Nothing will stop the fraking. It's simply too profitable for Congress to do something about it (one of the few bright areas in a dismal economy), and the courts have gutted the environmental laws too much for the courts to do anything about it. It's an intrinsically attractive business: the product is something (energy) that's extremely valuable and has exploding demand, and many of the inherent costs of creating that product can be foisted onto people in the surrounding community that have little recourse, legal or otherwise, to do anything about it.
Fracking will end when the oil/gas is gone. In its wake it will leave behind the mess the energy and chemical industries have left all over the country: polluted, barely usable land in economically devastated regions (which is what happens after the oil is gone and the companies leave) that must be cleaned up at enormous public expense: http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1]
Every story is some form of the same thing (plug: http://cleanupdepue.org). Company moves into little town. Residents rejoice in the new jobs. Company leaves when the land is polluted and used up. Property values plummet, and the town is left with no jobs and no ability to sell their houses and move out. The western midwest is in the first part of that story right now, hopefully they'll be smart enough and not have to see what the second part looks like 30-50 years from now.
[1] Incidentally, I think one of the great weaknesses of our country is that Congress sits in D.C., a city that is insulated from pretty much every substantial problem present in the rest of the country. In this particular context, it's a city that has never seen much industrialization and which has historically been surrounded by low-intensity agriculture in every direction (now: vast swaths of suburbia). I think we'd see a different attention to environmental issues if we relocated Congress to say the industrial New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania coast...
This is basically what happened in the rust belt with steel. Now another "boom" is happening with fracking. The people still haven't learned. You wouldn't believe how many gas workers are driving new trucks, buying toys, etc. I bet very few are putting any of this money in savings. When the fracking leaves we'll be in the same place we were when the steel mills shut down. Just waiting for the next economic boom to come.
What are left of the mills are pretty much rusty wastelands but I don't think quite as much pollution (at least in the ground) as we will see from fracking.
Prophetically, and maybe ironically, fracking service infrastructure in my hometown, Youngstown, Ohio, is being built on the same land that the steel mills sat abandoned for decades.
I'm on the Ohio border near Pittsburgh. Most of our infrastructure isn't reusing steel mill but some of it is. The thing I worry about more than the ground pollution are explosions. We've already seen a few but I don't think anything like that fertilizer plant yet. I have a pipeline being put in probably 300 yards from my house and those things scare the shit out of me.
I lost any faith in these companies doing any sort of sound geological work when a company disposing of fracking water placed their injection well near a fault and caused a rash of earthquakes in the area the well was built.
I'm not inherently against the idea of increased natural gas production, including fracking, but the lack of effort put forth by the industry to recognize and mitigate the risks involved has completely turned me off the practice.
It costs money to recognize and mitigate the risks. Under the current legal regime, it costs very little money to let the negative effects happen because other people will bear the costs of those effects. I.e. it's totally rational for companies under the existing regime to fail to take adequate precautions.
... because other people will bear the costs of those effects.
Yup.
Environmental protection is an accounting problem. Convert those externalities into line items on a company's profit & loss statement, voila, no more exploitation.
Yeah, it isn't really that profitable, especially given that a large portion of US gas is effectively land-locked. Put in some transmission to ports and a few LNG terminals / ships, and US gas will reach some equilibrium with European/Asian prices.
It's inaccurate to group together hydraulic fracturing and traditional oil drilling in terms of environmental damage. The regulations and safety procedures for oil are leaps and bounds beyond those of hydraulic fracturing.
My girlfriend is in charge for assessing the environmental impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline, and she recently spent two weeks rerouting KXL because she and her team discovered beetles in the proposed pipeline corridor.
>It's inaccurate to group together hydraulic fracturing and traditional oil drilling in terms of environmental damage.
No it isn't, fracking is a technique that is used to increase the output of a 'traditional oil well' and actually, oil/gas drilling has been ruining surface water for a long time, too. In the past it tended to happen to people who owned the surface as well as the minerals, and who were often happy to take an additional check for their trouble (or not), to go along with their mineral check, and have some bottled water delivered, or hook up to a community water district (yay, they can afford it now). It is easier to get over the loss of a water well when you're making five or six figures a month in O&G royalties. Fracking isn't new either. The only thing new is fracking for shale gas, which is usually deeper/higher pressure, and I guess probably needs better well casings and cement. The problem being that many of these wells are only barely economical or a gamble, to start with (thanks Aubrey McClendon).
>discovered beetles in the proposed pipeline corridor.
Yeah, every now and then an EPA guy scores a win for team EPA. I'd bet that it is the exception, not the rule.
The wins, unfortunately, tend to be random, as a result of the sorry state of our environmental law. The people at the EPA don't target oil pipelines for rerouting due to beetles instead of focusing on whether fracking is polluting groundwater because they care so much about beetles, or because they've already won on everything more important. Industry takes examples like this to show "look at how out of control the EPA has gotten!" because bystanders thing: "gee, I care about the environment, but all that work to protect a few beetles is a bit much!"
But that paints a misleading picture. The EPA goes for the beetles because the Endangered Species Act is one of the few laws with bright-line rules that hasn't been watered down over the last 30-40 years. That makes it a good tactical hammer. They've got a limited budget, and they need to hit things like this that are a slam-dunk in court instead of broader issues that could get mired for years in debates between expert witnesses and thousands of reports being thrown back and forth.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Australia CSG wells are often operated under a coal mining permit (vs oil/gas drilling permit) where the drilling operations, casing requirements, testing/audit trails etc. designed to protect aquifers (and well integrity) are nowhere near as strict as conventional oil & gas.
Hell, the crews drilling CSG don't even have basic understanding of well control theory (or enough instrumentation on the rig to detect problems) - hence the occasional uncontrolled blowouts, mitigated only by the fact that these CSG wells are slimhole vs conventional.
I'd much rather live next to a fracked conventional oil & gas well which has been cased & cemented according to the design of certified petroleum engineers, pressure-tested with all the results lodged properly with government authorities to depths far exceeding any of the local aquifers - than a dodgy CSG well cemented by amateurs who work to rough guidelines "appropriate for the area", who write more documentation on their invoicing than on any actual data collection...
Source: I worked with an oil & gas service company 2006-2008...
Here's a radical idea: in today's day and age, do we really need Congress to be in a centralized location at all?
Yes, there are practical and security obstacles to governance via permanent telepresence, but there are many upsides as well. Aside from the enourmous cost and disruption to existing practices, is there anything that makes it completely unfeasible? I imagine many representatives would much rather live in their home state than move to DC or constantly commute.
I personally think we should distribute the whole federal government. A side effect of the size of the federal government is that a ton of money flows into the Washington Metro area, which I don't think is fair.
Much of the infrastructure is already in place. The federal courts and the DOJ are already distributed. The SEC, EPA, etc, already have field offices in major cities across the country. Work could be pushed down from HQ into those field offices, giving them greater autonomy and moving jobs from DC to other parts of the country.
Fracking will end when the oil/gas is gone. In its wake it will leave behind the mess the energy and chemical industries have left all over the country: polluted, barely usable land in economically devastated regions (which is what happens after the oil is gone and the companies leave) that must be cleaned up at enormous public expense: http://www.epa.gov/superfund.[1]
Every story is some form of the same thing (plug: http://cleanupdepue.org). Company moves into little town. Residents rejoice in the new jobs. Company leaves when the land is polluted and used up. Property values plummet, and the town is left with no jobs and no ability to sell their houses and move out. The western midwest is in the first part of that story right now, hopefully they'll be smart enough and not have to see what the second part looks like 30-50 years from now.
[1] Incidentally, I think one of the great weaknesses of our country is that Congress sits in D.C., a city that is insulated from pretty much every substantial problem present in the rest of the country. In this particular context, it's a city that has never seen much industrialization and which has historically been surrounded by low-intensity agriculture in every direction (now: vast swaths of suburbia). I think we'd see a different attention to environmental issues if we relocated Congress to say the industrial New Jersey/Delaware/Pennsylvania coast...