By Paul Driessen
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Signs of pride and prosperity were evident all over
Williamsport and the gorgeous northern Pennsylvania countryside around it.
Friendly, happy people greeted us. New cars, trucks, hotels and restaurants
sparkled in a clean, bustling downtown. New roofs topped barns and houses,
while late model tractors worked the fields. Former dirt roads are now paved.
Men and women again have high-paying jobs, young people
are coming back instead of moving away, their salaries are supporting other
businesses and jobs, and many are taking college programs in oilfield technical
and business specialties, Vince Matteo told me. As president and CEO of the
Williamsport/Lycoming County Chamber of Commerce, he’s witnessed the
transformation.
“98 percent of the change has been positive,” he says.
Contributions to United Way are increasing each year, county infrastructure has
improved enormously, and environmental impacts are minimal.
Visits to several Anadarko Petroleum drilling and
fracking sites explained why. The operations are far more high-tech than what I
had seen previously on rigs in the Rocky Mountains, off the Louisiana and
California coasts, and last fall in Alberta’s oil sands region. Hydraulic
fracturing was first employed in Kansas in 1947. But steadily improved fracking
technology is now combined with computers, down-hole sensors and microseismic
instruments. Drilling equipment, lets crews send a bit 6,000 feet down and
8,000 feet laterally into Marcellus Shale formations – and end up within three
feet of their intended target!
The operations are conducted from atop a multi-layered
felt and impermeable plastic pad, surrounded by a berm, to keep unlikely spills
from contaminating farm and forest land. Multiple wells are drilled from a
single pad and “kicked out” horizontally in various directions. The drilling
rig is skidded a short distance to four or five more locations around the pad,
the entire array is fractured at high pressure, and short wellheads are
installed to collect natural gas and send it to local and interstate pipeline
networks.
A nearby impoundment is also lined with plastic to hold
water for fracturing operations. Topsoil removed to prepare the pad and pond is
stored nearby. As operations are finished, the land is reclaimed, topsoil is
replaced, and local grasses, flowers and shrubs are planted, to create meadows
for deer and wild turkeys –- or anything else the landowners prefer. To launch
20-40 years of hydrocarbon production from a 15,000-acre (23-square-mile) area
requires barely 2% surface disturbance, most of it for just a few months.
Once the work is completed, the area quietly and
unobtrusively produces decades of energy and revenue for farmers, wildlife
organizations, hunting groups, and local, state and federal treasuries.
Hydraulic fracturing takes place some 5,500 feet (almost
four Empire State Buildings) below the water table. To prevent groundwater
contamination, pipe penetrating the first seven hundred feet is surrounded by
layers of steel casing and specialized cement. During the drilling and
fracturing process, even rainwater collected from the drill pad is saved and
used. Some of the water used to fracture the shale is also recovered during gas
production; this “flowback” water itself is filtered, treated and reused.
The hydraulic fracturing process requires some 2.0-4.2
million gallons of water per well, but fresh or brackish water works equally
well. A 2013 Ceres study concluded that hydraulic fracturing consumed 75
billion gallons of water per year on average nationwide, in 2011 and 2012. EPA
says fracking consumes 70-140 billion gallons a year nationally, and the Texas
Water Resources Board estimates that Lone Star State oil and natural gas
companies used 27 billion gallons of water for fracking statewide in 2011.
However, Texas homeowners used 495 billion gallons for lawns and gardens, the
TWRB found (18 times what fracking consumed), and household landscape
irrigation nationwide consumes nearly 3 trillion gallons of water annually,
according to EPA (21-43 times the EPA and Ceres estimates for hydraulic
fracturing).
Even more revealing, according to the U.S. Department of
Energy, fracking requires just 0.6 to 5.8 gallons of water per million Btu of
energy produced. By comparison, “renewable” and “sustainable” corn-based
ethanol requires 2,510 to 29,100 gallons per million Btu of usable energy --
and biodiesel from soybeans consumes an astounding and unsustainable 14,000 to
75,000 gallons of water per million Btu!
As to chemical contamination, fracturing fluids are 99.5%
water and sand. Moreover, the 0.5% chemicals portion is increasingly basic,
nontoxic household or kitchen stuff. Anadarko’s chemicals today are only
“slickeners” (to help the sand get further into cracks created by the
pressurized water) and “biocides” that prevent bacterial buildup in the well
pipes. Which chemicals are used for any single well in the United States can be
determined by going to www.FracFocus.org -- and every EPA, DOE and other study
conducted to date has concluded that fracking has never contaminated a single
US well.
Hydraulic fracturing has created 1.7 million new direct
and indirect jobs in the United States, with the total likely to rise to 3
million jobs over the next seven years, IHS Global Insight reports. It has
injected billions into North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and other state
economies. It’s added $62 billion to federal and state treasuries, with that
total expected to rise to $111 billion by 2020. By 2035, U.S. oil and natural
gas operations could provide over $5 trillion in cumulative capital
expenditures into the economy, while generating over $2.5 trillion in
cumulative additional government revenues.
In the process, fracking has revived America’s
petrochemical, steel and other manufacturing industries and reinvigorated
American ingenuity and economic competitiveness. One shudders to think how
awful the US unemployment, part-time employment and economic picture would be
in its absence.
This game-changing technology has also transformed US, EU
and global political equations and power structures. With the United States,
Argentina, Britain, China, Israel and many other countries collectively sitting
atop centuries’ worth of now economically producible oil and natural gas, OPEC
and Russia can no longer control prices and threaten customer nations. For poor
developing countries, natural gas from shale provides fuel to generate abundant,
affordable electricity that will transform lives.
Then why do Hollywood and radical greens celebrate
misleading films like Gasland and Promised Land -- even after Phelim McAleer
and Ann McElhinney’s documentary FrackNation completely demolished Gasland‘s lies
and half-truths? Why do outfits like Food and Water Watch and the Sierra Club,
and ill-informed activists like Yoko Ono, continue to scream hysterical
nonsense about the process?
Follow the money -- and the ideology. Big Eco is big
business, and big egos. It seeks ever more power and ever greater control over
our lives. Fracking threatens all of that.
“What you get in your mailbox is a never-ending stream of
crisis-related shrill material designed to evoke emotions,” former National
Audubon Society COO Dan Beard once admitted, “so that you will sit down and
write a check” -- or click the “Donate Now” button. This
multi-billion-dollar-per-year industry would collapse without the crisis du
jour it conjures up, with help from the news media, politicians and regulators.
Deep Ecology adherents view fossil fuels as evil
incarnate, and believe fervently in “peak oil” and Climate Armageddon. They are
frustrated that fracking guarantees a hydrocarbon renaissance and predominance
for decades to come, and helps reduce carbon dioxide emissions without massive
economic sacrifice.
They also tend to be well-off and clueless about the true
sources of modern living standards. They have disturbingly callous attitudes
about people who have lost their jobs because of Mr. Obama’s war on coal and
cheap energy -- and about poor rural New York families that are barely hanging
onto their farms, unable to tap the Marcellus Shale riches beneath their land, because
Governor Cuomo refuses to lift his moratorium on fracking. Many don’t give a
spotted owl hoot about the world’s impoverished billions, whose hope for better
lives depends on the reliable, affordable electricity that “frack gas” can help
bring.
These shameful attitudes hurt people and planet. We need
to frack for a better, cleaner, happier world!
No comments:
Post a Comment