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In 2011, Fracking Was #2 In Causing Greenhouse Gas In US
eldavojohn writes "According to Bloomberg, drilling and fracking results in greenhouse gases second only to coal power plants in the United States. From the article, 'Emissions from drilling, including fracking, and leaks from transmission pipes totaled 225 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents during 2011, second only to power plants, which emitted about 10 times that amount.' According to Mother Jones, we now have more giant methane fireballs than any other country in the world and we can now see once dim North Dakota at night from space."
fracking / fræk*ing /
1. The number two contributor to global warming in the U.S.
2. The leading cause of throw-downs on Battlestar Galactica.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
"from stationary sources"
Kinda forgot automobiles and other vehicles.
Not to mention that once you exclude cars and power plants, third place is pretty far down the list.
[Emphasis mine]
Fracking! It causes giant sinkholes and poisons water! ... Well er ... Fracking! It causes global warming!
Science: Uh... No it doesn't...
Plain, old drilling for oil and gas releases plenty of CO2 because the drilling operations and all the other equipment run on diesel, natural gas is often burned off for safety reasons, there is often CO2 in the natural gas, and the gas itself is mostly methane (CH4), a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2.
Drilling for oil and gas is an energy-intensive operation that itself can release greenhouse gasses. Fracking has little to do with it, and the headline is misleading because it makes it sound like if only we stopped hydraulic fracturing, there would be no issue. No. Most of these emissions are from "normal" operations.
Comments posted in 2nd article:
"The reference article is based on the oil and gas industry as a whole being the number 2 CO2 contributer. The study didn't look into the contributions of fracking operations seperately. The title of this article is misleading."
"The post misrepresents the report. The 225 million metric tons of CO2e is for all oil and natural gas production, processing, storage, and transport (it does not include refineries). It is not just fracking. Furthermore, that's only 6.8% of emissions. Power plants top the list at 67.4%. The next two after oil and gas, refineries and chemicals, tie at 5.5%. So even if the 224 Mt were all from fracking then it would still not be a significant contributor relative to other sources."
Why not use that energy to do something useful with it ? Apparently energy is still too cheap if we can afford that.
This is such fudge that it could only appear on Mother Jones and Slashdot. ROFLMAO
And the #1 reduction in US emitted greenhouse gasses is due to coal power plants being replaced by less Co2 emitting natural gas electricity generation.
America largest Co2 contributer to the planet
No supprises there.
Or cows?
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html
fracking surprizing...
Denier = terrorist
Oh, fuck you, you fascist wannabe prick.
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The WHOLE STATE from SPACE???? Buddy Hall would be so proud!
After all the whining and complaining that goes on this site when Foxnews is cited, we're posting articles from Mother Freaking Jones?
From the article:
> “We know how to fix many of these problems; we just need to make the decision to do it.”
From this article, U.S. CO2 emissions are at a 20 year low
Combine the two ideas and you have to wonder if there are people with an agenda to kill fracking no matter what the facts are as opposed to ensuring fracking is done sensibly.
you can't fight the church of warmistas....
From TFA ...
In its second-annual accounting of emissions that cause global warming from stationary sources, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the first time included oil and natural- gas production. Emissions from drilling, including fracking, and leaks from transmission pipes totaled 225 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents during 2011, second only to power plants, which emitted about 10 times that amount.
1. From stationary sources -- how about planes, trains and automobiles.
2. Fracking is just part of what is included in "oil and gas production."
3. "The EPA report showed the benefits of fracking, as it attributed the reduction to cuts in coal use and increased use of gas as fuel by electricity generators."
Slashdot has become entirely too political. This isn't even close to being accurate and with all the shots the site takes at Fox News and such you'd think there'd be some pot calling ketlte black type self-awareness when throwing this sort of thing out there...
I'll miss the true technical stuff, but time to yank the site out of the ol RSS reader and find something better.
when the entire country switches over to NG for power because it is cheap and emits less CO2. Then we go & ban fracking and the gas goes poof!.
truf hertz
Apply their "rules", or lack there of, to most any other industry. Let's say I want to dispose of assorted farm waste into the environment so I claim it's mostly water, which it is, but the composition of this farm material is patented and the government isn't allowed to restrict it since it's exempt from the clean air and water acts. Within a decade they've turned some of the cleanest air in the country into some of the dirtiest, not even debated it's an established fact. There have been numerous releases and accidents which have left locals sick and some have died of cancer. Due to the fact most people in these areas don't own their mineral rights they can come onto your property, leave it an ecological disaster then leave without even attempting to restore it. The rest of the country is supposed to look the other way so we can keep getting cheap oil and gas and just feel thankful we don't live in one of these pristine areas that are being destroyed. Check out "Split Estate", it's on Netflix, if you want your eyes open. After everything I've seen and read I want fracking banned but it stands to make the oil companies a fortune so it's here to stay and we have no rights or say in the matter.
I think what is more important are the release of greenhouse gases worldwide versus just the USA. Worldwide volcanoes, undersea fractures in the ocean floor, and underwater magma displacements put more greenhouse gases into the air in a year than man can in a year. I also recall an article that says that methane releases from cows contribute more greenhouse gases than man does as well.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Oh Yeah!? Well, "Emissions from drilling, including fracking" Your Mom!
The article states we have more than any other country except Russia, Iraq and Iran.
I just wonder...
Who took the data for all these "Facts"?
Or facts in news are marginelly important to the Agenda!
'Emissions from drilling, including fracking, and leaks from transmission pipes ... second only to power plants, which emitted about 10 times that amount
So, who is the sensationalistic piece of shit, timothy or eldavojohn?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There's some good, even essential, baby in that bathwater - don't throw it out; regulate the holy fuck out of the entire industry.
> Implying Babies are Good.
> Implying you haven't had kids.
Makes sense, this is Slashdot. I mean, who would want to bring another innocent life into this cruel and unjust parent's basement?
I follow this closely. It's true. It's unfortunate because natural gas has the potential to be key player in reducing CO2 emissions. See this for how we can leverage today's, existing technology into an effective response to global warming.
http://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/
We need to speak with ONE voice- "fracking" needs to be the most tightly regulated industry in the history of humankind- all but nationalized in fact. No secret formulas. No fracking without studies on everything from earth quakes to CO2 emissions to groundwater contamination and constant detail monitoring. The companies will make their profit, but there is NO room for laissez-faire jack shit.
If you're into exciting unregulated industries with 1000% profit margins, fuck you, go invest in next year's Xmas toy fad. This industry needs to have all the excitement of a yearly WD-40 shareholder stock dividend event.
There's some good, even essential, baby in that bathwater - don't throw it out; regulate the holy fuck out of the entire industry.
So what is it, exactly, that you follow closely? Cuz so far you've demonstrated very little knowledge of the O&G industry. Well, beyond environmentalist boilerplate. So is that what you follow closely?
Which crappy website did you get this misinformation from? This has ben refuted many times e.g., http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/volcanoes-co2-people-emissions-climate-110627.htm http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf
Obviously, we are reaching the time that we have to "grow our own". When our crop growth captures as much CO2 as our energy use produces, we will have balance. It is pure madness to rely on fossil any longer than we have to do so.
Did anyone else picture some John Draper with his old Captain Crunch whistle, weaving his way through the phone systems, and his devoted script kiddie wanna-be's exuding greenhouse gases from their dorito-overloaded basement dens of unwashed post-pubescent manhood? Especially when they wouldn't let their mommas in to do the laundry because they were *busy* in a Quake tournament? Or did I just know too many people like that from my youth?
I specialized in setting up any girl they liked with a boy who actually *was* smart, and who bathed.
...you get one really big source? "Natural gas and oil production is the second-biggest source of U.S. greenhouse gases" -- why stop there? "Natural gas and oil production, plus coal power plants, is the very largest source of U.S. greenhouse gas. This group may also include cow farts."
"Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money."
-Cree
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Calling some retard denier a denier and a terrorist is being a facist wannabe prick HOW, exactly?
Because you are a denier and don't like the fact that you're using terror tactics to get your own political way is being shown up as the terrorist tactic it is?
("It would wreck the economy!", "It would give us over to the Russians!", "It's a way to give our money to the blacks in Africa!" etc.).
I find it a suspicious coincidence that when Russia is loosing it's influence, some leftist movements are coming up with sky ifs falling protests. In the 70's it was "peace movement" against short range nuclear weapons in Europe. Those weapons and other reagan policies in fact ruined evil empire and brought freedom to literally millions of Europeans. Later it turned out it that the "movement" was heavily controlled, steered and financed by KGB. No counting bunch of useful idiots in the west who did the work for Russia for free. These days Russia influence is mainly in energy supply. When Gasprom started to loose large chunks of gas business due to cheap plentiful clean gas obtained by fracking from US, the green movement jumped back to action. Somehow they do not care, that the gas is in most cases replacing coal, the dirtiest and most potent source of CO2. I have a feeling that if not KGB or whatever the secret police in Russia is called these days, the useful idiots are back at work.
JAM
... figures don't lie, but liars figure.
In this case, it looks like they've added all the natgas pipeline losses & emissions -- both the fugitives (methane at high CO2 equivalence multiplier) and the turbocompressor stations. Nevermind that most are on conventional gas.
Frac'ing * drilling most certainly have some emissions (mud outgassing) but these are too small to make a nice headline.
Why can't the gas being flared off be used for electric production?
Methane doesn't matter much as a greenhouse gas because its atmospheric half life is so short; it turns into CO2, which has a much smaller greenhouse effect relative to methane. Scary numbers based on methane emissions are just FUD.
(IPCC tries to get at this via the "GWP" measure, but that measure still overestimates the effect and danger from methane.)
"Emissions from drilling, including fracking, and leaks from transmission pipes totaled 225 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents during 2011 ..."
So, no it's not. Emissions from a number of sources, added up, are this "#2 cause," and fracking is including in that list of emissions, but with no indication whether it makes up 99.999% of these 225M tons... or 0.00001%. But hey, fracking is the latest energy technology that the global warming ideologues and other assorted neo-luddites hate, so why not spread blatantly false information like this about it?
Liberty in your lifetime
Some part of our economy isn't declining. Just Awful. It must be stopped!
What are we going to quote next? The Daily Mail?
USE PRIMARY SOURCES PLEASE.
The main reason you can now see North Dakota from space is the simple fact that oil workers make $90,000 a year and live in an area where an average house sells for $75,000. So they can afford to leave their lights on.
sudo make me a sandwich
An aspect of this whole thing many people are not factoring - we save a tremendous amount of energy (and emissions) simply by using more local sources of oil & gas. Not having to ship them from other countries helps in all sorts of ways.
In fact even if emissions were worse by extracting oil & gas in the U.S than obtaining the same things overseas, we'd still be better off doing so locally because of the economic gains.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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But to be honest, what I really want to know is - why I never see articles on banning soda pop, beer, or champagne? They also release mass amounts of CO2 when consumed.
From Soda's Contribution to Global Warming:
Raw Data
- Grams of CO2 per liter of soda: 4.85
- US population (July 2007): 301,139,947
- Soda consumed by average American Each Year: 53 Gallons
- Liters of soda consumed: 60,330,376,981
- Annual CO2 (in Grams) from soda: 292,602,328,362
- Annual CO2 (in Pounds) from soda: 645,077,711
- Annual CO2 (in Metric Tons) from soda: 292,684
- Total annual CO2 emissions in US: 27,245,758,000
- Percentage of total CO2 released by soda: 0.001%
Since it took ten seconds of Googling to find a candidate answer to your question, I would question whether that was actually what you "really want to know", rather than an example of the red herring fallacy (or something similar, I'm not up on my taxonomy of logical fallacies at the moment). In other words, it's an essentially irrelevant question, easily answered, which makes me doubt your sincerity in asking it (though your post was carefully crafted to appear even-handed).
And ten more seconds of Googling on your username reveal that you've opined on this issue before, arguing that we should "force the EPA the eliminate soda pop and other carbonated (CO2) beverages from being sold or consumed at all their buildings and locations" to put "the shoe...on the other foot". (Yes, let's stick it to those smug, smug EPA officials!)
And there's also the Youtube video where you comment that "It has been MUCH warmer (and MUCH cooler) in the past without any of man's help. Man made climate change AKA global warming is just a tax on the stupid". (What a maverick opinion!)
But since you said you were being honest, I guess any appearance of disingenuousness on your part is...strictly illusory.
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What makes humanity think that there can be a perfect source of energy?
Have you not read the laws of thermodynamics, where it cleanly and concisely ensures that there can't be one in this universe?
would this not just amount to a win for plant life on earth? personally i don't understand the infatuation with finite fuel supplies, but at least the plant life can enjoy more co2 to breathe. hopefully china's contribution to our 'greenhouse gas' content in the atmosphere will weaken the effects of the next ice age. because they don't have very nice environmental regulations it looks like.
and then I realized that they meant the process by which gas is squeezed from rocks instead of the euphemism popularized by Battlestar Galactica.
If you use a condom it traps the excrement so it doesn't get released into the atmosphere.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Source of image:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2013/01/17/a-new-light-in-the-sky-kuwait-on-the-prairie/
That's a BIG source of photons.
Where does the notion that nobody wants to live near a wind farm?
I can see windmills from my house and I can see a coal fired power station (well i could if i could get above the treeline), I would *far* rather see more windmills. As an engineer I find them beautiful.
...leftist screed, even by American standards. Yeah, awkward.
according to the minions of the cult of omnicidal sociopaths, aka, the new york times, it is airline travel that is the number one cause... besides the jetstreams lowering temperatures, the only real benefit of not having air travel is to the people who want to keep people stationary so they can be picked off group by group. the racist fucks that think the world is over populated, instead of being irresponsibly depleted. the poor (that are the ones that get victimized by the thinking of the "non" surplus population) arent even the great offenders in terms of environmental abuse, OR negative external and internal impact of policies, that is why it is so racist to think we need fewer people..... the great american 500 million.. a concept hitler would love....and we have the bildeberg and georgia guidestones to remind us of that great lie worthy of him that when there are more people in the world, there are more sociopaths. so which is number one? the overproduction of farm and livestock? thats a fair argument... number one according to the cultofomnicidalsociopaths minion the new york times, its air travel... getting also more and more expensive... keeping the poor in their places, so they can be picked off one city by one city... hey fukushima is taking care of a whole continental seaboard (the pacific WEST)... my poor native california. or is it number three.. the fracking? if it IS fracking, well, what about the energy independence, and i am less concerned about that than i am anwar.... what if more money were invested in safer techniques and emission reduction? ALWAYS BETTER than nuke..... fracking by the yellowstone caldera is a horrid thought if it makes things more dangerous, but not convinced that it would not help to allow seepage through the shale..... and why not figure out how to build lots of underground cities for the morlocks to live in in the future.. if we make them nice enough maybe they wont make us soylent green, maybe they will cook us down for soap and use the rest for lamp oil. much bigger concerns: one should always assume that someone is manipulating them whenever they feel like the sky is falling.
I prefer not to load-up on all the estrogen that's loaded in soy products
we need to stop the entire human race from living because we pollute the air too much so our planet just isn't able to survive anymore. Apparently all these studies are supposed to convince enough people among us believe the planet is more important than human life so the government then takes it upon itself to mandate we have to pay more to use energy to stay warm/cool, fine companies that use more energy or pollute more than others, subsidize 'green' energy sources that just aren't ready for mass acceptance just so we can transport ourselves around the planet, pay more to light up our homes and offices, etc. and feel guilty while doing it.
Maybe, just maybe, if the earth is getting warmer maybe it's just due to the fact there are 6 billions of us on the planet and our bodies give off heat (increasing the entropy of the universe) rather than the contraptions we build indirectly causing the earth to warm up due to pollution? Oh wait, that's not the right argument to make. That just creates a justification to kill human beings in order to minimize the impact on the environment.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
It does not matter what the energy source is... if it is abundant and available in America then the "progressives" will find a problem with it.
If we discover that we can run the American economy of pixie dust and unicorn farts, some Bloomberg or Soros-funded propaganda rag will immediately start complaining that there are people with life-threatening pixie dust allergies and that some component of unicorn farts is worse than coal. Of course, there will be no equivalent effort to prevent countries like China from using the stuff without any environmental controls at all. After we convert entirely to solar panels, you can count on all the "investigative journalism" stories to begin about all the toxic chemicals used in producing them, the fact that they produce less and less energy the older they get, and the horrible environmental devastation caused by all the old solar panels filling the land fills (accompanied by stories of sickly children living near those landfills, of course)
None of this is even about energy; it's all about control, manipulation, and propaganda.
Obviously, we are reaching the time that we have to "grow our own".
No. there's nothing "obvious" about this; thinking people require facts and rational debate
When our crop growth captures as much CO2 as our energy use produces, we will have balance.
Or... an impotent de-industrialized America that can no longer feed itself or provide its people with productive and satisfying lives. Living in the stone age might sound good to progressives, but it's just stupid and primitive and an unnecessary abuse of individual human beings.
It is pure madness to rely on fossil any longer than we have to do so.
Why? What good does it do to leave the stuff in the ground? You cannot uninvent or uncreate it. Indeed, burning fossil fuels is one of the highest forms of eco-friendly recycling... you take a deeply buried form of carbon that is not doing anything useful and burn it (getting useful work from it) and placing the resulting carbon into the air as CO2 where it is most-easily accessed by plants. Those plants, in turn, take in the CO2 and use it to thrive (becoming very leafy and green, and providing us with an abundance of food and materials like wood) and also producing that other thing most of us like: O2. After this, all the carbon that used to be deep-buried and not useful is involved in processes near the surface where it can be turned-over easily through various processes that benefit humans and that humans humans can easily manage like burning, planting, growing, burying (it's called a "carbon cycle"). The irrational fear of carbon is just amazing and quite an indicator of the success of propaganda. Ask yourself a question: if carbon emissions are so very bad and evil, then why are the people pushing that idea so unconcerned by their own unnecessary emissions???? (i.e. Al Gore on private jets and using multiple massive homes while cashing-in by selling his TV channel to oil-funded interests. UN climate panel members flying to remote resorts to meet and plan while alternatives like Skype exist. etc)
Yeah, I don't know who Motherboard is either.
You know, when a lie is so discredited that even Watts isn't using it any more, you should probably stop doing so, too. Makes you look like an idiot.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The title is purposely trying to be misleading. It should replace the word Fracking with drilling, it can still mention Fracking in the article but drilling (because of its much higher use) would be the second most cause of greenhouses gases. So by saying Fracking there it is basically a lie. You don't have to be pro-Fracking to get tired of all of this unneccesary negative propaganda.
It does state:
Emissions from drilling, including fracking, and leaks from transmission pipes totaled 225 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents during 2011, second only to power plants, which emitted about 10 times that amount.
The article then goes on to talk about how horrible fracking is on the enviornment. But that is not what the report said, it says emissions from all drilling.
But, anyways, shouldn't this be a DUH statement? I mean, the whole point of fracking IS to release natual gases, which IS methane, hydrocarbons, carbon dioxide and other gases. Oh no, while drilling for gas, we release.... GAS!!!! OMG!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas
Okay, I am exagerating the OMG. I mean, there are greenhouse emissions, but considering it is cleaner than coal, shouldn't we be pushing for more electricity produced by gas and less from coal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas#CO2_emissions
That would be the second largest producer in the UNITED STATES, not the world. China's coal burning trumps everything...