Whoopie! I can’t believe how you schmoozed this man who is promoting further environmental injustice with his pretend sincerity about U.S. energy policy. Don’t you know that they never put gas wells in the wealthy neighborhoods? The dirty drilling practices of unconventional natural gas are thrust on minorities, rural areas and the poor who are ill equipped to fight back!
Pickens and all the natural gas producers are in pain right now because we have a big old gas bubble. The only way they can ease their pain is to increase demand for natural gas by convincing the American public to convert to natural gas vehicles (NGVs). Since there is no delivery system for fueling those vehicles, taxpayers get to pay for that. Then the demand for natural gas will increase AND SO WILL THE PRICE! What’s the difference in paying high prices for gasoline or paying high prices for natural gas? Both are fuels that have a limited supply so investing in infrastructure for delivery and converting vehicles is NUTS!
Watch how they fawn all over Pickens.
ACTION REQUEST from un-natural gas.org:
Why the softball approach to T Boone Pickens? He used you. And you’ve got to keep abreast with your viewers, many of whom already know the following:
A) His only agenda is his own profit – but he’s pretty damn slick at making it look otherwise, isn’t he?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70HFEHB6dagB) The “Energy Plan” is his ticket to increasing demand for a dirty fuel that ruins lives everywhere it’s extracted, and in fact will NOT be used for energy independence. A great deal of it is slated for export. I’m talking about natural gas, or as we like to call it, UN-natural shale gas. The process of hydraulic fracturing, which pollutes vast amounts of precious water across the nation and leaves dead zones and sick people in its wake, is used to get natural gas out of tight shales. We need clean water, clean air, healthy cropland and healthy people much more than we need a few years’ worth of a dirty hydrocarbon fuel.
Want to know more? Visit:
http://www.un-naturalgas.org
http://un-naturalgas.org/weblog/?cat=107
http://www.journeyoftheforsaken.com/fracpage.htm
http://www.journeyoftheforsaken.com/whatyouneedtoknow.htm
http://www.journeyoftheforsaken.com/consortiumofthefraced.htm
http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/home.php
http://www.earthworksaction.org/oil_and_gas.cfm
THIS is the story you should be telling. Women across the country will thank you.As will I.
————————————-Here’s the e-mail URL for The View.
It would be great if we could get a hundred e-mails in to them in the next couple of weeks – enough for them to notice, anyway – a counter-offensive to industry efforts to increase demand for un-natural shale gas. The marketplace rules: less demand, less pressure on us and our homes, water, air, politicians, regulating agencies…
If Pickens is so concerned about our energy policy, why did he slander Al Gore and John Kerry? Why did he vote for “Drill, Baby, drill,” John McCain?
The Trouble With T. Boone Pickens’ Plan
Myth Busting Natural Gas
Myth Busting 2
Myth Busting 3
Behind the Shale (a 5 part series)
Send your emails to: http://abc.go.com/daytime/theview/ask
About Sharon Wilson
Sharon Wilson is considered a leading citizen expert on the impacts of shale oil and gas extraction. She is the go-to person whether it’s top EPA officials from D.C., national and international news networks, or residents facing the shock of eminent domain and the devastating environmental effects of natural gas development in their backyards.
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“The dirty drilling practices of unconventional natural gas are thrust on minorities, rural areas and the poor who are ill equipped to fight back!”
How do all the rich people know not to build on top of oil and gas reserves? Actually, they drill where there is a good possibility of finding oil or gas without looking at the socioeconomic factor of the people living on top of the formation. And, by the way, some of the wealthiest people I’ve ever met live in rural Texas and Oklahoma. They just happen to own the mineral rights under their land.
I understand you want to protect yourself and your family, but you are doing it by sharing a lot of misinformation. I’ve read your blog for a while but I haven’t figured out what you are doing – you don’t want drilling in your backyard and you seem to want to help other people keep it out of theirs. So what are you doing for fuel? And what do you suggest is the solution?
You are wrong! With new technology, drillers can move the drill site and they do it all the time. TCU in Fort Worth is a perfect example. They moved the planned well site from the very affluent neighborhood to a neighborhood where people had much less money. There are plenty of examples of environmental injustice. It is a fact!
What misinformation? Name something. I back up everything on this blog with evidence, but if you find something you believe is wrong, speak up with specifics.
I am not a big energy user. However, that is not the point. The industry is reckless with polluting our air, land and water. They can and they should do better–A LOT BETTER.
"What misinformation? Name something. I back up everything on this blog with evidence, but if you find something you believe is wrong, speak up with specifics."
Well okay.
In your December 15 post you discuss water used to produce oil and gas saying that it is injected into underground disposal wells and lost to the water cycle forever. This is mostly true in the case of water used for hydraulic fracturing. Where you go wrong is in your citations concerning the amount of water involved. Your statistics are for produced water: (copied from your post)
"400 Million gallons per day of waste water is produced by the oil and gas industry in Texas alone. [1]
WORLDWIDE
200 million barrels of produced water worldwide each day (Burnett 2007). [1]
200,000,000 bbl/day x 365 = 73,000,000,000 bbl/yr.
There are 42 gallons in a barrel.
73,000,000,000 bbl/yr. x 42 = 3,066,000,000,000 gal/yr"
The water used in fracking a well to get it to release, or PRODUCE, oil or gas is not the same thing as PRODUCED Water, which is what your statistics are referring to.
Some of the water used to frac a well returns to the surface as produced water, but most of the millions of gallons of produced water comes up from the same formations as the oil or gas that comes up with it. This water is, in many cases, miles below the surface, and it is already "contaminated" with gas and oil because it is all down there together.
You also write "That water is polluted then injected approx. 1.5 miles into the earth in saltwater disposal well/injection wells under a 250' containment formation where it stays PERMANENTLY. That water is not recycled like your bath water."
First, produced water is not polluted and then injected. It is injected because it comes up out of the ground diluted (or polluted) with high concentrates of minerals which have leached into the water over the millions of years it has been underground. The highly saline water is injected deep underground, usually in the formation from which it was removed, because it can damage vegetation and contaminate drinking water if released above ground. So, most of the water you are referring to in this article starts out and ends up in the same place therefore has no effect on the water cycle.
The water used for fracturing does come from the water cycle, and that is a problem. In fact, it is the very problem that your source, David B. Burnett, is trying to solve in his work at Texas A&M. That institution has come up with one particular water recycling technology that, as you are aware, is being put to use by Devon in the Barnett shale to reduce the amount of water lost.
In some areas, Wyoming in particular, produced water is actually added to the water cycle. Less saline, the water up there is more easily cleaned and is a boon for the people who use it to irrigate crops and water livestock.
As I said, I appreciate the fact that you are trying to protect yourself. I just think that you are ignoring a lot of information because it doesn't fit into your view of BIG BAD OIL. While I'm not naive enough to believe that oil companies, or any other business for that matter, has anything more than their own best interests at heart, I also don't believe that they are inherently evil. Oil producers need clean air and water, too. Although there are surely some bad apples out there, most oil and gas companies use the most advanced and safest technologies they can afford to protect the environment while they make money, if for no other reason than it is a lot more expensive to clean up a mess than it is to prevent the mess in the first place.
Yes, I got the produced water and the frack water mixed up in that post. As a matter of fact I was looking at that today for two reasons:
1. Chesapeake has been all over that post lately–every day for about a week, which means they are getting ready for a big PR lie about water.
2. I am getting ready to write a new post about water.
You are wrong that the produced water is not polluted. It contains hydrocarbons, radioactive waste and frack chemicals.
Most of the water I'm talking about is the fresh water used to drill the well, usually about 1 million gallons and the 3 to 6 million gallons to fracture. ONLY we don't know just how much water they (or you because I'm sure you are in the oil business as I once was) use because, for the most part, the numbers are given to us voluntarily. Also the wells are fracked and re fracked.
If you consider that 90 percent of oil & gas wells are fractured and that fracturing is taking place all over the world now, we are talking about TRILLIONS of gallons of fresh water removed FOREVER from our hydrologic cycle. You can't tell me that is not driving drought. It is INSANE and IMMORAL. People die every day from lack of water.
I can't know what is in the minds or hearts of Big Oil just as you can't know my "agenda" unless I tell you. I only judge them by their actions. If there are companies that behave in a more responsible manner, it would be in their best interest the police the others.
Are you with Devon?
No, I’m not with Devon. In fact, I don’t work for the oil industry. I’m a writer who has done a lot of research on the oil and gas industry. I am posting anonymously because I would not want my opinions to be construed as speaking for any organization that I get paid to write for.
The reason I mentioned Devon is because you have a post about their water treatment on your blog and your source comes from the university that developed the treatment system.
As far as the frac water is concerned,you are right about the volumes of water used to frac wells. That is why researchers all over the world are working on the problem. Unless oil and gas stay at the prices we saw last year at this time, water treatment technologies will have to get cheaper for most companies to afford to use on a large scale. I agree with you that water is a huge issue for the oil industry and its one that must be solved.
I guess where I take issue with you on the water issue goes back to the produced water/hydraulic fracturing issue. Take the current situation with gas in wells in Dimock, PA. From reading your blog, one could get the idea that the contamination has something to do with hydraulic fracturing when, as far as I can tell from the news reports, the situation has nothing to do with fracturing the wells. It seems to be an issue with the drilling. I am going to continue following the story to see how it turns out.
I personally think New York is doing the right thing by refusing to permit wells in the Marcellus until they can verify the safety of the practice. My sources say that there are no substantiated claims of hydraulic fracturing contaminating ground water, although that is certainly not what you read on the internet. My hope is that NY either discredits or confirms these instances. If it safe, frac on. If not, the oil and gas industry needs to do something different.
I hope the price of gas goes back up to where it reignites the fire that finally gets us off of fossil fuel. I’m tired of sending our young men and women off to foreign countries to fight for our right to drive suv’s.
You said:
“but you are doing it by sharing a lot of misinformation.”
If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time, and if I’ve been sharing a lot of misinformation, there should be more examples.
If you say you are a writer, then okay, but you should like an industry insider or, at least, an apologist.
You said:
“as I can tell from the news reports, the situation has nothing to do with fracturing the wells”
No, that is not true at all. They have not determined the cause and they have not yet finished testing the water.
If hydraulic fracturing is so safe, then the industry does not need an exemption. Just list the chemicals used and get on with it.
You said,
“If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time, and if I’ve been sharing a lot of misinformation, there should be more examples.”
I said that I’ve been reading your blog for “a while”, by which I mean a few weeks. I have Google alerts set up for the Marcellus and your blog pops up almost every day.
After looking at your blog a while longer, I guess that I was confused because you seem to blame every negative impact of drilling on hydraulic fracturing even when the fracturing itself has nothing to do with the example you are using. I now realize that the reason you always seem to bring it back to fracturing is because, were it not for fracturing, drilling would not have taken off like it has over the last several years in the Barnett and other shales. I guess that makes sense.
I also see that you are so emotionally invested in your argument that you only see what you want to see. I wrote, “From reading your blog, one could get the idea that the contamination has something to do with hydraulic fracturing when, as far as I can tell from the news reports, the situation has nothing to do with fracturing the wells. It seems to be an issue with the drilling. I am going to continue following the story to see how it turns out.”
To which you replied, “No, that is not true at all. They have not determined the cause and they have not yet finished testing the water.”
Hello. That’s what I said. We agree that we won’t know until the testing is complete, but for now you will still hold the position that it is caused by fracturing while I’m saying that I’m not going to call it until the tests are in.
The difference between my take on it and yours is that you will be disappointed if the news comes back that hydraulic fracturing had nothing to do with the contamination and I don’t care one way or the other.
As I said in my earlier post, “If it safe, frac on. If not, the oil and gas industry needs to do something different.”
Maybe you’re right and the oil and gas industry is going to make the earth a wasteland. If you are correct, thank you for your passion. Somebody needs to save the environment.
My passion is directed toward making sure that my son’s best friend doesn’t lose his life in Iraq because my country wants to use oil so much that it doesn’t matter if we have to sacrifice a few soldiers every now and then to maintain our standard of living.
Yes, I realize most of our oil is imported from Canada and other places far from the Middle East, but that has never stopped us from blowing thing up over there so that we can keep the “right” people in power just in case we need their oil. God, that’s got to be hard on the environment.
Anyway, it’s been fun chatting with you and I’ll continue to read your blog, but I doubt I’ll post again – unless you get something really wrong. I’d like to spend my whole day debating with you and everybody else that I have difference of opinion with, but I don’t own an oil well. LOL I’ve got to get back to work.
Okay, one more…
I said, “as far as I can tell”.
You only took that part that said, “as I can tell”. That’s what I mean. You’re so emotionally invested in your argument that you did a little spin-doctoring on mine.
Dang. I can’t believe I missed that before. I guess I better stick to writing and leave the editing jobs for someone else.
You are being less than honest with your intentions here and doing a great deal of spinning yourself. It also seems there is a great deal of the pot calling the kettle black as far as being emotionally invested.
The sooner we quite beating the hydrocarbon energy dead horse, the sooner all our sons can come home and stay home.
Best of luck to your son.