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Without fracking, we'd still be fighting wars in the Middle East.
We put in a solar roof last year. We own a Prius. I'm hoping I can afford a plug-in hybrid minivan in a couple of years. We're trying to grow more of our own food. I'm hunting for meat.
But fracking is a miracle technology that has brought our troops home from foreign wars. Cheap fracked natural gas has revived the domestic plastics and chemical industries. It's brought hundreds of thousands of great jobs to North Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, etc. It's bringing in foreign exchange as the U.S. becomes a major energy exporter.
Yes, it would be a disaster if we shut down the fracking. For us.
Dick Cheney once said "the American way of life is non-negotiable." He was dead wrong. The "American way of life" is negotiable... and breakable, because once you take away the cheap oil, it is no longer what it once was..
Shale oil allowed us to continue the euphoric consumer debt orgy for a decade or so longer, but at the expense of a much more brutal crash later down the line.
Fracking has bought a lot of oil to the market, but it's not the type of oil we need... We need cheap, easy to extract oil- shale is expensive, difficult to extract oil- and look out below, the shale oil industry is on the verge of collapse, which will be devastating for the US and global economy.
Here's what the "green/renewable" energy fruitcakes don't understand:
1. There is nothing renewable whatsoever about solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles
2. You can't have any of these things without a cheap, abundant oil economy
3. There is no substitute for oil. No other energy source we have available to us is so dense, transportable, versatile, convenient.
"To suggest the sandy soil is from fracking, is just wrong." Perhaps you misunderstood the comment.
The process of frac-ing uses huge amounts of sand:
"The Growing Demand for Frac Sand. With recent higher oil prices, activity in shale basins across the United States is increasing. To keep up with the production pace, frac sand demand is expected to climb accordingly, increasing to 115 million tons in 2019, up from 82 million tons in 2017." link
The frac-ing process also uses huge amounts of water:
"An average hydraulic fracturing job uses 3-7 million gallons of water, equating to 150,000 - 350,000 gallons of chemicals per well". link
All of that frac-ing fluid (sand/chemicals/and now contaminated water) used the the frac-ing process must go somewhere, it does not stay in the frac-ed hole...it is captured (if it doesn't leak on the land), and is then injected in deep wells...supposedly below the fresh water aquifers that we use for our drinking water.
Just like oil, water is a non-renewable resource. If we keep fouling our clean water supply in the quest for fossil fuels...ya gotta ask yourself, when it gets down to nut-cutting time....do I need oil to survive or do I need water....
Dick Cheney once said "the American way of life is non-negotiable." He was dead wrong. The "American way of life" is negotiable... and breakable, because once you take away the cheap oil[/b], it is no longer what it once was..
Shale oil allowed us to continue the euphoric consumer debt orgy for a decade or so longer, but at the expense of a much more brutal crash later down the line.
Fracking has bought a lot of oil to the market, but it's not the type of oil we need... We need cheap, easy to extract[/b] oil- shale is expensive, difficult to extract[/b] oil- and look out below, the shale oil industry is on the verge of collapse, which will be devastating for the US and global economy.
Here's what the "green/renewable" energy fruitcakes don't understand:
1. There is nothing[/b] renewable whatsoever about solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles
2. You can't have any of these things without a cheap, abundant oil economy
3. There is no substitute[/b] for oil. No other energy source we have available to us is so dense, transportable, versatile, convenient.
First you bash fracking, then you bash renewables. What are you trying to say?
Regarding the cost of fracking, obviously it's affordable or they wouldn't be doing it. 20 years ago, it was prohibitively expensive, but ingenious oil men like Harold Hamm figured out ways to do it economically.
The problem for the fracking industry is the current cheap cost per barrel on global markets. Under $50/barrel, fracking becomes unprofitable. Demand for oil has crashed because of the pandemic.
However, this demand is bound to come back next year as the world economy gets back to normal. And over the long term (20-30 years) as traditional oil suppliers like Saudi Arabia run low, fracking will play a larger role.
I think it's true, though, that some alternative energy sources will also take over from oil/gas in the next 30-40 years. Electricity demand is skyrocketing because of consumer gadgets, computer servers, and EVs. Solar electric is rising to meet demand, so the demand for new electric power plants has been flat. The biggest change in central power production is that coal fired plants are switching over to natural gas.
Thermal-solar power plants are operating in the Southwest (Arizona) and it's likely they'll expand; the advantage of molten salt is that it continues running the generators after dark. Meanwhile, as pv panels continue to drop in price, home solar adoption will grow to the point where probably most new construction will come with PV on the roof, and millions of older homes will be retrofitted.
Small, safe nuclear fission is making a splash as well. America became paralyzed over nuclear back in the late 70s, and no new plants were built for decades. But, the technology has greatly advanced, and safety is much better today. I believe the future will be nuclear. And maybe in 50 years, we'll finally have fusion.
A time will come when oil and gas will be used primarily for plastics and petrochemicals.
But today, we need oil and gas and fracking is the obvious and superior way to get it.
First you bash fracking, then you bash renewables. What are you trying to say?
Regarding the cost of fracking, obviously it's affordable or they wouldn't be doing it. 20 years ago, it was prohibitively expensive, but ingenious oil men like Harold Hamm figured out ways to do it economically.
The problem for the fracking industry is the current cheap cost per barrel on global markets. Under $50/barrel, fracking becomes unprofitable. Demand for oil has crashed because of the pandemic.
However, this demand is bound to come back next year as the world economy gets back to normal. And over the long term (20-30 years) as traditional oil suppliers like Saudi Arabia run low, fracking will play a larger role.
I think it's true, though, that some alternative energy sources will also take over from oil/gas in the next 30-40 years. Electricity demand is skyrocketing because of consumer gadgets, computer servers, and EVs. Solar electric is rising to meet demand, so the demand for new electric power plants has been flat. The biggest change in central power production is that coal fired plants are switching over to natural gas.
Thermal-solar power plants are operating in the Southwest (Arizona) and it's likely they'll expand; the advantage of molten salt is that it continues running the generators after dark. Meanwhile, as pv panels continue to drop in price, home solar adoption will grow to the point where probably most new construction will come with PV on the roof, and millions of older homes will be retrofitted.
Small, safe nuclear fission is making a splash as well. America became paralyzed over nuclear back in the late 70s, and no new plants were built for decades. But, the technology has greatly advanced, and safety is much better today. I believe the future will be nuclear. And maybe in 50 years, we'll finally have fusion.
A time will come when oil and gas will be used primarily for plastics and petrochemicals.
But today, we need oil and gas and fracking is the obvious and superior way to get it.
Pure fantasy. I've said this many times but it bears repeating because it's so important:
There is no substitute for oil. No other energy source we have available to us is so dense, versatile, convenient, and transportable.
And even if we did find a miraculous new energy source that could replace oil, it would take a full 3 decades to transition our infrastructure onto that new energy source.
We don't have that much time.
And stop thinking in terms of dollars. Instead, think in terms of thermodynamics- how much energy is left in a barrel once it's been extracted, refined, transported, and distributed? In the past, the amount of energy left was very high. Now it is low and will be approaching zero here sometime in the next decade. That is the difference between cheap and expensive oil. An oil price of $1M/barrel wouldn't make shale oil a viable business operation.
Pure fantasy. I've said this many times but it bears repeating because it's so important:
There is no substitute for oil. No other energy source we have available to us is so dense, versatile, convenient, and transportable.
And even if we did find a miraculous new energy source that could replace oil, it would take a full 3 decades to transition our infrastructure onto that new energy source.
We don't have that much time.
And stop thinking in terms of dollars. Instead, think in terms of thermodynamics- how much energy is left in a barrel once it's been extracted, refined, transported, and distributed? In the past, the amount of energy left was very high. Now it is low and will be approaching zero here sometime in the next decade. That is the difference between cheap and expensive oil. An oil price of $1M/barrel wouldn't make shale oil a viable business operation.
That last passage is crazy.
Oil's EROI is 15-25 to 1.
We have some older conventional shallow wells that likely sport EROI numbers in the 40s.
__________
On the thermodynamics side you are just out to lunch. I'll find some numbers.
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The writers will have to come up with another expletive
