Slashdot Mirror
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?
Because now as we speak, the EU-Commision has reopened an Anti-Rust Investigation.
Oh right, our house now, thanks to the sinkholes the fracking did!
Fracking for natural gas seems to be happy with a price of $4/MMBTU so long as we treat it as a strategic fuel and don't link it up with the $10/MMBTU international market. So, it can support onshoring of manufacturing for a while. But, Midwest wind is selling power purchase agreements at essentially the fuel cost for natural gas generation using combined cycle power plants. The cost of wind is likely to fall further. So, natural gas may end up being just a foretaste of low cost energy boosting onshored manufacturing as renewable energy displaces it.
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.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
and takes Detroit, then we stop 'em! But not until after.
This article tries to compare fracking water use to other uses (eg. golf courses) but fails to account for fracking water being taken out of the system - it's not recycled, it's disposed of. With lakes drying up or disappearing in California and other countries fighting over fresh water, how can the fracking industry be so wasteful?
if by 'small risk of environmental damage' you mean 'enormous active environmental damage', then yes - i agree.
?
I know the extraction bellcurves of conventional oil wells/fields are generally decades long things, while fracking lasts only a few years, so a fracking area tends to get dotted with many, many wells before they have to move on due to depletion.
Does the same short-livedness hold true for natural gas?
Can there be a such thing as green fracking for natural gas? Is there a way to avoid the witch's brew of nasty that they inject? From what I gather the primary technology behind fracking is that you hammer something down into the shale along with sand, the shale cracks, and the sand slips into the cracks and holds them open. Then the gas leaks out.
One of the huge complaints is that all that crap can contaminate water supplies; this would include the fracking fluid itself coming back up to the surface.
So my humble question is: Is there a different way to get the sand into the cracks without making such as mess?
Now my personal experience is that I grew up in a shale rich area and know two other things about shale, one is that it is very chemically interesting, in that friends and I would regularly break it open to marvel at the interesting colours between the layers. Those colours would then fade very quickly returning the shale to the dull dark grey that it usually was. I don't know if this was a thin layer of hydrocarbons evaporating or some sort of mineral that quickly oxidized. But whatever it was the rock was the only rock in my area that "did" anything. Secondly my experience was that you didn't want the shale near plants that you liked. If you lined your garden with it or put a shale walkway near trees they either died or largely stopped growing.
So shale appears to be an active rock that you generally want to leave alone. But again can shale be treated after the gas has been removed? Sprinkle a little something down the drill hole to return the rock to its previous inert(ish) state.
Mining is almost always messy, but many mines if properly managed can be not only fairly innocuous but can be sort of cool, as is the case that some rock quarries make for interestingly shaped lakes while others turn into stagnant cesspools.
The real way that this can be dealt with is to look at any mess the fracking people make as a subsidy that they are asking for. The simple question then is to place a value on that subsidy and make sure that they return to the local economy something extra that matches the subsidy. Not the usual baloney that they are providing jobs to the area(as they would do that anyway) but a concession that directly matches the value of what they are getting. So if the water in the area might be polluted and it will cost $200 million to run a clean water supply into the area then they should run a $200 million dollar water supply in to the area and maintain it for as long as the water remains altered. This would then either make the project unprofitable, or it would cause them to seek alternatives such as greening up the process.
From what the article says, this is a bump in manufacturing from short term contracts, this is hardly a sustainable client base. My guess is that at the very most this will be a benefit for one generation, maybe two at the very most. A few thousand jobs is nothing to shrug off but I hope that these towns are prepared for what is going to happen within the next 20 to 40 years. The cheap housing and sharp increase in demand will attract real-estate prospectors; and just like these sociopathic leeches always do, they will start building up their little housing price bubbles and once again the idea that maybe "infinite growth" can be a real thing is going to settle in the backs of peoples minds. I'm not saying that we should stop this kind of thing mind you. The money generated in this way is very real, even if the actual wealth is not. But we should be better prepared for the fallout this time.
it's properly (and technically) called 'exploitation of natural resources'. It isn't sustainable - in terms of environmental impact, massive front-ended depletion rates rates, or the ultimate demand-destruction the high cost of extraction begets. Political and environmental chicanery have obfuscated the first two, with massive monetary stimulus banking on the dollar's reserve status having propped up the latter (among other things of course).
If the ultimate cost of extraction were markedly lower (as it has in decades past) the net energy gains might still be enough to justify. But those days are long gone.
US Rust Belt Manufacturing Rebounds Via Fracking Boom
Watch your fracking language.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
yes.
http://geology.com/royalty/pro...
Like the earthquakes and poor air and drinking water quality. Quite schilling for the oil industry....
I'd be fine with it if they used safer chemicals. Yes it's a very small percent around 0.45 - 0.50 but when you add up just how much water they use it ends up being in the millions of gallons of nasty shit pumped in the ground like...
Hydrochloric Acid
Glutaraldehyde
Quaternary Ammonium Chloride
Quaternary Ammonium Chloride
Tetrakis Hydroxymethyl-Phosphonium Sulfate
Ammonium Persulfate
Sodium Chloride
Magnesium Peroxide
Magnesium Oxide
Calcium Chloride
Choline Chloride
Tetramethyl ammonium chloride
Sodium Chloride
Isopropanol
Methanol
Formic Acid
Acetaldehyde
Petroleum Distillate
Hydrotreated Light Petroleum Distillate
Potassium Metaborate
Triethanolamine Zirconate
Sodium Tetraborate
Boric Acid
Zirconium Complex
Borate Salts
Ethylene Glycol
Methanol
Polyacrylamide
Petroleum Distillate
Hydrotreated Light Petroleum Distillate
Methanol
Ethylene Glycol
Guar Gum
Petroleum Distillate
Hydrotreated Light Petroleum Distillate
Methanol
Polysaccharide Blend
Ethylene Glycol
Citric Acid
Acetic Acid
Thioglycolic Acid
Sodium Erythorbate
Lauryl Sulfate
Isopropanol
Ethylene Glycol
Sodium Hydroxide
Potassium Hydroxide
Acetic Acid
Sodium Carbonate
Potassium Carbonate
Copolymer of Acrylamide and Sodium Acrylate
Sodium Polycarboxylate
Phosphonic Acid Salt
Lauryl Sulfate
Ethanol
Naphthalene
Methanol
Isopropyl Alcohol
2-Butoxyethanol
NOT rebounding because of the fracking boom. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs lost to globalization are being replaced by the fracking industry.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Preemptive asshole strike?
Scared much?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I instantly decided to read this entire article with the word "fracking" interpreted in the same way it was used on Battlestar Galactica. I was not dissapointed =)
I think we can retain our domestic supply while curbing Russia by building but not using export terminals. We could save quite a lot on military expenses if we held that card in our hand: play nice or we'll take away your revenue in less than a month. So, the cost of building the (idle) terminals would be well justified.
frac = big tobacco
just wait, eventually the fake science will be debunked and everyone will know they were duped by a billion dollar industry. the only difference is that more people will be hurt from the contamination and exposure and it will cost taxpayers billions to cleanup
local landfills near me have Geiger counters and turn back many loads of "sludge" pumped out from frac well retaining ponds. apparently the deep shale has a high level of radioactivity and when the frac fluid comes back out, tiny bits of radioactive shale return with it. so not only is there a strange chemical cocktail in these large retaining ponds, there are also radioactive particles. did I mention that there the news reports all the time when these ponds leak and they take truck loads (100k tons at a time) of dirt away (but to where?) what other industry can store hazardous chemicals in multi acre retaining ponds? what other industry can create a new industrial facility (24/7) 1000 feet from your house (if you are lucky enough!).
Please don't beat your wife.
Ok, I'll beat my daughter instead.
No, please don't beat your daughter either.
Ok, I'll beat my wife.
huh??
Just because the idiots in the media just discovered the existence of the procedure a few years ago doesn't mean anything. The first well was frack'ed in 1947. If fracking is new, so are jet engines, nuclear bombs, and a whole host of now-outdated shit. Journalistic integrity is a lost art.
Problem: fossil fuels are required for a fossil fuel based economy. Yes that includes tech which requires plastics, electricity, and fuel to extract the mierals needed to build the products, make the products, and ship them.
Problem: reliance on foreign fossil fuels can cause wars.
One solution: extract fuel from places where the fuel was unreachable or very difficult to extract.
Problem: can cause environmental damage.
Benefit: energy independence
Benefit: jobs
Problem: does nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
Solution: non-fossil fuel energy sources with lower environmental impact.
Problem: bridge fuels are needed.
That's about it.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I blame this fraking boom on the sexy Cylons in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
In my day, kids didn't use fucking vulgar goddamn language like that, they had respect.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Problem is that if an area gets to choose between environmental damage and absolutely no employment whatsoever or some type of work so a future is possible (even if the future is being able to move to a city where there is a chance > 0 of finding gainful employment), the environment will be set aside.
The real people to blame are not the residents. They just want enough money to put food on the table without having to resort to growing pot or selling moonshine. Blame the people who cut funding to solar energy, the Congress that allowed China to seize the US's solar panel market by hacking into companies, then six months later, dumping panels for cheaper than rare earths until the US industry was bankrupt, then hiking prices.
... as the foundational premise of "Firefly" plays itself out.
The "fracking is bad" ideas are in the movies because they need bad guys in movies to create excitement. There are in reality only very small risks. No, I am not a shill. I am a retired person who took the time to look into it.
Simple question - would you prefer geothermal energy rather than energy obtained by fracturing?
There's a lot of nonsense posts in this thread about how it doesn't benefit anyone... I live right in the middle of this so let me provide some anecdotal evidence...
My Uncle is a farmer (cranberries) and has a 160 acre farm. His son worked in factories. Those factories pretty much left the state for China and my cousin, who admittedly is an idiot and therefor can't get a decent job that involves thinking, has been bouncing from fast food job to fast food job for about a decade. The cranberry market crashed a while back as the 'cranberry fad' died. Berries went from $80/barrel to around $12/barrel. My uncles farm was floundering, he was about $200k in debt and pulling in $40k/year after expenses.
Then came fracking.
My cousin got a job hauling pipes... he went from working at McDonalds to making $55k/yr over night. That may not seem like a lot to most slashdotters but in the Northern/Midwest area thats a very good salary. He's got land, a house, he's very happy though the commute is terrible. (up to 4hrs to work and back depending on the site hes working on)
Cranberries grow in sand... Sand is used in fracking. My Uncle just closed a deal to sell his farm to a Sand Mining operation for $2 million. In fact, nearly every Cranberry farmer he knows is selling as well. The sand mining companies are offering 400% the going rate for the land and are buying everything... everywhere... Some people are getting as high as $20k/acre depending on the Sand quality and how close they are to the railroad.
Now... as far as environmental impacts... The farm he spent his entire life building is going to literally be turned into an open pit 150ft deep. He hates the idea, but he can either retire a millionaire or leave his children so much debt they'll be forced to sell to the mine as well. The farmers that aren't selling are happy about it to because with fewer farmers around, the price of cranberries will go up. He plans to use his new found wealth to buy some land that has a trout stream running through it up the road and spend the rest of his days fishing.
So yes, the environmental impacts are huge. But to say it's not a boom for local people and the poor, that's just disingenuous. If you live anywhere near this stuff you're economic situation is going to improve. My uncles retaining ponds will, however, no longer be the best fishing spot in the county.
"retired" in the 'borat' sense?
that explains it.
(sorry, couldn't resist).
You've just read the label on your Pop-Tart.
Put your glasses on, drink some more coffee and try again.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Local policy makers should make preparations for what happens in a generation or two, agreed. This is, however, a solved problem. More money/jobs from the energy industry means that other businesses have paying customers- hair salons, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores - every segment of the economy benefits from the inflow of money to the area. Over the next 10-20 years, blighted abandoned areas become vibrant again. At that point, they are attractive places to build any business. That's the time that policy makers should encourage investment in any business that exports it's product or service out of the city. Manufacturing, software, universities- anything that is purchased by people outside the state will do just fine to maintain an inflow of cash to keep the local economy doing well.
Right now, these areas are so run-down that nobody wants to put any business there. It's a third- world environment, but with unions and Democrat labor laws. An influx of cash could allow Detroit to be rebuilt as a modern city again, which would then need to have intelligent policies just like any other modern city.
I couldn't care much about the chemical stew of fracking in rust belt states; they have dumped toxic sludge into Lake Erie for a century. I do care about the explosion of moderate sized earthquakes in Oklahoma, notably starting in swarms around the same time that fracking was allowed. If we continue on this path, the earth will have new human-induced faults, possibly in the rust belt areas. Most unfortunate, the ground in these areas allow earthquakes to be destructive over a greater range than on the west coast. The lack of historical seismic activity makes the ground brittle compared to seismically active regions. If the region gets changed seismically from inactive to active in a brief period of time, the quakes will be far more destructive.
can you at least proof read your list? Seriously, you've got methanol and Isopropyl Alcohol like 5 times each, I'm glad you're going for a long list, but remove duplicates, and Isopropanol is the same as Isopropyl Alcohol. And the Ethanol, guar gum and citric acid I've consumed within the last 48 hours, and god forbid if they're pumping petroleum distillate and Hydrotreated Light Petroleum Distillate (again, mentioned multiple times, and for the layman, also known as diesel fuel, both low sulfer and high sulfer varieties) into a petroleum well. I'm sure I can read through the rest of that and find out exactly what each of those chemicals is, but those are the ones that jumped out at me and I know what they are off the top of my head.
Nice bit of scare tactics there. Repeat items in the list to get a 37% longer list; Probably another third of the list are common FDA approved ingredients for food and soaps.
Seriously, you want to complain that up to half of one-percent of what they pump in could be table salt or pure grain alcohol? Or that they are using very soft water?
You are the reason why the only people who take environmentalists seriously anymore are the environmentalists who are to stupid to realize that the other environmentalists are just making shit up.
All municipalities supplied with artesian well water need to insist that any and all oil and gas fracking does not contaminate the water supply, now and WELL into the future. The Oil and Gas Fracking can take place today, the supply goes dry and the company packs up, sells off and disapears, meanwhile the water becomes contaminated with the oil, gas and fracking chemicals and becomes totally useless for town water supply. I would recommend ALL artesian well water be checked now and into the future for fracking contaminants. Also find out where the water comes from, it could be many miles away from the actual well. Make sure any and all fracking is well insured against water contamination again now and well into the future.
if we humans could just evolve quicker so that polluted water could be consumed, then all this nonsense about "saving the earth" by banning fracking would just go away.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Read the headline and wondered if they weren't bouncing back via the lucrative "toaster" market. So say we all!
95% of what is said her regarding fracking is incorrect. Go work for a fracking company for a few months and see how it is done, you will see exactly what is in the "contaminated" water. Many companies R &D departments are working on ways to re-use "contaminated" water to frac with multiple times so only a very small percentage of "new" water would be needed per frac. The water table where I frac isn't very deep, the place where the fracking is being done is about 2 miles past the water table and near the top of the wellbore there are 7-8 layers of casing (depends on company), cement and steel between the wellpipe and the ground around it, for the "contaminated" water to impact the water table it would have to bypass all those layers and that isn't going to happen. The oil and gas companies also subsidize the county and city to provide for more water testing just to ensure the public trust, not to mention we do our own testing. We live here and drink the water here, do you really think all the lab and engineering employees would use the local water supply if it were contaminated? Learn about fracking on your own and stop letting Matt Damon think for you.
But have you ever tried using pop-tarts for fracking?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
buy off Bush, who exempted it from all EPA regulations and monitoring.
So, good luck with all that fracking money as that million fracking wells drilled all over the country gradually increasingly leak and pollute the environment, including the local water table.
Drinking more causes this kind of reasoning.
And it makes you call your ex girlfriend early in the morning.
Or so I hear.
Time for coffee.
No brain, no pain.
Natural gas is a great improvement over oil, in both efficiency and the environment, and it works EVERYWHERE for EVERYONE NOW. Not 10 years from now, not for skyscrapers in the cities, not only in remote areas or on shorelines, not for the rich elitists, but EVERYWHERE for EVERYONE NOW.
It costs less, helping low income people to heat their homes, and while fracking itself is a concern I think the reduced pollution and carbon dioxide emissions balance it out.
But some jackass who modded me down doesn't understand that. Hopefully, you do.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
when you take into account the methane escapes and its 30-70x higher potency than co2 as a greenhouse gas, the process of fracking negates your argument many times over. (add onto that all the soil and water issues.. and well.. )
You've been eating Rum-and-Raisin ice cream?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"