Likely mid-range evolution of fracking technology?

Great Debates
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N.B.: I am a new member. I recognize that this post might be better suited to a different forum. I’m sure list management will relocate it as appropriate.

At the moment, fracking has placed natural gas in the “time-buying” modality with respect to global climate change. It is seen by many as a preferable option, at least temporarily, to the continued exploitation of petroleum (as long as it lasts) and coal. Nevertheless, fracking has clearly demonstrated some serious side effects that many with a pro-fracking political/economic agenda often refuse to acknowledge or even discuss.

These side effects include, but are not limited to, localized geological instabilities that arguably lead to (a) changes in water table accessibility by existing potable water well installations; (b) pollution of potable water tables with fracking solution and/or with natural gas itself; and © localized, highly destructive sinkholes and seismic events — plus the unarguable fact that natural gas still contributes an unacceptable amount of carbon dioxide, in the long run, to the global greenhouse gas footprint (albeit significantly less than that of petroleum or coal).

No currently developing technology is standing still; it is evolving — even if evolving only to the extent that it can be made commercially more profitable. Looking forward to the mid-range future of fracking, therefore, begs the question: Which evolutionary track will fracking take over the next 10-20 years?

I foresee three possible avenues; there are probably more I haven’t thought of:

  1. No further national regulatory action requiring congressional legislation will be taken due to the seemingly hopeless sociopolitical factionalism that has imposed a death-grip on our country and its government. Therefore, since commercial special interests (i.e., huge corporations and their Wall Street financiers) are basically running the country, fracking technology will continue to evolve only to the extent that it is made cheaper and more profitable, with no real progress made towards cleaning it up or restricting how it is deployed (except, of course, for the smiley-face “everybody wins” propaganda that is already being dispensed on television by the petroleum companies).

  2. A sea-change political movement activated by the “silent majority” independent center in the U.S. (much as I hate to re-purpose Nixon’s historically dubious 1969 allegation) will finally dissolve the deadlock in Congress — hopefully forever — in favor of realism, practicality, science, and therefore sensible, workable solutions to our serious nationwide problems. This, in turn, will lead to full-speed federally funded dispassionate scientific research on fracking technology — followed quickly by sound, science-based recommendations for federal legislative action that can be passed without regard to special-interest financial agendas. Existing fracking operations will then be suitably upgraded or, if necessary, taken out of service altogether as required by newly enacted law.

  3. Federal oversight over environmental regulation, having come to a virtually complete standstill, will be unilaterally taken over by various states. Citizens of those states whose political infrastructure is controlled by corporate and financial special interests will, at some point, have more attractive examples to look at in neighboring states. Based on the state citizens’ overall sense of commitment and drive, state political machines can be dissolved by state-level elections. Barring that, many citizens of these states will eventually vote with their feet and emigrate to other states where the quality of life is better protected. This evolution will ultimately reduce the tax base of the special-interest-based states to the point where continuing along the present über-corporate/Wall-Street trajectory is no longer fiscally viable, either for the states or the corporations.

This will, eventually, drive change, one state at a time. Current examples of this process are the state-driven initiatives regarding decriminalization of marijuana (medical or recreational), recognition of the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, and other “wedge” issues such as the currently-emerging contraception foofaraw. While state reclamation of control over such issues may drive more of a long-term than a mid-term outcome, it seems in many ways to be the most likely and the most realistic, given current sociopolitical trends in the U.S.

What do you think?

Ancillary remarks:

Somehow, we have reached a place in our history — or, arguably, a place where we have always been but which is now simply more clearly visible to more people — where the mass of what now constitutes America cannot be effectively governed by a single federal entity. Note that this is not a new problem; it existed in at least as great a measure at the 1787 Constitutional Convention as it does now — though some of the issues then were superficially different than those in the news today. (This is a big reason why the U.S. Constitution is, to this very day, the shortest national constitution in the world. The Founders of 1787 seemingly couldn’t solve these profound problems then any more than we seem to be able to solve them now.)

The nub of it is, we’ve pretty much run out of “solutions” and “compromises” to try — including a civil war in the 1860s, which, though resulting in some important constitutional amendments regarding slavery and civil rights, solved none of the underlying sociocultural problems that have plagued the U.S. since the country’s inception.

Broaching the idea of finally giving up on reconciliation of this troubled marriage of states with disparate cultures and interests, and opting finally for divorce (i.e., partition), has about the same response in most circles — left, right, or center — as loudly dropping the F-bomb in the middle of a decorous diplomatic reception. One way to dispassionately discuss this and other perhaps radical solutions to our national malady is to convene a new national constitutional convention, as provided for in Article V of the Constitution itself.

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Reported for forum change.

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You need to ask more clear questions, and avoid the political manifesto.

IMHO - Fracking is vastly safer than you think. Some of the listed ills are simply not consistent with geological reality, and issues with pollution of water tables are due to accidents during the fracking process, not due to the process itself. Regulation and experience should help reduce the number of accidents. Once fracked, a well should present no further issues.

The CO[sub]2[/sub] per unit energy of methane is a significant win against coal. In that respect it is likely to displace some CO[sub]2[/sub] generation. That is good. Long term CO[sub]2[/sub] will probably continue to rise, and coal will probably have a part to play.

Fracking is such a minor issue compared to so many other vastly more important things that it is very unlikely to garner much political sway.

The single biggest threat to the world - to humans, the economy and the world ecology, is ignored. Even the committed ecological activists ignore it. Worrying about fracking is wasting time.

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Since much of the OP is related to politics, this is better suited to Great Debates than GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

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I’m going to suggest, like everything else related to economy, that expediency will win over high-minded morality every time. So to answer the OP, no, things won’t change until something else makes the fracked oil sufficiently less desirable - usually because a cheaper substitute came along. natural gas may be less polluting, but decades of NG cars have show so far it does no copete with oil.

As for the feds abandoning regulatory oversight - I doubt it. Recall that the Republicans may talk libertarian and tea party, but given the opportunity, Reagan and Bush and Bush had no hesitation expanding the bureaucracy or raising the deficit. Perhaps the biggest push for the government taking a step back was deregulation, which IIRC was started as a Jimmy Carter initiative. No government department is going to abandon its mandate, whether it’s Rick Perry or Rand Paul’s “close the Department of Education” or your suggestion the EPA would quit overseeing fracking and its results.

IMHO, fracking is just one more trick to put off “peak oil” a bit longer. As the rest of the world develops, as more Chinese, Russians, and Indians want cars and electronic goods, etc. - the demand for energy, usually oil, will rise. As demand exceeds supply, prices will rise. This in turn, will drive the need to scrape out more an more oil using more and more desperate technology - from shale oil, from depleted oil fields, from deeper and deeper undersea wells.

Does anyone remember 2008, when demand and speculation were pushing the USA toward $6/gal gasoline? The only thing that “saved” us was the US banks setting the world economy back 10 years. Those 10 years are almost up, and things will start heating up again.

What can save us in technology. If electric cars ever live up to their promise, batteries that can charge quickly and hold a huge charge, good for thousands of charge cycles - then the car won’t need oil. Those same batteries would also allow storage of solar energy, boosting the utility of solar power; or even as a “buffer”, so houses could store electricity bought at off-peak for use during peak. Just as microwaves can cook with significantly less power than an oven, there are plenty of power-saving opportunities in the home for new tech, smart devices and other technology.

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Which is? I would say that humans themselves are the biggest threat to the world. There are just way to many of them.

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Yes, I agree that humans themselves are the biggest threat to the world. And there are way too many people — but, I believe, only insofar as being a virtually sure thing to produce way, way too many people in the near future. Then things will really start to fall apart. Foreseeing this reality, China made an attempt to deal with it at the national level (the “One Child Policy”). The basis of their initiative is morally contentious, and the results so far are inconclusive — but at least they tried. Of course, such a government-mandated change in the social structure of a huge multi-ethnic society would be impossible in any country that is legitimately democratic in its institutions — at least until it is already way too late to prevent a national and/or global food catastrophe.

I would say that the planet, in theory, can today adequately — nay, in fact, comfortably — support all its denizens. All that is required is something approaching world government thinking, and a system that prevents the accumulation of great wealth by individuals and corporations. Such a balanced system would be intended to ensure that everyone gets the right to live free of want (one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.”)

And no, I am not a Communist.

Nor am I a Libertarian, a Fascist, a Nihilist, an Anarchist, a Democrat, a Republican, or a Green. I am a member of no political action committees — though for practical reasons, I do tend to vote mostly for Democratic candidates and issues, as they tend to be (in my perception) less driven by mindless ideologies made up out of whole cloth, and more by the desire to achieve practical, desirable results for the greatest number of people in the greatest need. Usually.

But it cuts both ways. I have voted for a Republican candidate when I felt his or her qualities of leadership and perception of the problems at hand were better than those of the Democratic candidate. Same for issues and problems. I strongly support, for example, deep, meaningful legal reform at all levels of our court system, limiting financial recovery by plaintiffs who clearly neither need nor deserve it within the intent of the regulations allegedly violated by defendants. This is a so-called “Republican issue,” because the Democrats do in fact enjoy the virtually unalloyed support of the Trial Lawyers Association, which strongly opposes such reforms for obvious financial reasons.

Barack Obama made no secret, when he was running for the first time in 2008, that he, as a well-educated lawyer and professor of constitution law, firmly supported common-sense tort reform along the lines of what was being called for by the Republican party — that is, until after he was elected and sworn in, and somebody (like maybe Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or someone else in a position of partisan Democratic power) read him the riot act over openly supporting “the agenda of the enemy.” Practically treason! And we’ve heard no more from our president on this matter since. Disappointing, to say the least. Hell, I voted for the guy. Twice.

But nowadays, virtually all opposition to common-sense government actions or reforms (regardless of which political “side” they are on) stem from “obvious financial reasons,” or from financial reasons that are not so obvious. Whatever the source of the opposition, however — be it the trial lawyers or the Koch brothers — there can be little doubt that today, virtually everything is about money.

It didn’t used to be that way so completely. Really didn’t. Why has this changed so dramatically and so quickly in our country?

Wealth distribution has gotten so far out of kilter that *most people and companies are nowadays driven by the fear of want and, therefore, place the obsession to amass more and more money at the top of their priority lists. And there it tends to stay — strangely, even for the already-wealthy, at whose feet much of the problem can be laid.

Huge, massively wealthy corporations sock away billions and billions of dollars every year into commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds… where it sits there and generates even more money for the corporation, while these financial institutions take their slice off the top for doing absolutely nothing of any real productive value.

Why do they want to do this? CEOs and COTBs might come up with any number of lame, non-sequitur reasons, but IMO the main motivation is fear — and their actions are working to bring about the exact thing they claim to dread more than anything else: a cessation of economic growth and profitability.

Growth and profitability used to be assured by investment in research and development that might pay off in four or five years. Now, if it doesn’t pay off big-time before the end of the next quarter at the latest, the money goes in the bank and sits there, gradually draining away more and more of America’s collective wealth by transmogrifying it into mere “capital” — money that is doing nothing. More and more, the wealthy gradually (or sometimes quite quickly) become wealthier, the poor get poorer, the needy get needier, and fear becomes endemic across society. Such conditions, historically, eventually produce revolutions. I don’t want that to have to happen in America. It doesn’t have to. We’re smarter than that, and our founders gave us the tools to fix the problems. All we need is the will; everything else we already have.

The very existence of this whole problem represents a fundamental change in the collective consciousness of our country, from the ethic of “We can do this if we all pull together; we can make this country really work for all of us!” — to an ethic of, “I will do it if I want to do it and it makes me money; it’s every man for himself. That’s the American Way!”

The hell it is. The “American Way” was best articulated by Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must all hang together, or surely we shall all hang separately.”