Fracking: Good, Bad or Ugly?

thisisnotaspoon – Member

Wowsers, taking just one of those nasty big bold arrows pointing at Call me Dave, who would have thought that someone who used to work at Centrica is now a government advisory on energy. I mean employing people who used to be employed in the industry to advise on it? Really?

As much as I’m uneasy about the level of influence industry people have within government, one of the criticisms you hear over and over of the useless **** Michael Gove is that he’s never taught. (the other is that he’s a useless ****) And it does seem like sometimes it’s the same people saying both…

But still, anyone who doesn’t believe the current government and associates has suspicious links with some parts of business is very, very trusting. (see: Peter Davies)

Re fracking, I’m dubious about how well we’re going to do it. But mostly, I’m seeing an extension of the carbon-based economy which we already know is going to **** us, even with just the amount of hydrocarbons we already have on hand. So releasing and burning even more just seems incredibly moronic.

I’ve just watched the 1944 Pressburger/Powell film A Canterbury Tale, for which the Kent Weald forms an almost-mythical backdrop.

How cheaply we sell this country’s landscape. Shame on us.

Re fracking, I’m dubious about how well we’re going to do it. But mostly, I’m seeing an extension of the carbon-based economy which we already know is going to **** us, even with just the amount of hydrocarbons we already have on hand. So releasing and burning even more just seems incredibly moronic.

makes you wonder why the YES campaign in Scotland is based on selling lots of oil and keeping the tax revenues 😉

im sorry thisisnotaspoon, i am trying to remain open minded but if you think deepwater horizon is an example of a ‘happy ending’ from the self regulated industry of petrochemical accidents then you are putting me firmly in the NO camp.
…..not that my opinion means much in this country of course

big_n_daft – Member

makes you wonder why the YES campaign in Scotland is based on selling lots of oil and keeping the tax revenues

Just being realistic- genie’s out of the bottle, we’re going to burn oil til it runs out, and then mourn the waste of it as a feedstock.

But it’s much easier to avoid addiction than it is to kick it. We know we have a problem, but we’re investing money and energy and intelligence into making it worse in ever more ingenious ways, and not doing enough to look at better options.

Which takes us nicely back to Scotland with her 40% of all power provided by renewables, more than any other production method 😉

This kind of activity is not a solution to the problems facing us.

It is only a further waste and while it can be argued it does little damage it does damage.

we should be using less energy not more. blah blah blah..

someone earlier asked a question about the danger of causing earthquakes, and why people are so concerned.

if i have this right, the concern is that while the tremors are tiny, and so dont have consequences for buildings etc, they do pose a risk to the cement casing of the rig. as a casing failure would allow the stuff we are pumping down and pulling up, from below the water table to leak out people are concerned that increasing earth tremors increase the risk of a pollution event

Definitely ugly but not necessarily bad. I wouldn’t want to buy a house anywhere near a likely fracking area though.

Wouldn’t bother me, any more than living near the oil pumping plant mentioned earlier. High tension power cables, on the other hand, not a fracking chance!

the European Charter of Human Rights (we have no fundamental rights under UK law)

Of course we do! What we don’t have is a written Constitution.
We have the Magna Carta, which is enshrined in law, and is basically what the Charter of Human Rights is based on, with bells and whistles. We also have a Bill of Rights, from the 17th C, IIRC. That I’d have to look up, but Magna Carta is what pretty much all human rights legislation is based on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

Reopen the pits and sort out clean coal power generation.

I am being lazy and haven’t read the whole thread so apologies if my question has already been answered. I feel pretty ignorant about fracking. I have tried to read the gov documentation. Any other suggestions of reliable sources that give a decent attempt at a balanced view?

Links appreciated!

Channel 4 seem to have a fairly balanced perspective on what is currently known of the wider picture, but fail to mention the vested interests of much of the cabinet…

http://www.channel4.com/news/fracking-shale-gas-hydraulic-fracturing-truth-myth-facts-uk

furthermore, some folk have already raised the points and I have to agree that our focus should be on

a) reducing our use of energy

b) seeking sustainable, non fossil (or nuclear) alternatives, although in sustainable employment and profit terms, these may not be so attractive…

in our terms of our children’s children having a similar quality of life to that which we currently enjoy, these factors are paramount

Im sory you owe me a new keyboard and an explanation why my job is so hard if theres no “proper regulatory control”.

One possible explanation is that you find your job hard because you’re stupid and lazy. :p Are there any other possible explanations you’d like to advance?

if you think deepwater horizon is an example of a ‘happy ending’

Well its cleaned up, marine life is thriving and compensation paid. You asked for a happy ending, not a story of one of the hundreds of rigs out there on which absolutely nothing goes wrong and they end their working life in a scrapyard.

ne possible explanation is that you find your job hard because you’re stupid and lazy. :p Are there any other possible explanations you’d like to advance?

Thats always possible, although I’m up at 6am to go to a review meeting for a bloody water pipe which youd think would be simple……….

How much money is being in put into Thorium reactors or Nuclear Fusion R&D compared to fossil fuel exploration and R&D?

The taxes corporations pay should be massively increased (look at the insane profits) and put directly into renewable research.

The taxes corporations pay should be massively increased (look at the insane profits) and put directly into renewable research.

the profits arent much bigger than any other industry as a percentage, theyre just big in absolute terms. And those profits pay shareholders who are mostly pension funds who see them as a good investment over the long term.

The nuclear industry research is paid for by the governments, Oil and Gas pays for its own RandD, which department would you like to apply more cuts to to fund your project?

Its about a mile? from my house and lots and lots of other Victorian etc era houses. I wonder if any will subside?

When they built the M60 nearby alot of houses within 1/2mile in Sale moor subsided due to the water table being affected. Hmmmm

I just think it could be a very valuable resource. Environmental regulations are incredibly strict in the UK (I have to fill out pages of paperwork just to get permission to drill into an abandoned coal mine). Talk of pollution to aquifers, etc. I’ve never seen backed up by a reasonable scientific argument – the geology in which shale gas tends to exist isn’t really used for drinking water supply in the UK, and if you ever do want to drill into an aquifer that does, again, there is a huge amount of regulation in place.
Once wells are set up I don’t see it as being a huge blot on the landscape, no worse than wind turbines, pylons, etc. In terms of peoples houses being in the middle of fracking areas, I’m not particularly sure they know the difference, a high proportion of houses in the north east are sat above abandoned coal mines and would never know (bar the odd shallow mining exception not applicable to fracking). Plus there’s the economic benefits of employment, tax income, etc.

In short this. The current daily mail scare mongering view is crazy. We can once again set a worldwide standard in how to do it properly and roll this out worldwide, provide a lot of jobs, much needed energy and finance and have an industry to be proud of.

What winds me up is that any view of a fracking site shows a rig on it, do people not realise what it costs to have a rig on site and that it will be there not a day more than needed. So say 6 months and from then all you have is a few pipes that you wouldn’t see from the road if the field had a hedge.

Storage and containment of chemicals and drilling MUDs/flow back fluids will be extremely tight, environmental monitoring will also be crazy high.

And when it comes to water supplies being contaminated, well we don’t all have hugely deep boreholes to feed personal supplies here as they do in the states as we have a slightly different geology and set up here, for a start we have no deserts

Imvsure the protesters will give up once HS2 starts and some trees need felling

Its about a mile? from my house and lots and lots of other Victorian etc era houses. I wonder if any will subside?

When they built the M60 nearby alot of houses within 1/2mile in Sale moor subsided due to the water table being affected. HmmmmThe water is in the order of tens to hundreds of feet underground. Shale gas likely be thousands of feet and has to be under a layer of impermeable rock otherwise it would never have formed.

Ah thats good. We wouldn’t want to feel earth tremors. Imagine if fracking created earth tremors that could be felt- That’d scare people too.

I am for fracking. We will be burning fossil fuels for some time to come. Why not try to do this more efficiently and cleanly? The technology exists for this, however a lack of will from many quarters. As I understand though the setup for fracking is relatively straight forward and not particularly labour intensive. Don’t know how manydirect jobs it will bring.

Northwind states 40% renewables generation as a success for Scotland. I like to think it is a success for the UK. Everyone in the UK pays a slice of the subsidy to ensure wind turbines are placed in the best location to meet renewables targets. ie Scotland. Scotlands energy bills I imagine would be astronomical if trying to achieve such high targets alone.

I have mixed feelings about fracking. I think that there are some risks to all forms of mining and fracking is no different.

However look at America and the benefits that they have found. The US is once again energy self sufficient. If they wanted to the US could transition almost every car to run on gas. This has lead to the US coming out of recession much quicker than the rest of the world and change the whole global geo-political landscape. An energy self sufficient USA is now negotiating with Iran and didn’t in invade Libya or Syria, like it did for Kuwait or Iraq, due to it’s worries about oil.

So for UK, fracking could give us energy independence once again, hopefully give us time to figure out fusion, but there are some possible risks.

the profits arent much bigger than any other industry as a percentage, theyre just big in absolute terms. And those profits pay shareholders who are mostly pension funds who see them as a good investment over the long term.
The nuclear industry research is paid for by the governments, Oil and Gas pays for its own RandD, which department would you like to apply more cuts to to fund your project?

So you think a non renewable resource should be exploited by corporations for profit without any commitment to alternative research?

Interesting thread.

I saw the ‘Gasland’ doc a while back, which certainly made me nervous about fracking. However whatever the respective POV’s of everyone on here (and elsewhere) we have to recognise that the UK is going to face increasing problems with ‘keeping the lights on’.

While there remains a significant amount of coal available in the UK even the most ardent anti-environmentalist (with a long enough memory*) wouldn’t suggest coal power as the solution.

It’s interesting that many of the anti-fracking views come from the left side of the political spectrum. It’s certainly true to say that the way things are done in the UK via lobbying and civil service ‘advice’ (doesn’t matter who’s in number 10) the end result of fracking (or any other infastructure project) will result in massive profit and huge taxpayer funded subsidy for a select few involved.

This is also true of the proposed new nuclear power station programme (proposed taxpayer subsidy will run for 60 years).

Nuclear is one of the greener (even George Monbiot thinks so) solutions to our future power needs (cheap too!) but we object based on (mainly) political and environmental grounds. The latter reason is the biggest fallacy as the (French) channel and atlantic coast has more than it’s fair share of nuclear plants; closer to Surrey than Sellafield.

We should be getting mad about the way successive governments have allowed us to become reliant on imported energy and that private businesses are allowed to milk subsidies (funded by the taxpayer) to provide UK based energy (be that nuclear, windfarm or fracking).

* see ‘pea soupers’, clean air act etc.

I don’t think this is really a left/right argument. I’d suspect its quite a geographic one though. It’d be interesting for people, when declaring their support or opposition, to also state where they live. I’m guessing there might be some correlation

I see a lot of London-based politicians representing constituencies in the South East preaching the advantages (Grant Shapps on Newsnight last night, and Dave himself), safe in the knowledge that it’s not going to be going on anyhere near then.

Then I see the people on the ground, living next to where its going to be taking place, voicing genuine, well founded concerns, equally as safe in the knowledge that they’re about to be steamrollered by corporate interests and cynical self-interested politicians

Which takes us nicely back to Scotland with her 40% of all power provided by renewables, more than any other production method

Some big developments in various off shore renewables on the way too. Not all of them will come to fruition admittedly.

Hi Binners,

Based on a cross section of posts it looks like those anti wouldn’t vote Tory, although I would admit it’s not obvious that those pro fracking would either. In general the wider coverage of the debate (papers etc.) seem to divide on left / right lines with the odd NIMBY exception from the Mail / Telegraph.

As I said i’m probably more anti than pro fracking despite living in the SE. Neither left nor right leaning / voting as the government always gets in 😉

At my old place I had an uninterrupted view of an offshore wind farm. I have less of an issue with where these are built than the fact that you hardly ever see them turning / working. I didn’t move because the wind farm got built BTW

I would agree that people who are opposed to developments in their backyard don’t split on political lines but it’s not hard to find someone living near a proposed development of any kind who will have ‘genuine’ concerns.

HTH

in our terms of our children’s children having a similar quality of life to that which we currently enjoy,

we need to stop the over population of the plant, the increasing demand on basic natural resources and the gross consumerism that plagues us. However human nature isn’t going to change, so our childrens children are pretty much screwed.

Fracking is a good interim solution that from an environmental and regulatory point of view will be very tightly monitored. Just out of interest how many of the Anti brigade actually have any proper knowledge of environmental permitting, are ecologists, geologists, hydrologists, consultants, EHO’s etc… ?

Its just digging a bigger hole to bury our heads in, it will all end in tears 😉

I would agree that people who are opposed to developments in their backyard don’t split on political lines but it’s not hard to find someone living near a proposed development of any kind who will have ‘genuine’ concerns.

Agreed. But we’re not talking about building a housing estate here. This is a vast project which will have enormous environmental impact. And it seems to me that the people who are evangelists for it all have a couple of things in common. Strong links to the energy lobby, and a geographical location nowhere near where its going to be taking place

I wonder…if the fracking sites were in a Tory MP’s constituency would he wholeheardly support them?

This is a vast project which will have enormous environmental impact. And it seems to me that the people who are evangelists for it all have a couple of things in common. Strong links to the energy lobby, and a geographical location nowhere near where its going to be taking place

Does the same argument not apply to the construction of wind farms?

binners

I could give you locations in the UK of massive pipeline systems for gas terminals, oil storage facilities and power generation sites that may have had a huge visual impact at the time, but now you could ride close by and not even be aware of what they are or what they are doing. The problem I think is that a lot of folks get all misty eyed about the “countryside” and want to some how live in a state of stasis where nothing changes and it’s all blue skies and fluffy kittens. Life and existence isn’t like that and just sitting a corner saying no i don’t like it, without offering a sensible, realistic, cost effective alternative is about as useful as a two year old having a screaming fit. It also helps if you have a decent knowledge of the technology and legislative framework before toys leave the pram as well, which is where a lot of eco zealots and NIMBYS fall over as they know they diddly squat other than what they can find in some half arsed hysterical ramblings 😀

Tory MP’s and voters can be opposed to major infrastructure projects in their own backyard, HS2 is a good example of this. Some wind farm projects too IIRC

So you think a non renewable resource should be exploited by corporations for profit without any commitment to alternative research?

They do have a comitment to research. Someone legislates they need a % of biomass derived fuel in the fuel, they spend the money making it (the fact it F’s up car engines is a different kettle of fish). And there are already taxes (and further windfall taxes) on the industry, as well as paying for drilling licences.

Then I see the people on the ground, living next to where its going to be taking place, voicing genuine, well founded concerns

I saw the ‘Gasland’ doc a while back, which certainly made me nervous about fracking.

I know that’s 2 different posters, but you’re alluding to the same thing. Gassland was for a large part stretching the truth, for example the bit where they set fire to tap water, IIRC they had that ‘problem’ before fracking. Minor earthquakes happen all the time, cars crash and leak petrol into the ground, people wash paint thinners down the sink, put disposable bateries in the bin, all of which will probably contribute more to polution than Fracking ever will. Heck there’s a thread about Diesel cars on here at the moment where someone gets shot down for suggesting that removing the DPF, CAT and EGR is a bad thing as it increaces polution! Imagine the uproar if a drilling company announced it was removing it;s waste treatment plant as it was expensive to fix!

Where’s Nikola Tesla when you need him…

Have a number of technologies been suppressed in the pursuit of profit?

Is the energy market manipulated to the detriment of the consumer (and planet)?

Does the same argument not apply to the construction of wind farms?

good grief how can you think that the environmental impact of fracking is comparable to a wind turbine?

Life and existence isn’t like that

Au contraire, it’s entirely possible to be clear-eyed & hard-headed about ‘life & existence’… and also take exception to fracking & other forms of intensive extraction, or at least the arguments extended for them.

We should be learning to use less energy – point blank.

Because ripping up internationally endangered SSSI moorland to build access roads, then digging a big hole and pouring concrete into it isn’t very good for the environment?

Along of course with big quarries to collect and refine rare earth minerals, impacts on raptors, etc.

build access roads, then digging a big hole

Even if groundwater contamination fears prove, er, groundless, fracking = lots of access roads.

fracking = lots of access roads.

Really?

Any particular reason why fracking needs to be done away from the existing road network?