It’s fair to say that climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing our planet, and while much attention is directed towards solutions to the problems it presents, perhaps there’s less attention given to the the other side of the equation in the hydrocarbon industry. For example we all think we know something about hydraulic fracking wells, but how much do we really know?
[John Thurmond] is a geologist who has recently completed a long career in the oil industry, and he gave an informative talk on the matter at the summer’s EMF Camp in the UK. It makes for an interesting watch, as he leads the viewer through the process in detail, before discussing what should and shouldn’t cause worry.
We learn that fracking has two parts: first the hydraulic fracking itself, and then the re-injection of the toxic fracking well water released from underground along with the oil or gas. It seems the water released from the rocks a 10,000 ft depth contains all manner of toxic and even radioactive compounds, and the usual means of disposal is to inject it back into the ground at a much lower depth. He makes the point that while the hazards associated with the fracking are low, those of the re-injection are high.
The talk finishes up with perhaps the most interesting point, by looking at the nature of opposition to fracking, or indeed any other controversial development. Such things are inevitably surrounded by a swirling mess of half-truths, and his point is that identifying those easily deflected as not true is key to understanding the whole thing. It’s presented from an expert and factual perspective that’s so often lacking in this arena, and thus we think it’s worth a watch.
A wee bit over the top with that troll. You need to refine your technique and start considering your audience.
I…. Dont even know where to start here.
Killing off all whites is wrong on the same ethical basis that killing of any other race / ethnicity / people group is.
The fact that you’re arguing to preserve one race by killing off others indicates a severe moral realitivism problem.
Also I bet a 90% chance that this is a troll post.
If so, sure I guess I bit the bait. For the sake of everyone else reading this, not all conservatives think this way. I myself am one and this is a repulsive viewpoint that I very seldom encounter outside of the internet (trolling be like).
Also this has nothing to do with fracking lol.
99.93% chance if you know how to properly analyze for troll posts. I’m not a conservative but I am a master troll and damned well know trolling when I see it; false flag or otherwise.
Does he go into how wastewater injection, and to a smaller extent, the fracking process, often leads to induced earthquakes? Because if he doesn’t, he really should.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/does-fracking-cause-earthquakes
Yes, he does. Watch the video.
Hey buddy this is the internet, you can’t expect people to actually read things or watch things before commenting on them!
At least they admitted, implicitly, they didn’t watch the video :D
Ain’t nobody got time for that!
The earthquakes are giant phenomena involving very large volumes of ground. The video notes that the fracked ground initially may shake locally through a low magnitude quake. What it doesn’t say is that the fracked ground has larger damping capacity and less pressure energy accumulation capacity. Therefore fracking reduces the ability of the ground to accumulate and suddenly release giant quantities of energy, reducing a little the possibillities for large quakes. A little, because the quakes involve very large ground volumes. (Note: this is theoretical prediction – anyone to prove it?)
Just for posterity, the deleted comment (and 2 replies countering it, one mine) was a troll very literally suggesting ethnic cleansing / genocide in a rant unrelated to fracking.
Sometimes comments deserve to be deleted :)
And we’re just supposed to trust you?
I mean tbh I’d be very ok if it wasn’t deleted. I’m of the opinion that it’s generally better to let a comment like that be responded to than delete it.
There have been comments that have been deleted before which I would have much preferred to stay arround.
In this case, im 99% sure that someone was trying to be as outrageous and rage baity as possible.
Unrelated, but I’ve thought about writing a script that archives comments off of here just to permanently log the deleted ones. Would be an interesting data collection project.
(I guess more succinctly, I’m against shutting down dissenting opinions if genuinely held. But if you’re just trying to create an argument for the humor of it… then shut up)
Dude overshot for his audience. Trolling is like The Price Is Right, as close to $1 as you can get without going over. Spit too much fire and people know for sure you’re just trolling and won’t engage except to laugh at your lack of skills.
I think you have the percentage backwards, or at least you have the majority on the wrong side. I think that actual “trolling” (baiting a response just for the hell of it) is quite a bit rarer (and requires more skill, higher bar for entry ironically enough) than people with low impulse control who have simply been driven slowly and inexorably insane by internet access.
Maybe a 70/30 split, favoring the rabid crazies over cynical trolls
Yeah but now I’m curious…
Complete trash. First, the frac water isn’t released it is pumped into the wellbore to crack the formation. Then the water circulates to the surface carrying with it naturally occurring radioactive material from the rock and other natural elements. I don’t care if this person worked in oil & gas for a long time. A lengthy career doesn’t equate to a knowledgeable and competent professional.
How does the water circulate back to the surface?
I’m genuinely curious because I’ve a well 100 metres deep on one side of my garden and ive a septic tank less than 25 metres deep on the other side and it rains constantly where I live and I don’t see floods of faeces (and I definitely go number 2 a lot!)
Because Septic Tanks specifically prevent the release of the solid waste by design, they only release the liquids.
That’s why your septic tank has to be pumped every few years.
There is also both code and best practices for separation and grade between leach fields and wells.
Assuming Collie147 lives outside urban England his garden is likely big enough.
Safe assumption, septic tanks don’t work with high population density. Reciprocal of mass transit.
I’d still want to have the well water tested.
You point out some factual inaccuracy (or at least misleading phrasing) in the article’s summary, which is a fair criticism, but I don’t see where you disagree with anything said in the actual video (or any sign “the person who worked in oil & gas” doesn’t know what they’re talking about).
He spends a reasonable amount of time on the same point I think you’re making – the frac water itself is quite benign stuff and is used in a fairly sparing and targeted way, but the act of cracking the formation can release whatever toxic and/or radioactive materials are down there, either in the host rock or in brine solutions.
As usual, sure, it’s ironic that a lot of environmentalists are afraid of the “toxic manmade chemicals” used in fracking and not the “all natural” stuff that’ll actually kill them, but either way, the end product is potentially toxic and needs to be disposed of safely.
Am I missing something? Genuinely curious- I’ve got relatives who’ve worked in the industry but am certainly not an expert myself.
I’m happy with the video. Good presentation style, I know more than before.
My key takeaway is that some aspects are a much higher concern than what most of the discussion is typically about. Nothing wrong about that.
But certainly, there is likely more and more detailed perspectives. Please share your sources that give a deeper understanding!
What’d I miss? Was someone being fractious?
Only a fraction of the time.
Only one of the numerous deadly challenge…
IT is not ‘oil production’ but ‘oil extraction’.
production was a few tens of millions of years ago.
“climate change is real and caused by humans”
A statement without meaning. Climate has always changed and is always changing and humans always had some effect on (local) climate. Nobody disagrees with that.
There is no climate emergency however.
Are we gonna troll? Take your bullshit to Twitter my man.
It’s not trolling if it is a sincerely held belief (regardless of whether it’s correct or incorrect)
Your own statement is incredibly misleading – No climate scientist denies that there is natural changes to the climate. That’s a really dumb take.
The issue and the emergency is the direct impact humans are having on how quickly it changes and int what direction, which is both recorded and alarmingly rapid and globally impacting, not local.
“which is both recorded and alarmingly rapid and globally impacting”
Please show me the recorded climate emergency. There is no acceleration in sea level and no increase in natural disasters and no rapid increase in temperature either. The small increase in temperature and CO2 has decreased human deaths from climate and has greened the earth.
I’m not saying there won’t be an emergency in the future, just countering your point that it is “alarmingly rapid”. There is literally zero evidence for that. Zero.
“Carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere”:
“This is an increase of 50% since the start of the Industrial Revolution…”
“A study of humans exposed in 2.5 hour sessions demonstrated significant negative effects on cognitive abilities at concentrations as low as 0.1% (1000 ppm) CO2 likely due to CO2 induced increases in cerebral blood flow.”
It can explaine, why it is sooooo popular to be stupid idiots right now…
“This is an increase of 50% since the start of the Industrial Revolution…”
Correct. And every 100% increase (doubling) leads to about 1.1C increase.
“significant negative effects on cognitive abilities at concentrations as low as 0.1% (1000 ppm)”
Up to 1000ppm there are no issues. When using Heat recovery ventilation you can have the same air quality indoors as outdoors in terms of freshness, CO2 en humidity without losing on the heating/cooling bill. Indoor CO2 scrubbers are also an option.
“It can explaine[sic]”
None of your claims addressed the “alarmingly rapid” climate emergency people claim there is.
The room for disagreement is only about what the consequences are going to be and what actions are thus reasonable to take. That’s a global policy question.
But the temperature record is a matter of science, and while there’s some room for arguing around the margins, it’s pretty damn clear.
My favorite presentation: https://xkcd.com/1732/ Scroll down for the upturn. Try to ignore the dotted lines, though, they’re forecasts, but the solid line is solid.
And whether it’s “alarming” or not is in the eye of the beholder. But it’s absolutely real, absolutely measured, and it represents a real step change in slope that occurs right around the time oil started being widely used.
Here, I don’t think there is any room for disagreement, aside from just running away from thermometers.
“Scroll down for the upturn.”
Ahh, the infamous hockey stick. When Mann’s source code was leaked, it was discovered that any data you fed into it produced one. And we won’t get into the manipulation of temperature records, where NOAA has been taking old temperature data and lowering the numbers, and taking more recent data and raising the numbers. And it might be embarrassing to discover all the climate recording stations that have been invalidated over the last 20 years by, for example, having parking lots or even new buildings full of window AC units blowing hot air right on the stations.
“The solid line is solid”
It is based on a (bad, highly contested) computer model, and also the dotted line for the entire graph above circa ~1850 is a reconstruction. As the infographic itself admits, a hockeystick spike like the one shown in the current era would be completely smoothed over and lost in this reconstructed temperature average.
Is this a positive rebuttal of anything? No, not exactly. But “expert-trusting” gravitates towards things like chain-mailing infographics from reddit or a webcomic, which isn’t actually very sophisticated. More subtle disagreements and discussions about the details are completely verboten, especially among experts (who simply lose expert status the instant they point out problems). This is a recipe for junk science. And people historically love apocalypse revelations, it’s like a psychological tic inherent to the brain of Homo Sapiens.
Using quote marks is normally intended to imply the sentence comes from the article.
It’s a quote from the video in the article, not from the text in the article. Timestamp 49:47.
I always read the whole article and watch the whole video before commenting.
“What’s up, Pern” “Nothing C, just building an asteroid magnet” “Won’t that lead to us being pulverized by big heavy f’in rocks?” “No need to worry C, asteroid impacts are perfectly naturally and have always been part of our mineral rich society!” “Well golly!”, said C, “Nobody disagrees with that; it’s no asteroid emergency!”.
Soon after C’s house was pulverized by an asteroid. There were no survivors. Probably for the best, all things considered.
I bet that sounded smart in your head.
You can see an asteroid coming and predict it’s trajectory. You can calculate its trajectory within a certain margin of uncertainty.
Climate on the other hand is much harder to predict. All past doom predictions have failed so far. I predict slight temperature increases and slow and constant sea level rise.
O so everyone else’s predictions are too simple for the complexity of the issue. Yet your gut feeling prediction, in no way based upon any calculations or analysis using actual data,is the one we should trust? Please help me make sense of that line of reasoning.
Why not break it down to a risk analysis. If you are right, but we act like it is real, what is the cost to the planet? Some money wasted on things that turned out to be gimmicks and a heavy focus on efficiency that benefits everyone involved. The cost is money.
Now flip it. You are wrong and we act like it is not real. We accelerate carbon emissions and bring back some cfcs even. We ignore all signs of things getting worse and just keep making the problem worse. What is the cost? Widespread famine, deaths from natural disasters, mass migrations due to loss of habitable lands, global economic collapse due to the above effects and others. And that is just the start of it. Wars likely start over dwindling resource availability. Etc etc.
Doesn’t that make the answer simple? Isn’t avoiding that worth the potential for unnecessary costs due to green initiatives?
“so everyone else’s predictions are too simple for the complexity of the issue.”
I didn’t write that. They are not too simple, they are simply wrong. A simple linear model is more likely to be correct, then their biased overly complex models.
“Why not break it down to a risk analysis. If you are right, but we act like it is real, what is the cost to the planet?”
Millions of deaths due to economic damage and loss of freedom. Every percentage decrease in economic growth leads to millions of people dying and suffering. Life years lost is a real cost. Freedom lost is a real cost. You pretend there is no cost to climate fascism.
“What is the cost? Widespread famine, deaths from natural disasters, mass migrations due to loss of habitable lands, global economic collapse due to the above effects and others. And that is just the start of it. Wars likely start over dwindling resource availability. Etc etc.”
This has been completely debunked. Instead of more famines we have higher crop yields. Instead of more deaths from natural disasters(per capita) we have fewer. Climate alarmist policy lead to economic collapse, not energy diversity and energy freedom. More wars are fought now because of climate policies.
The frac fluid is pumped down the hole. The water is then pumped back out. At first it’s mostly frac fluid water, then gradually you start getting more oil & gas and less formation water.
The entire subject is far more complex than this short talk. In Arkansas where I live, the gas is at about 2000’ and the cracks are horizontal because of the shallow depth. The injection wells are at 13,000’. We are on a splay of the triple junction that forms the New Madrid and the Mississippi embayment. Very long history of minor earthquakes. When they started water disposal, the number grew tremendously. So now the water is trucked outside the corridor underlain by the New Madrid splay.
As a career oil & gas guy, I could quibble about a lot, but this is probably about as much as can fit in a short talk. The details omitted would take hours to explain. My sole quibble is he didn’t explain how incredibly dangerous a frac site is when they are working. 5000 psi air lines and other extreme pressure lines. A broken air line will cut a man in two in an instant. The safety protocols are very thick books and everyone is expected to know their section of that tome word for word. The Macondo/New Horizon blow out is the consequence of making a mistake. That should never have happened as they knew they were in trouble for quite a while, but no one would take responsibility for killing a $100+ million well. So it cost over $20 billion to clean up the mess instead.
I started when “deep water” was over 600’. I was immensely proud we reached over 10,000’ without a major accident. But then BP bought the companies I worked for and decided that the Amoco and ARCO safety protocols were too expensive. And learned the hard way why those companies did things the way we did before BP took over.
The really amazing part of “unconventionials” is the drilling. Keep the well in the center of a 200’ interval for 1-2 miles and drill the well in 5-7 days. Move the rig a few feet and drill another well.
this is one of those things that really highlights the strength of past predictions. i remember being a teen in the 1990s, reading about peak oil in Analog Science Fiction & Fact. their columnists were already proactively confronting myths about peak resource theory. yes, the peak for oil gushing out of the ground for free was correctly predicted and has come to pass. they said, with a somewhat apocalyptic tone, that the only way past that peak for fossil fuels is more expensive extraction. things like fracking and tar sands extraction. instead of getting a vast quantity of a reasonably easy-to-use fuel for free, we are burning an ever-increasing fraction of the product just to extract and refine the remaining low quality sources. they pointed out that this would be a disaster because not only are the low quality sources much more polluting to extract, but there’s a vast quantity of it. we will be releasing an increasing amount of co2 into the atmosphere per watt of useful work, if all of these resources are used to their limit.
like Analog’s predictions on food production, i found it kind of doom-and-gloomy at the time. the incredible hurdles that would have to be overcome seemed insurmountable, and the result of surmounting them seemed detrimental. but in both cases, the revolution has come to pass exactly as predicted. the limitations turned out to be more economic than technological, and we have come out the other side with the definitive answer: yes we have the industrial capacity to ravage the entire planet, leaving no stone un-ravaged.
the scale of the accomplishment should give us some hope for the future of ‘geoengineering’. every generation does deal with the problems it faces most acutely. but for now it’s kind of depressing. the market signals that should tell people to change their behavior are being masked by our willingness to externalize some stupendously large costs.
Earth’s been through orders of magnitude worse. Industrial capacity will run out of runway before it has enough time to do fatal damage to a biome that covers an entire celestial body. Even the idea that it will cause the extinction of Sapiens is a bit overwrought and silly. But it would certainly mess up current structures of power and technology, which certain people have far more affinity towards than humanity or life in general anyway.
Man will probably have a significant die-off (of current overproduced and overextended populations which live entirely off unnatural sources of energy and especially fertilizer). This will be dramatic and horrible, but then we’d be left at probably middle ages population levels which would be sustainable for another 200,000 years, and nature would easily deal with ~420-800 ppm co2. It has been ten times that in history and recovered without destroying complex life.
It is either return to pre-industrial society (and have the opportunity for another industrial revolution forever cut off from us) or reaching new worlds, which is fairly unlikely but not impossible. Even with nukes we wouldn’t be able to extinguish all life. Human vanity loves to overestimate its own power, especially its destructive power
At least, not if you’re older than, say, 90.
“It’s fair to say that climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing our planet”
Many will dispute this, but granted I don’t oppose efforts to reduce negative environmental impacts