Guest “that was easy” by David Middleton
Like most Bloomberg energy articles, this is very stupidly written… Starting off with the headline that implies that “Warren’s fracking ban” is something more than a fantasy…
Politics
Exxon, Chevron Begin Pushing Back Against Warren’s Fracking Ban
By Kevin Crowley
November 1, 2019America’s two biggest oil companies are starting to push back against the fracking ban touted by the leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, which may become one of the most consequential flashpoints for energy markets during the election campaign.
Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. executives spoke out publicly against the proposals for the first time on Friday, saying they would shift profits from crude production from the U.S. to other countries, and may increase prices for consumers while doing nothing to reduce oil demand or greenhouse-gas emissions.[…]
To be sure, whoever gets elected next year will find it difficult to end fracking. Presidential powers to enact a ban only extend to federal lands, something that would be certain to face immediate legal challenges. A wider restriction would need to go through Congress.
“Any efforts to ban fracking or restrict supply will not remove demand for the resource,” Neil Hansen, Exxon’s vice president of investor relations, said on a conference call with analysts. “If anything it will shift the economic benefit away from the U.S. to another country, and a potentially impact the price of that commodity here and globally.”[…]
“It’s really unlocked an economic huge economic benefit for the country, as well as for the companies involved,” Jay Johnson, the boss of Chevron’s upstream business, said during the company’s earnings conference call.
[…]
Bloomberg
Here’s Liawatha’s Tweet and one of the funnier replies…
Well on a positive note that should make OPEC Happy that they will be back in The Oil business big time.
— Redlion’s Den (@eddiern24) September 8, 2019
What a Joke. Get off the Stage..
Setting aside the fact that the President has no authority to ban frac’ing anywhere other than Federal lands, and might not even have the authority to do it there. Leasing on federal lands and the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) is governed by laws. Presidents are charged with faithfully executing the laws, not faithlessly disregarding them.
Obama’s unlawful drilling moratorium and subsequent permit-orium were repeatedly slapped down by Federal judges. Obama’s defiance of these rulings did more damage to Gulf of Mexico crude oil production than any hurricane has.
Day 9: Obama repeatedly defied federal court with Gulf oil policies
by Conn Carroll
September 26, 2013[…]
After reviewing the facts and science in the case, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana found that Obama’s drilling ban was an “arbitrary and capricious” abuse of executive authority, and ordered the ban overturned.
But instead of following the law and allowing Gulf drilling to resume, Obama doubled down, issuing a new moratorium featuring minor technical changes from the first.
The second Obama drilling moratorium applied for the exact same length of time as the first moratorium, through Nov. 30, 2010.
But after intense bipartisan political pressure from Louisiana Sens. David Vitter, a Republican, and Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, Obama nominally lifted the moratorium on Oct. 12, 2010.
By that time about 36 rigs in the Gulf of Mexico had been put out of work, five rigs were being transferred to Egypt and other parts of Africa, and 12,000 jobs had been lost.
Energy industry experts predicted that if new oil leases were not issued, the long-term and indirect economic losses would include more than 175,000 jobs in the region.
But even though the Obama the moratorium had been nominally lifted, a functional ban remained because the Interior Department refused to issue any new drilling permits.
So oil companies again took Obama to federal court, this time seeking an order holding the chief executive in contempt of court and asking that the government pay all of their legal fees.
Again, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana ruled against Obama, finding him in contempt of court for “a flagrant and continuous disregard of the Court’s Order.”
Finally, on Feb. 28, 2011, almost a month after he had been found in contempt, Obama granted the first oil lease in the Gulf of Mexico.
But while the Interior Department has since stepped up the pace of issuing leasing permits, Gulf oil production is still far below pre-Deepwater Horizon levels. The month before the blowout, according to the Energy Information Administration, oil companies were pumping 1.6 million barrels of oil a day out of the Gulf.Today they are pumping just 1.07 million barrels a day, a 33 percent drop in production.
All told, according to a 2012 American Petroleum Institute study, Obama’s Gulf oil drilling moratorium cost the United States more than $24 billion in lost energy investments and about 90,000 jobs.
Those losses make the $440,596.68 in legal fees the Eastern District forced Obama to pay the oil companies for defying its court order seem like a drop in the bucket.
Washington Examiner
Hurricanes in 2005 (Katrina & Rita) and 2008 (Ike) inflicted extensive damage on Gulf of Mexico oil & gas infrastructure, depressing production by about 250,000 bbl/d from 2006-2008. The Obama maladministration’s unlawful drilling moratorium and “permitorium” in response to the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill depressed production by about 500,000 bbl/d from 2011-2013.
Since then, Gulf of Mexico oil production has surged to record levels and is expected to top 2 million barrels per day in 2020 as a dozen recent deepwater discoveries are brought online.
While a President Fauxcahontas could inflict similar damage, barring new legislation from Congress, the courts would probably slap her down even harder than they slapped Obama down.
What if a Marxist POTUS was able to ban frac’ing and offshore drilling?
POTUS = President Of These United States
JULY 8, 2019
U.S. crude oil production surpassed 12 million barrels per day in AprilU.S. crude oil production and lease condensate reached another milestone in April 2019, totaling 12.2 million barrels per day (b/d), according to EIA’s latest Petroleum Supply Monthly. April 2019 marks the first time that monthly U.S. crude oil production levels surpassed 12 million b/d, and this milestone comes less than a year after U.S. crude oil production surpassed 11 million b/d in August 2018.
Texas and the Federal Offshore Gulf of Mexico (GOM), the two largest crude oil production areas in the United States, both reached record levels of production in April at 4.97 million b/d and 1.98 million b/d, respectively. Oklahoma also reached a record production level of 617,000 b/d.
The U.S. onshore crude oil production increase is driven mainly by developing low permeability (tight) formations using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. EIA estimates that crude oil production from tight formations in April 2019 reached 7.4 million b/d, or 61% of the U.S. total.
[…]
US EIA
About 9.2 million barrels per day of current US oil production comes from tight formations and the Gulf of Mexico.
Frac’ing and offshore drilling account for over 75% of current US crude oil production and almost all of the future growth potential for US production and reserves growth.
While an Enviromarxist ban on frac’ing and offshore drilling wouldn’t drop our production to zero-point-zero immediately, the decline would be quick and particularly sharp in the tight formations. There is a very significant relationship between “rig count” and production.
Obama’s unlawful Gulf of Mexico moratorium, very quickly dropped production by about 500,000 bbl/d and the 2014-2016 crash in oil prices caused a similar decline in the Permian Basin. A ban on frac’ing would be catastrophic in the Permian Basin.
Permian Basin oil production with frac’ing…
What would have happened if frac’ing was banned in 2010…
It would be even worse for natural gas.
About 70% of current US natural gas production and all of the future growth potential is from “shale” and other tight formations requiring frac’ing.
The biggest slice of the “shale” gas pie is the Marcellus formation…
Natural gas production from the Appalachia region is mostly from the Marcellus and Utica formations.
Appalachia region natural gas production with frac’ing…
What would have happened if frac’ing was banned in 2010…
Conclusion
Anyone calling for frac’ing ban is mentally ill. Any POTUS who tried to enact a frac’ing ban would be committing Treason. A frac’ing ban wouldn’t change this:
A frac’ing ban would just drive up oil & natural gas prices, force us to import more crude oil and convert LNG export terminals into import terminals. To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in The Lost Word, Jurassic Park…
A frac’ing ban would be “the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas.”
Notes about nomenclature
Fracking vs. frac’ing
Frac’ing is a common well completion procedure that has been safely employed in oil & gas production for more than 70 years. There is no evidence whatsoever that frac’ing has ever polluted groundwater or triggered palpable earthquakes. Wastewater injection wells aren’t frac’ing. Frac’ing is a hyphenated abbreviation of “hydraulic fracturing”. Fracking is a cleaned up version of the “F” word.
What is frac’ing? And, is it the same as hydraulic fracturing?
In short, yes. The term “fracking,” which is (supposedly) shorthand for the well completion process of hydraulic fracturing, is actually correctly spelled “frac’ing.” Fracking has become the most used word to describe natural gas from shale deposits, such as the Barnett Shale.Google “fracking” and you get 10,200,000 links.
Unfortunately, the word fracking appears to be widely misunderstood and misused. In fact, it is being used in ways that have nothing to do with the process of frac’ing. For example, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram used the words “pipelines used for fracking” in a recent article’s title, which is incorrect, since pipelines are not used in frac’ing. It’s a good example of how fracking has become an epithet, not a proper description term.
I asked a few people about the word usage recently. “It’s a co-opted word and a co-opted spelling used to make it look as offensive as people can try to make it look,” said Michael Kehs, vice president for Strategic Affairs at Chesapeake Energy, the nation’s second-largest natural gas producer. To the surviving humans of the sci-fi TV series “Battlestar Galactica,” it has nothing to do with oil and gas. It is used as a substitute for the very down-to-earth curse word.So, to set the record straight, here is a quick primer on frac’ing:
First, frac’ing is a well completion or well stimulation technique actually called hydraulic fracturing. It is not a drilling technique, as is commonly written. The fracturing process consists of pumping a combination of 99.5% water and sand, and .5% chemical additives, into the wellbore under high pressure, creating tiny fractures in the shale to release the natural gas. Frac’ing is done after the drilling rig has been removed.
Second, frac’ing is done after the drilling rig has completed the wellbore and has been removed. The actual process of frac’ing a Barnett Shale natural gas well takes less than a week to complete. At that point, the natural gas produced from the well that was hydraulically fractured is no different than any other natural gas well, regardless of how the well was completed.
Finally, and most importantly, the abundant quantities of natural gas contained in shale deposits have been unlocked by combining hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling. While the combination of these technologies has been used for decades, it was perfected for shales about 10 years ago. The result is a complete change in the energy outlook for the United States, and many countries in the world for that matter.
[…]
Barnett Shale Energy Education Council
Shale vs. “shale”
I try to put quotation marks around the word shale when I use it in reference to “shale” plays. Most “shale” plays aren’t actually shale.
Is it Shale or not Shale? That is the Question.
In a previous blog on unconventionals, ”Conventional vs. Unconventional Shale: What is my Reservoir?,” Richard Day wrote about the nontrivial problem of classifying reservoirs as conventional or unconventional formations. I would like to continue this topic, as, in Europe, this issue has made it into the headlines of local newspapers. People in small villages have become “experts” in the field of geology, and believe they can determine whether exploration is for conventional or unconventional hydrocarbons, and whether it threatens their tranquillity. If they deem it so, from England to Poland, they voice their concerns.Personally, if I had a choice, I would prefer to have unconventional drilling in my backyard rather than conventional. The high environmental standards and restrictive regulations give more guarantees that unconventional drilling is more secure and environmentally friendly than conventional drilling. But, sometimes, local people are afraid of whatever we call “shale.” Here, I would like to show examples of rocks that do not meet the definition of shale, but are still perceived as shale. Definitions can be misleading, and the nature of shale is more complex than people believe.
[…]
Recently, I was forced to change my presentation because I used the word “shale” for a rock containing over 45% clay minerals (as was reported in an X-ray diffraction (XRD) test and consistent with my petrophysical analysis), but the operator was wary of naming this rock as a “shale.” Shale can be defined as: ”Shale is laminated, indurated (consolidated) rock with > 67% clay-sized materials.” Jackson, J.A. (1997). Glossary of Geology, 4th Ed., American Geological Institute.
While it is always good to have reliable sources of knowledge, please take a look at the mineral composition of known shale gas plays in the U.S., as presented in Fig. 1 – which shows that almost none of the U.S. shale gas plays meet the criteria of the definition given above. According to this definition, there are no shale gas plays in the U.S. “Houston, we have a problem…”
[…]
Halliburton
Notes on comments
If you’re going to complain about my style and use of words like:
- Liawatha
- Fauxcahontas
- Marxist
- Enviromarxist
Don’t bother to comment. At best, I will ignore you. At worst, I will ridicule the living schist out of you.
Warren needs a real job in the real world. I suggest she replace Deputy Doug.
https://dailyinterlake.com/local_news/20191106/decoy_patrol_car_totaled_in_somers
Thanks for the added educational detail in this post.
Macondo happened in 2010. That was a significant event that drove down Gulf activity. Let’s give BP some credit too.
Macondo didn’t drive activity down. Obama’s idiotic and unlawful response to Macondo did.
BP’s idiotic lack of safeguards drove the industry down.
And plus losing $30B+ in damages.
Both sides seem to be filled with wishful thinkers and fools. Fracking does make sense for Tier 1 wells that can generate a great deal more energy than the energy it takes to bring them to production. But fracking makes no sense if it is not economic, which is the case for most of shale production in the US at this time.
The shale miracle was a Federal Reserve and SEC scam. Change the rules to do away with test wells that prove reserves while adding trillions in liquidity can cause all asset classes to rise nicely, even the shares of shale companies that are destroying capital.
But the party is over. We have just seen many of the shale players get wiped out as they have no access to cheap financing but remain with huge funding gaps because their production costs are greater than the revenues that are received from the production output.
Vangel: We’ve seen you play this card over at Bishop Hill. It was as dumb then as it is now.
He plays the same ignorant card here in every post that mentions shale or frac’ing.
Pocahontas’s call to stop permitting and ban fracking has nothing to do with climate or pollution, b/c her ban wouldn’t affect either one.
Her ban would almost immeditately drive gas pump prices north of $5/gal, and probably to the $6-$8/gal range in most of US. With natural gas production severely crippled, electricity prices increase would likely result in folks monthly electric and nat gas bills doubling to tripling overnight.
This of course would be the Democrats pay-off to the GreenSlime billionaires who’ve been betting long on wind and solar for 2 decades, and funding Democrats’ campaigns and PACs with hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes.
For the record. Up in Canada there have had three, greater that 4.0 magnitude induced seismic events associated with Fracturing operations. FoxCreek AB, Farmington B.C. and Benalto/Sylvan Lake AB. It can happen. Total damage from the events are two broken windows.
Do you have a link to any technical reports about this? Particularly specifically linking specific quakes to specific frac’ing operations.
and include any science that demonstrates the earthquakes would not have happened if there wasn’t any fracturing
Fox Creek…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fracking-likely-linked-to-4-4-magnitude-quake-in-fox-creek-1.2938900
Farmington…
https://thetyee.ca/News/2018/12/08/Fracking-Halted-Near-Fort-St-John/
Nothing specifically linking frac’ing to earthquakes.
David. Really?
You’re very stubborn. I’ll send you basic instructions for using a mouse, and where Google is.
You’re pretty convinced. This isn’t happening, huh? Try to get over it. It does happen, and you denying it just annoys me and makes you look stupid after all the good stuff you’ve contributed.
If anyone ever again posts, and endorses a comment from the Tyee, or Narwhal, I’ll leave this site forever.
I know you’re busy (me, too) but this is important to me.
I absolutely refute the idea of AGW, but it really bugs me that you can’t accept:” Yeah, we cause little earthquakes in a small geographical area, but we’re working on it.”
Give me your phone number- we can discuss it.
You’re simply totally ignorant of the difference between frac’ing and everything else involved in drilling and producing oil & gas wells and how earthquakes occur.
If you had the slightest grasp of the subject matter, you would realize that I am not saying that activities related to oil & gas production aren’t causing induced seimicity.
If you want to argue that without frac’ing, there wouldn’t have been a resurgence of oil & gas drilling and production activity and possibly associated minor induced seismicity, you’d sort of have a point.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-hydraulic-fracturing-related-earthquakes-and-tremors
“Reports of hydraulic fracturing causing felt earthquakes are extremely rare” and aren’t evidence of frac’ing causing the earthquakes. This is how an earthquake can plausibly be attributed to frac’ing…
http://www.ogs.ou.edu/pubsscanned/openfile/OF1_2011.pdf
Even after this detailed study of a specific frac’ing operation causing an specific quake, the conclusion was a 50-50 proposition.
If anyone ever again posts, and endorses a comment from the Tyee, or Narwhal, I’ll leave this site forever.
promise? /joke
Seriously though,
1) play the man not the ball. If you have a problem with the factual accuracy of the link by all means point out where and how you think the link got it wrong. Attacking the link because you don’t like the organization it comes from? That’s a desmogblog method of arguing. Rather than accusing everyone else of using desmogblog tactics, I suggest you stop projecting and start taking your own advice.
2) what exactly do you have against the Tyee? That’s an honest question, it’s a Canadian site, I’m not Canadian and thus not familiar with the site, a quick google shows that mediabiasfactcheck rates them as “on the far end of Left-Center Biased based on liberal editorial bias and story selection that often favors the left” but that they also “rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact check record”.
Benalto/Sylvan Lake AB…
https://www.canadianunderwriter.ca/insurance/how-recent-alberta-earthquake-compares-to-others-in-canada-1004160512/
Nada, nothing, zip, zero, zilch.
For the record the mild quake in the Sylvan lake area was where mild quakes have happened in the past without oilfield activity. A completion operation was shut down as a precaution.
There have however been quakes in the Rocky Mountain House area nearby which may have been related to reservoir drawdowns, pressure relief, or disposal wells. Many disposal wells in this area are old producers that actually have considerable negative pressures or in other words no pumping pressures are applied.
I think the jury is still out but since the quakes are insignificant it is mostly a non-problem
but it won’t make a difference if the Leftists control at least 1/4 of the Senate. You will have one-person rule. Filling the courts with Constitutionalists makes no difference if they decide that she doesn’t need to obey the law. 26 senators can prevent the removal of the president, no matter how dictatorial and abusive of the law that president is.
I was working for an oil and gas production company when Josh Fox’s movie came out. We all had a good laugh at the many wrongs used by the movie to condemn fracing. But the one thing that really had us going was the miss-spelling of fracing. The only way fracing was spelled throughout the industry was “fracing” and not “fracking”. We knew that Josh Fox had done no homework for his movie, and had just made up devisive material to suit his politics. Josh just wanted a Michael Moore drive-by-shooting movie to impress his far left friends
The industry should have come out strongly against the doco at that time but they chose to be PC instead. The one thing I have to hand to Trump is that he is showing the Republicans and others how to grow a spine.
Fox literally insisted that fracking was the entire life cycle of a well.
I use the Murphy’s gas station price sign on our main drag to gauge the health of the oil market. It also serves well to educate friends less interested in this topic. Currently regular unleaded is selling at $2.15 a gallon. This despite an increase in the state tax, geopolitical issues in the MidEast, a ban on Venezuelan imports, and chronic instability in Libya.
A vote for Warren would return us to being a supplicant of Putin, The Supreme Douche in Tehran, and Nicky Maduro.
Fauxahontas calls for nation to follow in Commifornia’s footsteps and raise prices across the board with limit to energy production. She demands that only “good people” be allowed get licenses for oil and gas production on federal lands. “We need to make sure that only DemoKKKrats get these opportunities since we know they are pure of heart and much wiser than the evil conservatives and Republicans,” she said in a recent interview. She also plans on sending cadres from Commifornia to states in the Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain regions to help with their forest management programs!
Having a geolgist debate a politician is like having a major league slugger compete in a T-ball game!
David
You’re kidding, right? I guess you didn’t read the links.
From the Geoscience link: “With an increase in seismic activity from hydraulic fracturing and fluid injection at oil and gas sites in northeast BC, it is important to understand how and where this can occur so that any risk can be reduced and managed.”
Here are the slides from the Geo Science open house in Dawson Creek held earlier this year, attended by a large group of concerned landowners. (I was there, as well.) http://www.geosciencebc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2019-05-29-2018-052-seismic-amplification-open-house.pdf.
I really didn’t expect after being lambasted a couple of times (and quickly blocked from posting on Desmogblog) that someone with your credentials as a contributor to WUWT would call BS on me on a well known, and frequently occurring event. Please check secondary links in the ones I’ve already sent.
Fluid injection is wastewater injection.
Hydraulic fracturing is a specific process. Nothing in the link ties frac’ing to earthquakes. The correlation is between the overall increase in drilling & production activity with seismicity.
A frac’ing induced earthquake would occur close to and simultaneously with the frac’ing operation. An overall increase in seismic activity could be due to many things, including the extraction of the hydrocarbons… But it couldn’t be due to frac’ing.
David.
Au contraire mon ami.
You are the ignorant individual in this little “duel”. You don’t even read the links I’ve sent. Events recognized by oil companies, land owners, government agencies, and casual observers, have created government orders to mitigate the issue you say can’t exist. (As in: Law)
“Total ignorance of the subject matter.”
I absolutely defy you to challenge me on any step of the drilling, stimulating, and producing of an oil or gas well. If you aren’t aware of things that really do occur, this will be a really short battle.
I’m deeply depressed that you, and a couple others in this discourse have decided to be experts in an area you know nothing about. How about ” Thanks PeterT, I learned something today.” (Instead of shooting me down climatista style.) And please stop with the “frac’ing”. “Fracking” is bad enough.
I apologize for getting frustrated, and a little angry. I know I’m off topic, but I thought WUWT was interested in looking at empirical evidence. It’s there, if you’d bother doing a little research, already presented in links you won’t read.
Seismic activity in a small area of north eastern Canada due to hydraulic fracturing activity is only a small technical footnote, and although you refuse to accept it, it exists.
The real battle is convincing everyone that (1) “Fracked” gas is regular natural gas, and (2) C02 is not our enemy. Not everyone knows, but methane, CH4, when combusted forms two molecules of water and one of C02. So much for worrying about the large amounts of water used during “fracking”.
We’re just left to deal with that nasty C02.
Try not to behave like Desmogblog, David. Heck, even I’ve been wrong once or twice.
PeterT, David has been schooling you all throughout the thread. It is you who should be saying “Thanks David, I learned something today”. Instead you ignore his points, insult him, and try to pretend you know more than anybody else here.
You want a challenge on the process? try reading David’s posts (something I have my doubts that you’ve done, at the very least you haven’t comprehended it if you did read it). He says “Hydraulic fracturing is a specific process” and refers to it as a separate process from “wastewater injection” into wastewater disposal wells (which operate for longer durations and inject much more fluid than the hydraulic fracturing operations). since you claim to know so much, I challenge you to address that point.
John, I’m up to that challenge.
I am very much aware of the difference between the processes involved in both the hydraulic fracturing component of a completion, and disposal wells. I very much need to be, where I’m employed. I have an issue with one statement David makes. He says: “Hydraulic fracturing is a specific process” and refers to it as a separate process from “wastewater injection” into wastewater disposal wells (which operate for longer durations and inject much more fluid than the hydraulic fracturing operations).” (Huh?/sarc) Up here, there are a huge amount of regulations that apply to disposal wells. https://www.bcogc.ca/node/15117/download
Although disposal wells may accept a large amount of fluid over time, they never receive the volumes and pressures that happen during a frac all at once. Once monitoring systems and reporting requirements determine a disposal well is “full” they are capped, and the land around them is reclaimed. As to your point about “much more fluid than the hydraulic fracturing operations”, I’ll disagree. Much of the produced fluids are stored on surface in large tanks known as “C” rings, and if the fluid does not contain H2S, it may be stored in open, lined pits. Oil companies try to recycle as much of this fluid as possible (Shell claims 100%). The salinity of this fluid, typically 100,000 ppm of chlorides or higher, makes it difficult to use in a frac. (Hard to viscosify.) That said, technology is always evolving, and large strides have been made to be able to viscosify highly saline water to use in fracs.
I’d like to add one more thing in response to one of Davids’s comments to me earlier. “The Bakken, Eagle Ford and tight formations of the Permian were the source rocks for conventional reservoirs in their respective basins. Prior to the “shale” revolution, these basins were in decline.” They weren’t in decline. They basically didn’t deliver anything until the advent of horizontal drilling starting about 2008.
I used to be a “Drill Stem Tester” (DST operator) in the ’70’s in Canada. Drilling the Montney gave nothing but an annoying little burp while drilling through it (spitting drilling mud up on to the drill floor) because of relatively high pressure, but the formation has almost 0% permeability and porosity. Hence, no continuous flow, or blowout. We would never bother running a test on it. Today, look at the Montney / Duvernay. Who’d a thunk it? Wow, half the potential of the Canadian Oil Sands, and all due to improvements in horizontal drilling and multi-interval packer systems technology. I’m leaving hydraulic fracturing out of it, because it’s been around since WWII. Send me another challenge, John.
David is not an oilfield guru. I don’t claim to be one either, but I do know what I’m talking about. You simply don’t have a point of reference to be able to judge what it is you’re being fed .
Let’s stop this. Overall, I 100% agree with WUWT’s mission.
Peter,
You are simply confusing a specific well completion procedure with the entire process of drilling and producing oil & gas wells. Which is understandable because all of the articles you’ve cited also do so.
luckily the US has 600 years of proven coal supplies to make up the shortfall in natural gas that would result from a ban on fracking.
get ready to convert your furnace room to a coal bin.
The earthquakes that sometimes result from lubricating a seismic fault are very similar to what happens in forest management in Kalifornia.
If you burn the forest each year, especially at the start of the rainy season, all you get are cool fires that do little damage to existing trees and settlements, because the fuel load is low and moisture is high.
However, if you let the fuel accumulate through fire suppression, the fires that do result can be catastrophic.
The same for earthquakes. If you lubricate a fault you get lots of small, harmless quakes. Otherwise, the stress in the fault builds up until you get a powerful earthquake.
Fracking should be recognized for what it is. Controlled release of the next big earthquake.
Prediction: In the future, Fracking techniques will be used to minimize earthquake damage. People in the future will regard us a ignorant for not recognizing this simple solution to earthquakes.
Much the same way we look at current forest management as ignorant for not using controlled burning, when the native American population used controlled burning hundreds of years ago, long before the arrival of European invaders.
Pocahontas did not say she was going to ban fracking. She said she would sign an executive order to ban fracking. As the article points, these are two different things, and I suspect she is well aware of that.
Fauxcahontas is dumber than schist… She’s incapable of knowing the difference.
Doug, David.
From Doug: “After a million frack jobs, there will undoubtedly be some done in areas of seismicity. Those will become poster boys for the anti-frack crowd. Be careful about promoting them as a cause and effect situation.”
Good point, Doug.
However, the fact exists that in a small area of BC, it happens, and there are people working on it to figure out why.
https://www.bcogc.ca/node/15577/download
SMS
You refer to David Middleton as a deity. That’s a bit frightening. However, I’m glad you’re not chasing Greta instead.
“You forgot to mention the mountain mover, limited entry, frac plugs, frac balls and so much more.”
Are you referring to the Halliburton Bulk Storage Trailer (Mountain Mover) used in the 90’s? I guess no one told you, but frac balls are almost never used anymore. Frac plug? limited entry? I have no idea what you’re talking about, and neither do you. “Two trucks, 5 gallons of diesel, 15-30 minutes” etc. Sounds like you really know your stuff! /sarc. Checkout this website (one of many out there) that can explain to you step by step how a modern frac / completion is done. https://packersplus.com/
I did read my links. Did you? Can you?
You said you worked for an oil company. As what, exactly? Coffee boy?
PeterT
You are a snarkly little snit. Calm down and start doing some critical thinking.
Think of what an earthquake would do to the numerous laterals that were drilled. You are claiming that, like the article you link to, that there is a slipping for the zones around the frac. That cannot be. If this were true all the casing in the laterals would be parted. Not hard to figure out that if this were true then the development of the Bakken would not be possible. Any suggestion that fracs are to blame for earthquakes is just fantasy. And your experience is the proof.
As for your atitude, go pound sand. I’m older than you, retired and worked for the oil and gas companies as a drilling/production/completion engineer for most of the time I was involved over 40 years. It sounds like you came out of the rigs, got a gig with Halliburton and rode it to a fracing consultant position.
So lets just drop the snarkiness. Tell me how you haven’t parted your lateral production casing in all this time if you believe fracing is inducing earthquakes. What does your experience tell you?
“Frac’ing is a hyphenated abbreviation of “hydraulic fracturing”.”
OK. Then
– where is “hydraulic” in “Frac’ing”.
– what’s the advantage of “Frac’ing” against self explaining “hydraulic fracturing”.
– what other compilations are common of “hydraulic etc.” without “hydraulic”.
Just asking.
/ one could think on a hydraulic fracturing site everyone is used to the abbreviation Frac’ing. OTOH – how often on a hydraulic fracturing site is the designation hydraulic fracturing site needed … /
Elizabeth Warren ✔@ewarren · Sep 6, 2019
On my first day as president, I will sign an executive order that puts a total moratorium on all new fossil fuel leases for drilling offshore and on public lands. And I will ban fracking—everywhere.
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The politician Elizabeth Warren has a clue : ban frac’ing.
What’s next.