…[It] was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock – reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.
On Thursday, Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu visited the National Energy Technology Laboratory in South Park, PA:
Chu said the Department of Energy’s experiments between 1978 and 1992 helped develop the widespread practice of horizontal drilling and fracturing that made capturing natural gas from rock formations such as shale cost-effective enough that private industry could take over.(Source.)
This is some pretty serious revisionist history, and it’s all directed at justifying continued “investment” in greenclean energy research*.
…[It] was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock – reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.
On Thursday, Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu visited the National Energy Technology Laboratory in South Park, PA:
Chu said the Department of Energy’s experiments between 1978 and 1992 helped develop the widespread practice of horizontal drilling and fracturing that made capturing natural gas from rock formations such as shale cost-effective enough that private industry could take over.(Source.)
This is some pretty serious revisionist history, and it’s all directed at justifying continued “investment” in greenclean energy research*.
Phelim McAleer and his wife Ann McElhinney are journalists and documentary filmmakers. You may remember Not Evil Just Wrong (2009), their takedown of Al Gore and Global Warming hysteria.
Now they want to tell the truth about natural gas development and hydraulic fracturing in a full-length documentary titled FrackNation. McAleer says:
FrackNation will skeptically examine some of the scarier claims made by anti-fracking activists and look at how shale gas is helping some of the poorest communities in the US and potentially across the planet. It will feature small farmers, the working class and others who are benefiting from this economic boom. We will look at the backgrounds and motives of those opposing fracking.
FrackNation will go head-to-head with GasLand II, Josh Fox’s planned sequel to GasLand (2010), the highly effective anti-gas propaganda piece. With scant concern for earth science and demonstrable fact, GasLand earned an Academy Award nomination and stirred up anti-fracking hysteria nationwide with its memorable footage of flaming faucets. PBS and HBO will jointly bankroll Gasland II to the tune of $750,000. It is set to air on HBO this fall.
Here’s how you can fight back: To tell their grassroots tale, McAleer, McElhinney and co-producer Magda Segieda will rely on grassroots financing. The website kickstarter.com provides a fundraising platform for creative projects. FrackNation‘s goal is a modest $150,000.
For as little as $1.00, you can support a professional, fact-based counterargument to GasLand II. $20 donors will receive a copy of the DVD upon release. All donors will be named executive producer of the project.
Phelim McAleer and his wife Ann McElhinney are journalists and documentary filmmakers. You may remember Not Evil Just Wrong (2009), their takedown of Al Gore and Global Warming hysteria.
Now they want to tell the truth about natural gas development and hydraulic fracturing in a full-length documentary titled FrackNation. McAleer says:
FrackNation will skeptically examine some of the scarier claims made by anti-fracking activists and look at how shale gas is helping some of the poorest communities in the US and potentially across the planet. It will feature small farmers, the working class and others who are benefiting from this economic boom. We will look at the backgrounds and motives of those opposing fracking.
FrackNation will go head-to-head with GasLand II, Josh Fox’s planned sequel to GasLand (2010), the highly effective anti-gas propaganda piece. With scant concern for earth science and demonstrable fact, GasLand earned an Academy Award nomination and stirred up anti-fracking hysteria nationwide with its memorable footage of flaming faucets. PBS and HBO will jointly bankroll Gasland II to the tune of $750,000. It is set to air on HBO this fall.
Here’s how you can fight back: To tell their grassroots tale, McAleer, McElhinney and co-producer Magda Segieda will rely on grassroots financing. The website kickstarter.com provides a fundraising platform for creative projects. FrackNation‘s goal is a modest $150,000.
For as little as $1.00, you can support a professional, fact-based counterargument to GasLand II. $20 donors will receive a copy of the DVD upon release. All donors will be named executive producer of the project.
Nine quakes in eight months in a seismically inactive area is unusual. But Ohio seismologists found another surprise when they plotted the quakes’ epicenters: most coincided with the location of a 9,000-foot well in an industrial lot along the Mahoning River, just down the hill from Mr. Moritz’s neighborhood and two miles from downtown Youngstown.
At the well, a local company has been disposing of brine and other liquids from natural gas wells across the border in Pennsylvania — millions of gallons of waste from the process called hydraulic fracturing that is used to unlock the gas from shale rock.
Here, the Times conflates two dissimilar processes in an attempt to create fear and worry about natural gas. Follow below the jump, and allow me to explain.
Nine quakes in eight months in a seismically inactive area is unusual. But Ohio seismologists found another surprise when they plotted the quakes’ epicenters: most coincided with the location of a 9,000-foot well in an industrial lot along the Mahoning River, just down the hill from Mr. Moritz’s neighborhood and two miles from downtown Youngstown.
At the well, a local company has been disposing of brine and other liquids from natural gas wells across the border in Pennsylvania — millions of gallons of waste from the process called hydraulic fracturing that is used to unlock the gas from shale rock.
Here, the Times conflates two dissimilar processes in an attempt to create fear and worry about natural gas. Follow below the jump, and allow me to explain.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (COMINTERN) (AMPAS) are a bunch of suckers when it comes to Leftist propaganda films featuring outrageous, junk-science based, anti-capitalist claptrap. Just ask Al Gore, who won an Oscar a few years back for An Inconvenient Truth.
One of this year’s nominees in the Documentary Feature category is a film by Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic called Gasland. Too bad there’s no category for Documentary Fiction.
Here’s Gasland‘s famous image of flammable tap water, from a Mr. Markham’s Colorado water well:
Gasland aims to educate the public about the supposed danger of hydraulic fracturing, a process commonly used in preparing low permeability but gas-bearing rocks for production in wells once they are drilled. In reality, the process takes place thousands of feet underground, separated from underground water sources by a mile or more of rock. In the last 60 years or so, a million wells or more have been fracked, with no documented instances of groundwater contamination.
You’d expect industry to step up and object. But even public officials have been moved to denounce Gasland‘s fast and loose treatment of the facts.
Gasland incorrectly attributes several cases of water well contamination in Colorado to oil and gas development when our investigations determined that the wells in question contained biogenic [naturally-occurring] methane that is not attributable to such development.
From John Hanger, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection:
Gasland is “fundamentally dishonest” and “a deliberately false presentation for dramatic effect.”
Gasland talks about Dunkard Creek [a massive fish kill] – an environmental disaster – but everything we know about Dunkard Creek at this point indicates the primary source of the problem was a coal mine in West Virginia.
Surely Gasland will win its Oscar. Its inflammatory (no pun intended) theme and predictable hysteria will attract Academy voters like flies to a cowflop. It’s not so much that the Left-coasters are anti-energy, they’re just hostile to forms of energy that actually, you know, work.
[Disclaimer: My employer is not an ANGA member company. It's likely that we would benefit economically from greater restrictions on hydraulic fracturing, since restrictions will inevitably lead to higher prices of our gas, which for the most part does not require fracking. The success of the process in the shale plays of PA, OK, LA, TX and elsewhere have resulted in a huge supply of natural gas on the market, so that the current price differential between gas and oil ($4 per mcf gas vs nearly $100 per barrel oil) prices a gas BTU at about a quarter of the cost of an oil BTU. For the consumer and for the environment, natural gas is the best deal going. - SM]
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (COMINTERN) (AMPAS) are a bunch of suckers when it comes to Leftist propaganda films featuring outrageous, junk-science based, anti-capitalist claptrap. Just ask Al Gore, who won an Oscar a few years back for An Inconvenient Truth.
One of this year’s nominees in the Documentary Feature category is a film by Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic called Gasland. Too bad there’s no category for Documentary Fiction.
Here’s Gasland‘s famous image of flammable tap water, from a Mr. Markham’s Colorado water well:
Gasland aims to educate the public about the supposed danger of hydraulic fracturing, a process commonly used in preparing low permeability but gas-bearing rocks for production in wells once they are drilled. In reality, the process takes place thousands of feet underground, separated from underground water sources by a mile or more of rock. In the last 60 years or so, a million wells or more have been fracked, with no documented instances of groundwater contamination.
You’d expect industry to step up and object. But even public officials have been moved to denounce Gasland‘s fast and loose treatment of the facts.
Gasland incorrectly attributes several cases of water well contamination in Colorado to oil and gas development when our investigations determined that the wells in question contained biogenic [naturally-occurring] methane that is not attributable to such development.
From John Hanger, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection:
Gasland is “fundamentally dishonest” and “a deliberately false presentation for dramatic effect.”
Gasland talks about Dunkard Creek [a massive fish kill] – an environmental disaster – but everything we know about Dunkard Creek at this point indicates the primary source of the problem was a coal mine in West Virginia.
Surely Gasland will win its Oscar. Its inflammatory (no pun intended) theme and predictable hysteria will attract Academy voters like flies to a cowflop. It’s not so much that the Left-coasters are anti-energy, they’re just hostile to forms of energy that actually, you know, work.
[Disclaimer: My employer is not an ANGA member company. It's likely that we would benefit economically from greater restrictions on hydraulic fracturing, since restrictions will inevitably lead to higher prices of our gas, which for the most part does not require fracking. The success of the process in the shale plays of PA, OK, LA, TX and elsewhere have resulted in a huge supply of natural gas on the market, so that the current price differential between gas and oil ($4 per mcf gas vs nearly $100 per barrel oil) prices a gas BTU at about a quarter of the cost of an oil BTU. For the consumer and for the environment, natural gas is the best deal going. - SM]
Dr. Daniel Fine of MIT discusses how new technology in extracting gas will impact geopolitics and the environment
Dr. Daniel Fine of the Mining and Minerals Resources Institute at MIT addressed Fletcher students at a talk sponsored by the International Security Studies Program and offered his insights into how the development of new technology will allow the United States to tap vast, previously inaccessible, resources of natural gas that will impact everything from the price of gasoline to the ability of Chinese companies to buy equity in Russian natural gas fields.
The United States has a monopoly on “hydro-fracing” technology. The technology, short for hydraulic fracturing, releases natural gas trapped in shale deposits by injecting the deposits with high-pressure water mixed with sand and small amounts of chemical additives.
According to Dr. Fine, the “cloud over gas” used to be “do we have enough gas?” In 2003, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan declared that the United States did not have enough natural gas, and that it would be necessary to import liquid natural gas (LNG). This, said Dr. Fine, was clearly a mistake in the light of the new hydro-facing technology, not only because importing LNG poses a security risk to the United States, but because tapping natural gas from shale represents an economic “bonanza” in “the most [economically] repressed parts of the country:” western New York, western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, areas which suffer from high rates of unemployment, and are estimated to host 490 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The thousands of jobs that could be created in these areas could stand in the way of President Obama’s pursuit of subsidies for renewable energy.
This week, several news stories converged on an odd topic: hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking Schematic. Note: Vertical scale grossly underrepresents the depth of the producing formation.
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, has been used since the 1950s to stimulate oil and gas wells. The process involves pumping a sand-laden slurry into a well and subjecting it to enough pressure that the rocks in the productive formation fracture, or break. The purpose of the sand is to prop open the fracture, so it stays in place. The carrying fluid can then flow back out of the well, along with oil and gas if it’s been a successful frac.
Dan Spencer: Scorned by GOP electorate Roemer to go all Nader and continue his Quixotic presidential quest as an Independent. http://t.co/ePvruHMB#RSRH
Moe Lane
PG DeFreese
Victoria Coates
Daniel Horowitz
Dan Spencer
