Yet Another Front-Page 'Fracking' Story; NYT Again Hits 'Reckless' Natural Gas Extraction
New York Times reporters Danny Hakim and Nicholas Confessore filed another in a series of front-page stories Friday revolving around the natural gas industry, especially the “fracking” process by which natural gas is obtained from shale and is opposed by liberal environmentalists. This time the scene is the paper’s own backyard: “Cuomo Moving To End a Freeze On Gas Drilling.”
The Cuomo administration is seeking to lift what has effectively been a moratorium in New York State on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial technique used to extract natural gas from shale, state environmental regulators said on Thursday.
The process would be allowed on private lands, opening New York to one of the fastest-growing -- critics would say reckless -- areas of the energy industry. It would be banned inside New York City’s sprawling upstate watershed, as well as inside a watershed used by Syracuse, and in underground water sources used by other cities and towns. It would also be banned on state lands, like parks and wildlife preserves.
One suspects the Times will not be relaying quotes of Cuomo the hero on this subject the same way it did after he successfully shepherded gay marraige through the state legislature.
Hydrofracking has prompted intense protests from some environmental activists, who say it threatens the cleanliness of groundwater. The process involves injecting large volumes of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, deep into the ground to break up rock formations and release natural gas. It is legal in a number of other states, including Pennsylvania.
Indeed, earlier this year reporter Ian Urbina went after allegedly lax regulation of fracking in Pennsylvania. More recently, Urbina filed two front-page investigative stories that resulted in much rebuttal from people who actually study the natural gas industry.
Jon Entine at George Mason University is only the latest to rip apart Urbina’s contentions about fracking, at RealClearPolitics on Friday. Entine revealed that the paper’s sources have ties to critics of shale gas, which the paper failed to disclose. Excerpts:
Times' editors present this story as an independent investigation, as blowing the top off a conspiracy of silence from natural gas "insiders." It brags in a special section headlined "Industry Privately Skeptical of Shale Gas" of reviewing, over six months, "thousands of pages of documents related to shale gas, including hundreds of industry e-mails, internal agency documents and reports by analysts....Readers are left with hyperbolic but anonymous fragments of criticism, many years out of date, sprinkled with derisive comments from Berman and Rogers.
....
The Times' story rehashes criticism of the shale gas industry that has been rattling around the Internet for years. The only new identifiable voice is that of Deborah Rogers. She is described by Urbina as "a member of the advisory committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas" and later as a "commissioner" at the bank. She portrays herself as having begun her "financial career in Europe where she worked in Corporate Finance in London, specifically venture capital."
....
Urbina also did not disclose that Rogers has been fighting the natural gas industry -- and Chesapeake Energy in particular -- tooth and nail for years. She is on the steering committee of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project at Earthworks, an anti-shale-gas advocacy group, and lectures around the country....Where were the Times' fact-checkers?
Some of the Times’s sources were not impressed with reporter Urbina:
I spoke with representatives of two companies that are portrayed in the Times' piece as peddling to their customers the "bubble lie" that shale gas has a rosy future. PNC Wealth Management said it was not contacted by the reporter. IHS Drilling Data spokesperson David Pendery, quoted in the Times story, was irked at the paper. "I got a bizarre call from the New York Times reporter, who wanted me to respond to sections of an email that he read to me, but he wouldn't supply us with the actual email so we could read it in context," he said. "He wasn't very professional."
Entine concluded that “the Times chose to endow with credibility what other responsible news outlets had determined was less than newsworthy” and called on Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane to get involved.
- Clay Waters's blog
- Login to post comments
Comments
How the States got their Shapes
Submitted by CobraMan on Fri, 07/01/2011 - 2:17pm.
Did anyone see the latest episode of How the States got their Shapes? One segment dealt with Pennsylvania and the independent oil business there. The most memorable segment was when those independent operators used water and explosives to "reopen" fractures in the rock in which to allow for the improved extraction of oil, something they've been doing for over a hundred years without any of the supposed "contamination" of ground water. I didn't see a single Times article about that. Why the discrepancy, I wonder (philosophically, at least)? Are they afraid to show that fracturing of oil and gas strata doesn't actually lead to ground water contamination? Inquiring minds want to know!
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. The US Constitution
Unless you're a fetus. The US Supreme Court
Or Anwar al-Awlaki.
The EPA already studied Fracturing in 2004
Submitted by Bluegill on Fri, 07/01/2011 - 3:12pm.
They found fracturing to be harmless, of course they are studying this all over again and want to include air quality as well. I am an investor in some Bakken stocks and worry about the risk of government intervention as par for the course over the last 3 years.
Here is what you need to know
Submitted by jdhawk on Fri, 07/01/2011 - 4:34pm.
Here is what you need to know about "fracking:"
Essentially, however, the whole anti-fracking movement has its head where the sun doesn’t shine—and here are just ten reasons why:
1. Hydraulic fracking has been around for 60 years. Developments made by U.S. engineers around 2008-9 have simply made the process much more commercially viable.
2. Since fracking was introduced in 1949, over 2 million frack treatments have been pumped without a single documented case of treatments polluting a water aquifer.
3. 90 percent of all gas wells drilled in the United States since 1949 have been fracked.
4. The depth of most shale gas deposits drilled is between 6,000 and 10,000 feet—water aquifers exist at an average depth of 500 feet.
5. Claims of ‘migration’ between the shale gas layers and water aquifers due to fracking or for any other reason, are patently absurd as the gas would have to pass through millions of tons of impermeable rock. If the rock was that porous, neither the water nor the gas would have been there in the first place. (As the hard data in fig. 1 from a study of 15,000 frac treatments in the Barnett Shale Field reveals plainly.)
6. Fracture design engineers go to great lengths to avoid fracture growth of even 100 feet to prevent losing production.
7. The new eco-horror genre flicks, like Josh Fox’s "Gasland," create impact by making outrageous claims which include suggesting “569 chemicals” are used in a single “toxic cocktail” frack treatment. The reality is that 99.5 percent of the treatment is water and sand. Much of the remainder is made up of a maximum of 12 or so harmless gelling agents, like Guar gum (used in ice cream making), and chemicals commonly used around the house.
8. Domestic running water faucets being set alight with a match might wow gullible film audiences, but dissolved methane found in well water may well be biogenic (naturally occurring). As the largest component in natural gas, methane is not even regulated as it is not toxic and escapes naturally like soda bubbles.
9. Hydraulic fracking procedures are heavily regulated and not, as often claimed by eco-activists, exempt from drinking water and other key regulatory laws.
10. Concerns about using “excessive water resources” in the process are already being assuaged by new developments, including recycling water. And the U.S. Ground Water Protection Council confirms that drilling with compressed air is becoming increasingly common.
As Montaigne said three hundred years ago, “Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least well known”. After well over a decade of flat-lining global temperatures, it’s not surprising that greenist activists are tapping into new emotive areas to rally the troops to their simplistic eco-paradigm. “Save Our Water” clearly offers an anti-toxic sound-bite tonic – albeit one based on fracking ignorance.
This post originally appeared at Energy Tribune.
Read more: http://www.energytribune.com//articles.cfm/7206/Ten-Fracking-Things-Ever...
Frack chemicals
Submitted by Kilroy on Sat, 07/02/2011 - 10:48pm.
I work as a medic in north east British Columbia and right now I am actually at a frack. On my computer I have the Material Safety Data Sheets from 3 of the big frack contractors up here,and no I'm not going to name them. I have to have these to treat anybody that might come in contact with these compounds and there are a total of 127 compounds and more than a few of them are duplicates just having different names. One of them even gave me a MSDS for H2O. You can bet that I have all the MSDS's available for the products as it is not in the companies interests to have withheld this information from me if something happens to one of their employees.
A new process that I haven't worked on but heard about is using propane instead of water in fracking. All I know about it is there are 2 crews doing propane fracks up here right now but it is something that will make a huge difference in the process.
Here is some irony for you I watched Gasland one morning and an hour later the head of the EPA said that the EPA has no documented cases of frack water contaminating drinking water supplies.
NYT
Submitted by jessieH on Fri, 07/01/2011 - 6:26pm.
The NYT has been wrong more times than right, so, I'll just ignore their opinion.