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Maybe he does. All I know is he uses 'depends' the way he depends on the government.
Do you work for tampax? because you are a bag
Maybe he does. All I know is he uses 'depends' the way he depends on the government.
So rather that refute my claim that You Lie that fracking has neve caused any groundwater pollution, or any problems at all, you jerk off.
I'm sorry. Since that's how you respond to everything, I thought that was all you understood.
"how you respond to everything"
Lies get a "You Lie" response, and since you wrongies nearly always lie, You Lie is to your everything.
You Lie:
"In July, a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wyo., and pulled up a load of brown oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people.
The results sent shockwaves through the energy industry and state and federal regulatory agencies."
http://www.propublica.org/feature/bu...-supplies-1113
... just one of MANY instances where fracking is the primary suspect in destroying ground water supplies, aquifers.
so, You Lie that fracking is NEVER a problem. Go Frac Yourself.
That does not compute.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think there is an association with natural gas and benzene. Can you show me the process that collecting natural gas leads to benzene please. I was unable to find the chemical process.
That link is to a yellow journalism website with a hard on for natural gas producers.
The Bakken shale which is what they are talking about in Wyoming is 7-10000 feet deep... much deeper than the 300 foot ground water reservoir that they are talking about. The fracturing is done in stages and does not migrate up that far... in fact there are several safeguards that it will not.
1 the frac goes to the path of least resistance... which prohibits it coming through the rock up to the surface because of the many changes in tensile stregth...
2 it is actually designed to get a certain amount of penetration OUT... it is in the company's economic interest that the frac stay in the formation that it was intended to be in... the more fracturing of the target, the more production...
3 there is cemented protection pipe over all potable ground water.
The "Oily Substance" he mentioned? Dunno what that is... it's not frac fluid... they don't use oil based gels... or if it is hydrocarbons mixed with frac fluid, they have a leak in their casing and it is getting into that formation via the well bore...
They are not fracing from 7000 feet into a 300 foot aquifer... not gonna happen.
I guess it could be oil based drilling mud? but if they have a leak in their protection pipe up the hole they are breaking EXISTING regulations and need to deal with it and pay reparations... not make new laws against fracturing which didn't cause the problem.
Last edited by Sec24Row7; 03-21-2010 at 12:48 PM.
Since this is a pretty big hackjob of an article I thought there might be a written response by someone who has actually done some research into this guys facts...
What do you know?
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Today, ProPublica author Abrahm Lustgarten has written a defense of his article. He claims that my article is "indisputably misleading." Let's take a look at each of the three charges which I leveled at the ProPublica article.
1. I wrote:
The theme of the ProPublica article, headlined "Buried Secrets," is the natural gas industry's refusal to disclose a list of all chemicals which are injected into the ground in hydraulic fracturing. The article accurately characterizes the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission as the "most stringent" regulatory agency regarding hydraulic fracturing.
The COGCC promulgated its final draft rules on Nov. 7, before the Nov. 13 ProPublica article, and before its Nov. 17 appearance in the Post. The article misdescribes the new regulations, and, significantly, omits the fact that the commission's new disclosure rule is nearly identical to what the drilling company Halliburton proposed in its June testimony to the commission. Section 205 of the new regulations protects drillers' trade secrets about the precise chemical recipes, while mandating full disclosure when specifically needed by the state for health or environmental protection.
In the spring, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission had proposed draft regulations which would have required natural gas drillers to disclose the exact recipes for the fluids which are injected into the ground in hydraulic fracturing. During summer hearings, the industry vehemently objected, and said that they would pull out of Colorado, rather than disclose their trade secrets. Lustgarten's article accurately describes this part of the story.
Then, according to Lustgarten:
In August, the industry struck a compromise by agreeing to reveal the chemicals in fracturing fluids to health officials and regulators — but the agreement applies only to chemicals stored in 50 gallon drums or larger. As a practical matter, drilling workers in Colorado and Wyoming said in interviews that the fluids are often kept in smaller quan ies. That means at least some of the ingredients won't be disclosed.
"They’ll never get it," says Bruce Baizel, a Colorado attorney with the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, about the states’ quest for information. "Not unless they are willing to go through a lawsuit. When push comes to shove, Halliburton is there with its attorneys."
This is entirely wrong. Under section 205 of the the final draft rules, which were published on November, the reporting trigger is not 50 gallon drums, but whether an individual well site uses 500 more more pounds of a chemical product in a quarter. Significantly, fracking companies must disclose to the public the trade names of the fracking ingredients; moreover, whenever an environmental or health official needs information for a specific investigation, the companies must disclose the exact chemicals in their recipes, with the chemical list being treated a Confidential Business Information by the officials who receive the list. As a described in my article, the final rule is similar to what Halliburton proposed in its June 6, 2008 testimony.
Lustgarten's January 12 self-exculpation does not even mention his misdescription of the regulations, and does not attempt any rebuttal of my evidence that he falsely accused the natural gas industry of hiding "buried secrets" even though the industry had proposed a disclosure rule and the "most stringent" (Lustgarten's words) agency had adopted something very close to that rule.
2. A second issue is Lustgarten's bait and switch about data. The article includes an extensive discussion of a case in Sublette County, Wyoming, in which groundwater was alleged to have been contaminated by hydraulic fracturing, and in which the federal Bureau of Land Management determined that fracturing might be the cause. Lustgarten wrote:
The contamination in Sublette County is significant because it is the first to be do ented by a federal agency, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. But more than 1,000 other cases of contamination have been do ented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In one case, a house exploded after hydraulic fracturing created underground passageways and methane seeped into the residential water supply. In other cases, the contamination occurred not from actual drilling below ground, but on the surface, where accidental spills and leaky tanks, trucks and waste pits allowed benzene and other chemicals to leach into streams, springs and water wells.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of each contamination, or measure its spread across the environment accurately, because the precise nature and concentrations of the chemicals used by industry are considered trade secrets.
In an e-mail to Lustgarten, I specifically asked him what he now calls "a precisely tailored question." I asked him for the do entation of his claim that there were over a thousand "do ented" state and local cases of groundwater contamination from "hydraulic fracturing." ("where can the data be found which substantiate the fact about over a thousand do ented cases of contamination from fracking in five states?") He responded by pointing to the Colorado and New Mexico agencies. ("The New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission have together do ented more than 1000 cases where water was contaminated by drilling activities.") I asked the Colorado and New Mexico agencies the same question I had asked Lustgarten, and the response was "zero" for Colorado; and that New Mexico has no such data.
Now, Lustgarten says that all along he was talking about any water contamination that resulted in any way from oil or gas drilling--such as leakage of chemicals from a waste pit on an oil-drilling site.
But that's not the question that I asked Lustgarten, and it's not what he wrote in his article. His article contrasts "the first to be do ented by a federal agency" with "But more than 1,000 other cases of contamination have been do ented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania." How many times do you think that any "federal agency" has "do ented" groundwater contamination that resulted in any way from oil or natural gas drilling. If and only if the 2008 BLM case in Wyoming is the first and only case of such federal do entation can Lustgarten's defense of his article be true.
3. I also wrote that Lustgarten had falsely described a study by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission:
The Commission surveyed regulatory agencies in 28 states (including Colorado and the other four states where ProPublica claimed that there were more than 1,000 "do ented" cases of contamination). The response covered the entire history of hydraulic fracturing in those states. Every single one of those 28 states reported that there had never been groundwater harm due to fracturing.
The ProPublica article did not report the evidence from that government study, but brusquely dismissed it as "an anecdotal survey done a decade ago." Actually, the 2002 study has no anecdotes, and with a dataset of almost a million wells, it cannot plausibly be considered "anecdotal."
There are three comprehensive studies about hydraulic fracturing: a 2004 study by the EPA; a second, earlier, study about the same subject as the EPA study (groundwater safety as it relates to about hydraulic fracturing in coal methane beds); and the third study, mentioned above, by the Interstate Commission. My article mentioned and discussed only the third study.
Lustgarten writes:
The drilling industry, echoed by Kopel, cites three do ents when asserting the environmental safety of hydraulic fracturing. They are a 2004 EPA study (PDF), a 2002 survey of state agencies (PDF) by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission and a similar survey in 1998 by the Ground Water Protection Council (PDF).
In its Nov. 13 article, ProPublica detailed flaws in the EPA study and reported that the two surveys were "anecdotal," meaning that they included none of the basic data required to qualify as a scientific study.
To say the least, that's an extremely idiosyncratic meaning of "anecdotal." The dictionary defines "anecdotal" as "based on personal observation, case study reports, or random investigations rather than systematic scientific evaluation."
"Anecdotal" is an accurate description of Lustgarten's article, which examines a few cases of alleged contamination. There's nothing wrong with anecdotal news stories. "Anecdotal" is not an accurate description of the Interstate Commission study, which has no anecdotes, and which collected decades of data from 28 state regulatory agencies.
Now, we find that Lustgarten apparently has his own definition of "anecdotal"--that is, something is "anecdotal" if does not include "the basic data required to qualify as a scientific study." Perhaps at some time Lustgarten will explain what basic data he thinks were lacking from the two studies. As a media critic, I would not have criticized him for offering plausible critiques of the studies. His article, however, did not contain any argument about what data he thought were missing, and his characterization of the studies as "anecdotal" was false and misleading--at least for readers who understand the word to mean what the dictionary says it means.
Today I received this e-mail from Mark Thiesse, a Wyoming groundwater regulator who is quoted in Lustgarten's original article:
I’d like to thank you for your recent editorial on the ProPublica article. I was one of the folks (I’m with the WY Dept of Env Quality) interviewed for this article by Mr. Lustgarten. I spent several hours on the phone and around a dozen follow up emails to try and help him write a factual article. Unfortunately he seemed to have his own agenda. The one error that was most blatant from my perspective was the "20 mile long plume" that he mentions. I must have told him 5 times that it was individual impacts to separate water wells due to water well drilling practices – not related to oil and gas drilling at all – but that did not make it into his article that way.
If you had to make an important decision, would you rely on the factual information in a ProPublica article? I have only studied one article from ProPublica in detail, but the organization's implausible efforts to defend the validity of a wildly inaccurate article would make me hes ate to rely on anything from ProPublica.
(link)
Bode:
Out of curiosity, is the organization defending the article, or the author?
This made me kinda glad I go through some of my old subscribed threads occasionally.
Thanks!
Oil is at 80 bucks a barrel now, a few short years later, even in the middle of a US economic downturn.
One of my favorite failed "ha ha!" moments.
85 by the middle of next year, even in a slow US economic environment, according to the Economists' commodities guy, who predicts swings above 100 or so will happen then too.
That is generally in line with my moderate 6-7% per year prediction for the next 15-20 years.
I will check back in after another year or two.
Its got nothing to do with oil going "up". It's the fact that oil is denominated in dollars and the dollar is going to . The price/supply/demand for oil is quite stable right now. The "increase" in oil prices is directly related to the Fed flooding the market with dollars.
Thats why the US doesn't use energy and food (other commodity) prices when calculating the US inflation rate. They can claim price inflation is lower than it really is...so you get price inflation without wage inflation.
To some extent, I would agree.
But, since the renmenbi is pegged to the dollar (#2 oil consumer), and the yen is falling in value (#3 oil consumer), the euro has actually fallen against the dollar ( ulatively the other large oil consumer), and others haven't really moved all that much in the interim since 2005, I don't think the case can be made that it is only moving in response to currency fluctuations, or even mostly.
You would have to present a bit more evidence to support that. Please be my guest, I genuinely would like to know how exactly they relate. My understanding is that it is more supply/demand at work.
Too bad scott doesn't post more, he could probably speak to it more authoritatively.
"The "increase" in oil prices is directly related to the Fed flooding the market with dollars."
nah, there no demand vs supply dramatically different than 2001 when dubya came into office at $35/barrel.
The commodity traders, in cahoots with the oil countries and the US/UK oilcos, are propping up the price of oil, and the US is exporting 100s of $Bs of national wealth overseas, and burning 70% of the oil for transport. Unsustainable, but nobody will dare mention the word.
Acually it is very different. The Chinese used to be net exporters.
Now they import more oil than Japan, and are #2 in imports, after the USA.
Currently at $100 now.
"Currently at $100 now"
Traders know how to bet on the price up/downs.
Half of Libya’s oil production shut down
Brent futures hit $110 as turmoil continues
http://www.ft.com/home/us
Libya Chaos Could Leave 'Lasting Scars' On Region's Oil
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0...tml?view=print
Big Oil’s lust for tax loopholes
Oil prices and profits rise while big oil defends its tax loopholes
http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/3...te+Progress%29
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BigOil (and BigLNG) will reap $10Bs in windfall profits from the M/E turmoil, and yet we give them $Bs in tax breaks, subsidies, uncollected royalties. The power of BigOil to America is without challenge.
Just another case where the corps do what's best for the corps, while pre-empting/buying-off any challenge to their power, and while ing people, environment, the planet.
Yep...time to sell the Eddie Bauer Expedition. Stole it in 2008 when oil hit $140. I can still get more for it today after putting 50K miles on it than I paid for it. Thinking about putting the significant other in a Ford Edge...anyone got one? Like it?
Not too bad for a six cylander.
Market for used cars is pretty solid these days. I noted an interesting article the other day that says that has changed the economics of leasing then buying the car afterwards.
Yeah, but since I own the Expedition free and clear I think I will just roll that equity into the new one. If I can get 17K trade in and finance the balance (maybe 15K) on a hard loaded Edge with close to 0% interest and dealer incentives that makes for some pretty cheap driving. That 100K warranty on the new ones is pretty attractive.
Oil pressure rising
A MONTH ago Brent crude oil stood at around $96 a barrel and Hosni Mubarak was ensconced as Egypt’s ruler. Now he is gone, overthrown by a display of people power that is shaking autocratic leaders across north Africa and the Middle East. And oil has surged above $111. Little wonder. The region provides 35% of the world’s oil. Libya, the scene of growing violence this week, produces 1.7m of the world’s 88m barrels a day (b/d).
So far prices have not been pushed up by actual disruptions to supply. Oil hit a peak even before news emerged that some foreign oil companies operating in Libya would stop some production and that the country’s ports had temporarily closed. As Adam Sieminski of Deutsche Bank points out, oil prices are driven both by current conditions and by future expectations.
Oil markets don’t like surprises. The sudden ousting of Mr Mubarak and the unrest in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran and Algeria (which between them supply a tenth of the world’s oil) have added 16% to oil prices. But the big worry is that spreading unrest will culminate in another shock akin to the oil embargo of 1973, the Iranian revolution or Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
...
If Libya’s oil stopped flowing importers would look to Saudi Arabia to make up the shortfall. The oil could probably flow to fill the gap in Europe, Libya’s main market, in a matter of weeks. OPEC claims that it has 6m b/d on tap but that looks wishful. Analysts think the true number is nearer 4m-5m b/d, with 3m-3.5m b/d in Saudi hands. That is ample to plug a Libyan gap but would hasten the day when growing world demand sucks up all spare production capacity and sends oil prices rocketing. Analysts at Nomura reckon that it would only take a halt of exports from Algeria as well to absorb all the slack and propel oil to a terrifying $220 a barrel.
Despite rising prices, Saudi Arabia has so far been reluctant to turn its stop s. OPEC claims that the world is amply supplied with oil and seems content with a price around $100 a barrel. Traders hope that Saudi Arabia will boost production stealthily or that OPEC will call a special meeting to raise quotas and calm markets.
...
http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsb...and_oil_prices
Is the moratorium on gulf drilling still in affect?
Little known fact that the last oil refinery built in the US started up in 1976.
You underestimate the power of the MIC....a one trillion dollar plus money pit...BigOil (and BigLNG) will reap $10Bs in windfall profits from the M/E turmoil, and yet we give them $Bs in tax breaks, subsidies, uncollected royalties. The power of BigOil to America is without challenge.
This will be the only time I advocate government growth........President Obama, I call on you sir to force American companies to switch to the following policy in order to ease up oil consumption: Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, the 4 day work week.
Airplane fares going up again... they didn't went down when the gas went down... now they're jacking it up again...
I'm tired of hiding all this bull behind oil prices...
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