Just curious about the viewpoints of posters on this board towards fracking:
We all want affordable energy in the home, Wrenching Spanners. If that comes at a cost of a small earthquake levelling Blackpool, then I think we’d all agree that’s a price worth paying.
Overall IDK really - the economics of energy are complex wrt getting a true picture of the cost, a lot of government subsidies. If it is legitimately cheap and accessible then it is also inevitable. Part of the reason our nuclear program went pear-shaped was the discovery and exploitation of North Sea oil and gas, low hanging fruit and the path of least resistance for government policy, relative to the difficulties of innovating in the nuclear sector.
Several communities who believed the oil companies assurances that it was environmentally safe and would bring many jobs, seem to feel totally betrayed. There were only a handful of jobs, and the environmental damage was huge.
There are aerial photos of the toxic chemical pools left behind that would make anyone question if it’s worth it.
Those photos are truly disturbing.
It’s a complete environmental disaster. And worse, fracking companies are selling their used water containing who knows what to farmers in California who will buy any water they can get their hands on.
What’s curious is notice how many of those companies are owned by the Resnick family, who already control a ridiculous amount of the water in California.
As others said, I suspect the true environmental costs are not being disclosed - and are being borne by parties other than the energy companies.
The use of water is huge. Also, around here there is a great deal of mining for sand. Which isn’t a big deal if you like big holes where there used to be farmland.
I suspect the true long-term costs would make renewables/nuclear look far more affordable.
I would say that it is not a ‘good’ thing, but it does bring jobs and has begun to shift geopolitical power out of the hands of the Middle East and its relatively fundamentalist governments. Overall, I’d say the sooner it goes away the better, but only if it goes away to be replaced by renewables or clean energy, not if it’s going to be replaced by similar processes in places with less regulation or controlled by authoritarian governments. So I guess I like that it’s a geopolitical win. I dislike that it’s environmentally unfriendly (I won’t go so far as to turn it into hyperbolic ‘disaster.’ This isn’t rare-metals mining we’re talking about. Health concerns are elevated, but not Love Canal.)
I recall the corporate propaganda when fracking was about to come to Wyoming. It claimed there would end up being more usable water. There was never a more misleading, evil load of BS.
Renewable or nuclear energy would be better.
I have personally been involved with fracking and have been on many sites, reviewed designs etc. etc. All forms of energy production or for that matter food production bring hazards associated with them. You get fertilizer run off with crops, you get animal cruelty with slaughterhouses, and greenhouse emissions from cows.
As engineers, we try real hard to mitigate the negative aspects of energy production and it is continuously evolving.
Everything we need to live has an environmental impact. For example :
1> The water we use is probably excessive and bad for the environment with many aquifers drying out
2> The antibiotics we use pollute the natural waters
3> Plastics - you know the story
4> The houses we live in need a lot of energy to build and heat up and our houses are getting bigger …
I can go on and on but there is no magic bullet that will suddenly make the environment better - even wind and solar. Either we all start living like people did in the stone age or learn to accept sustainable exploitation of resources.
On the whole fracking is much cleaner than the traditional coal mining or drilling.
My gf and I are firmly entrenched in the anti-fracking camp. In our area fracking began a few years ago. Shortly thereafter our well water became undrinkable after 30 years of perfection. The fracking people had their engineers review maps, and they claim our well was not damaged by fracking.
Our property would be a perfect place for fracking, but my gf refuses to even meet with them. Last winter a rep stopped repeatedly, asking that I arrange a sit-down with them and my gf. I took their card and my gf shredded it. They kept coming back and I eventually told them I would call the cops if they returned.
The guy returned in the middle of a blizzard and his car became stuck on our lane. I called the cops and they came out and wrote him up for defiant trespass. The guy’s car was stuck and I wouldn’t help him get out. He sat in his car running it to keep warm. He ran out of gas and his cellphone battery drained. He walked up to the house and told me his plight and I told him I’d alert his next of kin if he froze to death.
I called my gf at work and told her she’d never get past his car. I drove my Jeep out, went around him, and picked up my gf at a parking lot on the main road. We returned home. I drove around his car and into our garage. Eventually, many hours later, he got a tow truck to get him out.
Fuck fracking and fuck frackers.
I’m in favor of fracking. It allows for better resource management with minimal surface damages. It is not a good solution for when reservoirs are close to aquifers but most of the basins being fracked don’t have that problem. Horizontal fracking is a relatively new technology and there have been great advancements in the last 20 years that allow it to use less water and sand and have better cement sheaths.
In basins that I’ve worked in water has been a problem but a lot of the problem is that even treated water isn’t allowed to be put to beneficial use so it has to be injected into deep aquifers that basically remove it from the water cycle. It would be better to allow the water to be treated and used instead of wasted.
To take plastics as an example, all the bad stuff was initially unrecognised and kinda crept upon us imperceptibly until we were in the middle of another environmental disaster and wondering quite how we got there. You could say something similar about antibiotics.
On the other hand, I live close enough to the Horse Hill site in Surrey that I am now in an earthquake zone (!). That happened in about 12 months, and so far as I know production hasn’t even started yet - we’re still at an exploratory stage.
On the face of it, it’s hard to think of anything less like an imperceptibly growing environmental disaster - this one is in your face and we have an immediate, obvious question to be addressed.
So: my view- why are we going down this route, which is also making the fossil fuel/global warming problem worse, rather than concentrating much more on the other viable options (renewable, nuclear)? Have we reached the point where energy demand is so high that we have no choice? If so - Sheeeeet…
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I have mixed views on it, to be honest. On the one hand, I can see why it’s important to do, from an economic standpoint. I think there are some environmental risks (including, of course, it’s impact on global climate change), that make me a bit leery, but I can also see the realities on the economic side. That said, my preference would be that we were going nuclear more heavily, and that we were closer to what I see as a paradigm shift in the market wrt electric vehicles. I think this is happening, and we’ll see a huge shift in the next 10 years…but I wish that the technology would be where it is today 10 years ago.
I will say that I think, with respect to reality, that shifting our power generation from coal to natural gas, while not ideal or optimal, will help some, and even shifting some of the vehicle fleets from gasoline or diesel to natural gas will also be a help, but personally I think that fossil fuels are, ultimately, a dead end. The only reason they are still a thing is that the technology just hasn’t been there at the price point and performance envelop, and that the public is scared of nuclear energy to the point where we just don’t make new ones even to replace the ones that are going or will be going offline as they age out.
I’m against it. For the environmental reasons, but also I’m against any measure to *extend *our dependence on fossil fuels by making it easier to extract every last BTU we can… I am similarly against any other relatively new fossil fuel extraction methods. We need to rip that bandage off.
Shifting from coal to natural gas is the fastest way to reduce CO2 emissions. Natural gas releases approximately half the amount of CO2 per btu than coal. If we could switch all coal power to natural gas it would have a bigger impact on climate change than 30 years of construction of solar and wind plants.
Germany has spent $500 billion dollars and twenty years trying to move its energy production to solar and wind. In the meantime, the shift to natural gas in the U.S. has caused a bigger reduction in CO2 emissions than anything Germany has managed, both in absolute terms and as a percentage. And Germany’s shutting down of their nuclear plants eliminated all their gains.
Natural gas and nuclear power are the best answers to climate change in the short and medium/long terms, respectively. To the extent that fracking helps natural gas replace coal, it is so green we should be championing frackers for helping to save the planet.
That general summary was reasonable. I’d just nitpick the last part and say it’s not really relevant either if fracking is cleaner than traditional oil/gas drilling, which it’s generally not. But in the US the result of fracking is substituting natural gas for coal as a fuel at the margin. Natural gas is much more desirable from a variety of points of view. And if fracking wasn’t used, but only traditional drilling methods, the big production increase would not have happened, so more coal would be used.
The environmental effect of fracking v traditional drilling isn’t that relevant. It’s whether fracking has such a big local environmental impact that the positive of much less CO2 and ‘traditional’ pollutants (sulfur, mercury etc) than coal is cancelled out. But I think you really have to exaggerate the local impact of fracking to say that.
Same token, local impact isn’t much of the the reason coal is a problem. You drive for hours and hours in northeast WY, then you come across all the southern Powder River Basin open pit coal mines (~40% of total US coal production, the biggest is around 10% by itself) for around an hour…then wide open spaces for hours and hours. If burning (and transporting) coal didn’t have much wider effects, the mining of it would not be a big deal on a macro level. And fracking even less so.
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Let’s break up the bedrock and put poison-laden water in there. Does it really sound like a good thing?
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At least in Colorado, the energy companies are blatant liars. CRED, the public-relations arm of the energy company, claims they work with local governments. Translation: extort cities for millions to not frak there. In the latest election against increased setbacks, their advertising was full of fearmongering and lies. So who do you trust when THEY say it’s safe?
Ok, because I am a Battlestar Galactica fan, every time is see this thread I think:
Missionary 
“Firmly entrenched” indeed!!
I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, natural gas can help make renewables like wind and solar more viable. But on the other hand, fracking is so cheap that there’s the temptation to rely entirely on gas, instead of the renewables (which might be good in the short term, but in the long term it’s just enabling our addiction). And it’s undeniable that it does a lot of environmental damage, but it’s still probably not as bad as, say, mountaintop removal coal mining, and gas is a lot more clean-burning than coal (including in carbon dioxide emissions).
I guess it’s sort of like methodone: You can use (with a doctor’s supervision) it to wean you off of a heroin addiction, but you can also be addicted to it itself. And I’m afraid that we’re just becoming addicted to natural gas, instead of quitting.
I agree with your comments.
I worked on a technology that used gases like CO2 and Nitrogen (in place of water+ additives) for fracking. It works but is not economically viable.
I have also worked on Coal plants with zero carbon emissions using coal gasification but again not economically viable.
Clean energy is an utopian dream.
In my personal opinion, we will not be successful in cutting back CO2 emissions significantly in the near future. Although we should make every effort to reduce CO2 emissions, we should also invest in Global Dimming technologies which will help us fight global warming if the current trends in CO2 continues.