 |
Musician John Butler in Perth yesterday with Phil Roe, a lawman of the Goolarabooloo people. 'I as an Australian citizen have a duty to protect these things' Picture: Marie Nirme Source: The Australian |
Gas hub protest campaign travels south | The Australian:
THE campaign against Western Australia's most contentious resources project has moved more than 2000km south, to Premier Colin Barnett's doorstep.
Tomorrow's free Concert for the Kimberley has been timed for maximum impact ahead of the March 9 state election, with thousands expected to attend at the port of Fremantle.
Live music will be punctuated by speeches against Woodside's proposed $40 billion gas hub by former Greens leader Bob Brown and the WA Wilderness Society's state co-ordinator Peter Robertson.
"This rally could well prove a turning point in the campaign against the gas hub at James Price Point," Mr Robertson said.
John Butler, Missy Higgins and Ball Park Music will perform as the crowd is invited to send protest emails to state political candidates from their phones via a qr code generator.
Photo Damian Kelly
Posts
20,000 - 25,000 what a day.
ReplyDeleteTodays fraccing news.
ReplyDelete...First, it’s important to keep in mind the distinction between produced water and flowback water.
Flowback water includes all of the fluids used in the fracking process to initially stimulate oil/gas production.
Produced water is defined as the flows associated with ongoing oil/gas production long after the fracking is complete, as has long been the case with all conventional oil/gas wells that never required fracking, since all oil/gas production usually contains a sizable fraction of water.
The water treatment issues for flowback waters and produced waters are thus different.
In particular, flowback waters are contaminated by the proprietary ingredients that fracking operators want to protect for competitive advantage, whereas produced waters contain loadings of the minerals that leach out from the particular oil/gas bearing shale strata being tapped.
(worth remembering that)
.............
EXCELSIOR TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — Three deep hydraulic fracturing wells in northwestern lower Michigan's Kalkaska County have used 42 million gallons of water in the past two years, according to a published report.
"They are gigantic water consumers, and there are enormous wells," said Paul Brady, who lives a few miles away. "I'm concerned about the water, just like everyone else should be."
... It shows that one of the Kalkaska County wells used 21.1 million gallons of water and two others a combined 20.9 million gallons.
...........
A letter to the editor,Cleveland,Ohio,US.
Fracking waste: Injection wells 'reliable and effective' for whom?: letter to the editor
I was pleased to see that The Plain Dealer deemed the illegal dumping of toxic fracking waste front-page material ("Ohio oil and gas driller charged with violating Clean Water Act," Feb. 15) and that the editorial staff sent out a warning about sending this toxic waste to landfills ("Fracking waste warning," Feb. 5). However, there is an elephant in the room that still needs to be addressed.
In a Feb. 17 letter to the editor, Thomas E. Stewart of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association called injection wells "a reliable and effective disposal method" for the liquid waste from hydraulic fracturing. Herein lies the problem: It's reliable and effective for the oil and gas industry. What about the rest of us? Ohio has quickly become a regional dumping ground for the industry's millions of gallons of fracking waste. The waste Ben Lupo's company allegedly dumped was found to have known carcinogens, and the waste being shipped from Pennsylvania was found to be radioactive by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Do we expect that we can inject this toxic waste beneath our feet millions of gallons at a time and it won't be a massive health hazard a generation from now? Have we forgotten the lessons of Love Canal?
Dorothy Faller Olmsted Falls
..........
(...in an appallingly flagrant disregard of environmental law, a renegade operator in Youngstown called Hard Rock Excavating was caught by regulators dumping untold tens of thousands of gallons of untreated wastewater into the Mahoning River (which drains into the Ohio River). The principal of the operation, a Mr. Ben Lupo, is subject to up to three years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines if convicted of violating the Clean Water Act.
(Oh, by the way, even though he was only just recently caught red-handed, this event doesn’t appear to have been the first for Mr. Lupo, who seems to have a long history of illegal water dumping, according to this article by the Vindicator. Not to mention, Mr. Lupo also owns and operates another company, D&L Energy, which was responsible for the injection wells thought to have triggered the seismic activity in Youngstown in late 2011. It’s almost as if Mr. Lupo is waging a one-man public relations demolition derby for the industry.)
If this comes to pass the profits being made with tieing LNG to the high oil price will collapse within 5 years.
ReplyDelete(then we will all get sick and die)
Soon the world will be flooded with oil
...as well as bountiful oilfields in North America, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other producers in the Middle East, there are massive, barely tapped reserves in South America, Africa and the Arctic: not billions of barrels’ worth, but trillions.... according to a Harvard University report put out last year, we are heading for a glut.
The 75-page study, by oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, was based on a field-by-field analysis of most of the major oil exploration and development projects in the world and it predicted a 20% increase in global oil production by 2020.
..
In particular, the report highlighted the deep-water reservoirs in Brazil’s Santos basin, which are thought to hold as much as 150-billion barrels of oil, Venezuela’s “extra-heavy” oil in the Orinoco Belt, estimated at 1.2-trillion barrels, the oil sands in Canada, the Kwanza basin in Angola, and the Bakken and Three Forks fields in North Dakota and Montana in the US, which, Maugeri said, “could become the equivalent of a Persian Gulf-producing country” all on their own.
..
And the reason for this boom? A technological revolution that is transforming the way oil is found and extracted.
“We, as an industry, are now able to see what we had previously not been able to see, and find what we previously had not been able to find,” says Gerald Schotman, Shell’s chief technology officer..
One of the greatest advances, and the procedure that has dominated the headlines in recent years, for good reasons and bad, is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Fracking was actually pioneered in Kansas in the 1940s but it is only recently, thanks to numerous improvements, that it has become economically viable. It means that oil previously thought unreachable is now within our grasp.
..
And nobody is exploiting these advances with more enthusiasm than the US. In just six years, the number of barrels being produced by the Bakken formation, a unit of shale rock stretching from Montana to North Dakota, has increased a hundred-fold — from 6,000 a day to 600,000 a day.
..
The boom in North Dakota is rapidly transforming America from a net importer of oil to a net exporter, thus reducing its dependency on the Middle East. China, Russia and Argentina, impressed by the results in the US, are pushing ahead with their own fracking.
And Linc Energy announced just last month that it was hoping to extract 233-billion barrels of oil from shale rock in the Australian outback, with a potential worth of £13-trillion.
..
Canada is now producing up to 1.9-million barrels a day from oil sand projects, although, like fracking, the process has attracted protests.
Al Gore, the climate campaigner, has described tar sands as “the dirtiest source of liquid fuel you can imagine” and labelled plans to build a major new pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries on the Texas Gulf as “insane”.
The oil boom has also been fuelled by new, more accurate methods of drilling. The invention of horizontal drilling means even if the surface site is several miles off target companies are able to drill downwards and then turn sideways to get to the bottom of a well. A rig 300 miles out at sea can steer a drill down five miles, out five miles, and come within a couple of inches of the bull’s eye.
There is virtually no chance of drilling a dry well; oil companies had a 99% success rate in 2011.
*(unless you're Woodside and it's 100% dusters)*
Companies are drilling deeper than ever before, too. The Yastreb rig on Sakhalin Island, just off the east coast of Russia, has set numerous industry records. Last August, its operators announced they had drilled the world’s longest extended-reach well — nearly 15km down. That is deeper than Mount Everest is high.
Technology has an unstoppable forward momentum. What seems mind-boggling will soon seem old-fashioned.