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US Rust Belt Manufacturing Rebounds Via Fracking Boom
schnell writes:
A NY Times article reports that Midwestern "Rust Belt" towns and their manufacturing economies in particular have rebounded greatly due to the U.S. resurgence in fossil fuel production. This resurgence is driven by production of shale gas and natural gas from "fracking" and other new technologies that recover previously unavailable fuel but are more invasive than traditional techniques. "Both Youngstown and Canton are places which experienced nothing but disinvestment for 40 years." "They're not ghost towns anymore," according to the article. But while many have decried the loss of traditional U.S. manufacturing jobs in a globalized world and the associated loss of high-wage, blue collar jobs, do the associated environmental risks of new "tight oil" extraction techniques outweigh the benefits to these depressed economic regions?
do the associated environmental risks of new "tight oil" extraction techniques outweigh the benefits to these depressed economic regions?
That is an excellent question. What we need is an excellent answer. Unfortunately, right now, we only have some rather crude guesses, mostly made by people with entrenched preconceptions (on both sides of the issue). We don't know what the probable environmental cost of an additional $100m of fracking production is.
There are two reasons to continue fracking, while going easy on the rate of production; 1) the oil will still be there, it will probably continue to climb in value, and we are learning -- by doing -- more cost effective and safer approaches to extraction, and 2) because we need more data to improve the risk assessment model.
Not doing fracking won't get us the data we need, and would prevent us from developing the technology to get this stuff out cheaper and safer. Doing fracking as fast as we can will waste money and create additional damage by using current early-stage extraction processes, and it exposes us to poorly quantified risk.
The biggest problem right now is that the oil companies, in fear of regulation-to-come, are extracting as fast as they can to try to get the money out of the ground before the axe falls. That is pretty much the worst possible answer: It minimizes the profit margin on a finite resource while maximizing the risk. It is a textbook example of short-term orientation market failure.
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I'm pretty sure we would have to invade Canada to force them to take Detroit.
That you cannot get the recipes is a big lie propagated by the gasland film.
You can do a google search and find the generic recipes. The problem is those recipes are generic and depending on the soil the proportions of different chemicals change. The big problem and why various companies have been fighting the various anti-frackers is that as you use the water it picks up chemicals from the ground, the various anti-fracker groups want companies to do a constant scan for those picked up chemicals and track all of them and report all of them.