to substandard drilling techniques and produced several feet of disasterous subsidence
A large number of the commenters here seem to be in a state of shock that Greens don’t accept their credentials at face value, yet natural gas geologists and coal geologists are fighting a war based on ruining each other. Your opposition
is not the straw man stereotype that you have created. I myself voted Republican
in the last presidential race, and I expect to do so again in2012. I am a skeptic
as to human-caused climate change.
I take it that, “The SCIENCE is settled!” Fracking is safe. To that I say the same thing as I do the AGW types, “Prove it! Show me the data!” Since Fracking hasn’t been around all that long, the data is probably thin. How much is known about earth quakes? Certainly not enough to accurately predict the time and location of theit occurrence. Not long ago there was fracking taking place in Arkansas. The imediate area was experiencing unusual earth quake activity. When the fracking was halted, the earth quake activity stopped. Can that be attributed to fracking? Insufficient data! Can fracking be ruled out? The same responce! The author tells us, “Neither report could attribute with any certainty the seismic activity to the local fracking . .” Do the reports categorically rule fracking out? I suspect not! Liberals play fast and loose, conservatives are by nature more measured.
“Since Stanolind Oil introduced hydraulic fracturing in 1949, close to 2.5 million fracture treatments have been performed worldwide. Some believe that approximately 60% of all wells drilled today are fractured. Fracture stimulation not only increases the production rate, but it is credited with adding to reserves—9 billion bbl of oil and more than 700 Tscf of gas added since 1949 to US reserves alone—which otherwise would have been uneconomical to develop.”
http://frack.mixplex.com/content/hydraulic-fracturing-history-enduring-technology
Good article. If you join with the radical enviros to attack other capitalists, dont be surprised when nobody will defend you. Pretty hipocritical to engage in crony capitalism, using radical big gov to bury your compeditors, and then wonder why not enough people in the US beleive in capitalism. These people are contemptable. Kind of like the worste of the crony capitalists in Atlass Shrugged, who cheerfully used big gov to bury their compeditors, and then was shocked when that same gov went after them.
In reality, the best way for natural gas to defend itself is to also defend coal, since coal is the envoros main target. As long as they are still around, natural gas is not the primary target. But once coal is toast, they are next.
Coal and nuclear are the dirtiest forms of energy. Coal because of particulates, acid, and waste. Nuclear because of radioactivity, no place to store the waste safely, no insurance possible, etc. Natural gas IS much cleaner and much safer. People die earlier, because of particulates from coal. The environment is destroyed by acid from coal pollution. We should use the cleanest form of energy that is affordable. Natural gas is it. If wind power, and solar can compete on a level playing field, great. Until then we should use natural gas whenever possible. There is nothing wrong with telling the truth about coal or nuclear. Making up false stories about fracking is wrong. All precautions should be used to minimize real pollution due to fracking however. We need cheap, clean energy to compete. We have a hundred years worth and probably double that when you add in biogas and new finds. Then we have methane hydrates to exploit. Geothermal is also promising, especially for heating.
There are plenty of places to store the waste safely. Nuclear waste is a political problem in its entirety. There are no engineering problems for waste storage that we have not already solved.
action: We just came up with a great new method of extracting natural gas from the earth called fracking. reaction: “Well, we don’t like no fracking gas, man.”
Earthquakes are caused by the release of stress between rocks. Fracking does not directly cause earthquakes, but it may bring forward the time that the stress is relieved. The earthquakes would have happened at some point, possibly more intense as stress builds up over time. By relieving pressures in the surrounding rocks fracking thus makes an area safer by avoiding more severe events in the future.
It is probably too late to use fracking techniques to relieve stress in the San Andreas fault. This is mostly because it may trigger a large event, and even though the event would have happened anyway, possibly even on a larger scale, fracking would be blamed because it is the human thing to do.
Even so, this technique may be useful to avoid the build up of stresses in major faultlines.
so, some activities are risky and may cause damage.. so what?
I have an idea: let’s stop driving cars because there are some effing accidents.
Hey, why don’t you all commit mass suicide???? Life is sooooo dangerous!!!!!!
I note that Switzerland recently banned fracking(for geothermal purposes)on the
ground that fracking was causing localized,but real, earthquakes. Smug Col.Blimp
types take note. Again, google Gulf of Mexico floor subsidence” or “NorthSea floor subsidence” and tell the readership what you find.
“… 11. chambers
It’s about time that the environmental movement comes clean (so to speak.) They are against any and all forms of energy production that which are not solar or based on magic. If they can’t stop a particular form of energy production out-of-hand (nuclear power or new hydroelectric dams) they will regulate it to death. Fracking causes earthquakes? No proof for this assertion but that won’t stop them.
I expect that most of the readership believes that industry and government could decisively defeat our “energy crisis” in only a few years. I do,too. Here are a handful of short-term programs that could begin to solve the problems of the world’s most important economy.
1)Regenerative shock absorber. People are beginning to understand that much of the energy used by a car could be recovered. While there are a number of fixes proposed to recover the energy expended in braking, regenerative shock absorbers,could likewise regain much of the effort expended by a car going over a series of bumps. It is astounding that this simple and effective
technology has been ignored.
CONT.
The gross-effect battery
This device uses waste sludges as electrolytes in crude but very large batteries.
Waste sludges are completely pervasive in modern society.They include windrows of spoiled fruit, acidic mine seepage, sewage, garbage leachate,pickling waste, and many other waste materials. One such device is under construction in Israel(where I live), and another gross-effect battery is planned for Michigan within 6months.
I apologize to the readership for having to present this in such a disjointed fashion.
Piezoelectric .
Piezoelectric cells produce DC when the cells are subject to mechanical distortion. There is a long list of economic events that involve wasting energy,sometimes deliberately,which could be exploited at minimalexpense. For instance a piezoelectric mesh strung across a waterfall would be stimulated to produce DC with almost no environmental impact.A piezoelectric mesh stapled across an earthquake fault would produce DC every timethe fault moved.
There is an almost-endless supply of suitable situations.
i’LL GO ON IF YOU WANT. pOINT MADE?
Amory Lovins(Rocky Mountain Institute)has pointed out that photovoltaic arrays have a major problem with wind “loading”. This problem should imply its own resolution. Namely, supporting members for the photovoltaic arrays should include
piezoelectric cells. Then, when the wind pushes on the installation, it will activate the piezoelectric cells and the installation as a whole will produce much more DC from the same area. Note in particular that with cells capable of being activated by wind pressure, the installation could produce electricity at night, thus answering a major criticism of solar power.
There is a huge number of structures that would be suitable for energy production via wind loading. A partial list includes awnings, flagpolesfences, canopies–even trees. Clearly, our problem is not an inevitable chronic shortage, but an enormous misallocation of resources that makes it ever more difficult to maintain satisfactory near-term growth.
Fracking has been going on for over 60 years. The Texas Railroad Commission, the most experienced energy regulatory body in the world, has been monitoring hydraulic fracturing for that 60 year period, and has not found a single case of contaminated water from the fracking. In each instance of purported seismic activity attributed to fracking, the seismic activity took place on a completely different depth and formation than the one being racked, and in each case, a long way from it.