I agree the article is light on details. I have been unable to find an article that explains the actual engineering problem they are dealing with. No one seems to be reporting WHERE the methane is leaking from. Is it coming from a blowout of an existing well that cannot be controlled? Or is it leaking outside of the well casing and coming up around the well through the earth (similar to Macondo)? No one seems to report that and it makes a huge difference. As someone who works in the drilling business for oil and gas I have to assume this leak is outside the well casing, coming through rock strata because controlling a blowout does not normally take this long.
Your explanation about the "pipes used in the wells" is pure bullshit however. The same well 7" steel casing is used for gas and oil, and in fact this field produced gas. The Aliso Canyon Field which is now used for storage has about 212 wells in it, and the earliest wells are not that old. The early drilling was in the 1970's. By oilfield standards that is a fairly modern field. Some of these wells produced as much as 7 Billion cubic feet of natural gas before they were depleted. They were suitably designed for gas and oil. The field most certainly held methane before they started using it, because it produced methane. For what it is worth, I currently manage an oil and gas field that produces out of 7 inch casing at about 8,000 feet, and has been producing since the 1970's. We do inject water, but have not yet considered using it for gas storage because it is still producing gas and oil.
Natural gas storage in oil fields is the norm around the world, not the exception. Building tanks is much less safe and more expensive, plus tanks to hold the quantities of gas that are stored would be huge beyond engineering capabilities. This is the most practical solution to storing natural gas. What they did wrong is probably more closely related (and I am speculatiing) to not doing enough cement bond logging, and not enough casing inspections, and basically not enough due diligence to assure themselves that every well they are using for injection is sound and can hold. However, the part that disappoints me the most is that there does not seem to be any communication with the media about what is actually happening.
For what it is worth, the Los Angeles Basin still holds the record as the most productive oil basin in the world in terms of barrels of production per acre. Few people in Los Angeles realize the city was built on oil, and much of the original wealth of Los Angeles was made by oil. Getty once owned Malibu. Doheny Drive in Hollywood is named for one of the largest oil prospectors in California, who established the oil business in Los Angeles. Recent estimates of Wilmington Field, that stretches across southern Los Angeles, estimate it still holds a Billion barrels recoverable.
I'm guessing that at a younger age this same professor thought that anyone caught buying, or selling, a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, deserved to be jailed. Or maybe not, after his generation was well intentioned when it advocated revolution. Perhaps Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and other booksellers need to be watched, since they all still sell this book.
I drove a Toyota Troop Carrier in Africa, which is just a slightly different body than the Land Cruiser. It had a 6 cylinder inline diesel, with 17 inch split riim wheels, so tires were easily changed while off road, which was all the time for me. It pulled a trailer with 400 gallons of fuel and carried 8 or 10 people and a couple of goats that rode on the roof.
I have begged Toyota dealers to get me one, or even a diesel version of the Land Cruiser, which is sold in most of the world. The problem has nothing to do with Toyota. The problem is these models no longer comply with US safety and emissions regulations, and are simply illegal to import. These days if you want a buy a good vehicle you have to go outside the United States, or rebuild an old truck or 4WD. Right now I am sticking with my Willys.
Registering drones is about as useful as licensing cats. The collar falls off. The cat can't be caught and won't allow anyone to read the tag if it is wearing one. It looks like all the other cats. When the cat gets lost no one bothers to cancel the license. When the cat dies no one reports its death. If the cat decides to live somewhere else, it does. If the cat bites someone they don't bother with the license, they just capture it or kill it to test it. No different with a drone.
My wii-fi connections are so poor and/or secured that I have never been able to download iOS9 and my current OS will not allow me to use my UNLIMITED cellular connection for downloads. I have an iPhone that has NEVER been able to upgrade itself or to back itself up because of this stupid limitation, which I presume is imposed on me because at&t wants to freeload on other people's bandwidth.
So in other words, throw the 1st Amendment, along with science that they disagree with, under the bus. I would caution that this sort of enthusiasm for a cause hurts it much more than it helps.
In the 1970's I rode a bicycle from Missouri to California, then up Highway 1 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, out to Yosemite, up to the top of the pass, and back to Los Angeles. Years later I used to ride Highway 1 for exercise taking 30 mile rides after work. I have also done a lot of riding in the Netherlands. The Dutch have it figured out and the US will NEVER be safe for cyclists. The Dutch do not mix bicycles and cars, and bicycles have special lanes for going around intersections. Bicycles never go through intersections there, except on the special lanes that cross the streets outside of traffic circles. Often the bicycle paths are a hundred feet or more away from the highway, and are much more pleasant to ride on because of that. US bicycle lanes are a joke and drivers resent them, as well as the fact that it is legal and expected to merge a car right into the bicycle lane prior to making a right hand turn. Cars who park along bicycle lanes become another hazard from the other side of the lane. Bicycle lanes simply do not belong on streets or on sidewalks. They need to be isolated from both pedestrians and autos if anyone expects safety.
A bicycle simply cannot share a lane with a car moving 30-60 miles an hour, even if you can manage to reach peak speeds of nearly 25 mph as I often do, and expect to survive. Cyclists cannot see what is behind them, no matter how many tiny little mirrors you wear on your helmet or on your handlebars. Cyclists who ignore traffic rules are only that much more of a threat to themselves, and they do those of us who do follow traffic rules a disservice by convincing drivers that cyclists are unpredictable and crazy. After being run off the road by a police patrol car, and reading of several fatal cycling accidents on Highway 1 in my neighborhood, I quit riding. A doctor finally convinced me that the risk of permanent head injury from cycling accidents was so great that I will choose to live a longer life over the benefits of cycling. I have an expensive Trek that decorates my garage.
Electronics? I just wish I could buy a truck with a manual transmission. There are almost no new truck modles left in the US that offer manual transmissions. I may drive my 2002 Toyota for the rest of my life. That means I won't be worrying about the so-called "high-tech features." I consider mechanical devices to be higher tech.
Exactly. I have worked with some very well respected scientists who have been credited with leading their field. Most of them come across as wackos if you don't know who they are. Good science is like many other fields- creativity and refusal to accept the norm are what allow good scientists to become great scientists. That's why when someone quotes "97 percent of scientists" I just stop listening, because they obviously do not understand science.
That said, self-review is clearly not peer review, but peer review has been a rigged game in many publications for as long as it has existed.
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
on
Recycling Is Dying
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· Score: 2
You have hit on one of the biggest problems, and one that I never understood. Municipal recycling typically makes almost zero effort to educate people about what and how to recycle. In the days when you had to take your recycling to a recycling center, and there were people there to examine your recyclables and supervise your sorting, most people got some education on what was recyclable.
Now there is one big blue bin for everything. I have seen people throw in food containers with food still in them (this becomes garbage, not recycling), plastic bags (not recyclable at most facilities), and all sorts of plastics. I've even seen computers put in the recycling bin. Plastic spoons? They are made of styrene, which is the same plastic as expanded styrene foam (Styrofoam) and not generally recyclable (some places take it). Wax paper cups and wax containers for milk or juice are generally not recycled, but some places have started.
People do not realize that there are a bunch of minimum wage humans manually sorting their recycling on a conveyor belt at the recycling center. They also don't realize that if they contaminate the whole load with a broken jar of syrup, the whole load just goes to the dump. Wet paper, food, misidentified plastics, all of that can make the whole load go to the dump instead of being recycled, and yet the recycling collectors make no effort to get the public to sort for them. Maybe they know the public is just too damn lazy and too ignorant to understand those numbers on plastics to actually sort stuff.
Then to compound the problem there are folks like me who know what can be sold for money and what can't, and the valuable items are things I sell, rather than donate to the trash company to sell.
Yes, of course I do, unlike you I am a geologist. In fact, understanding fault and fracture systems is one of my specializations, so please do not attempt to school me on something that you clearly do not understand at the basic level.
I am not inferring anything. You are the one with a cartoon-like understanding of the world. Most faults actually act as seals, not conduits. Most fractures in the subsurface are actually sealed as well, by diagenetic mineral deposits. There are three basic types of faults, but all faults are much more complex in the real world. Reverse faults are compressional. Normal fualts are extensional (tensional). Strike-slip faults are transpressional and often contain both extensional and compressional elements. All faults contain material known as fault gouge. This material often forms a seal and makes it impossible for fluids to move through faults. Most faults are held closed by considerable lithologic pressure.
I will return to my original statement, which is that oil and gas are already trapped by rocks and faults under the surface, or they would not have remained there over the millions of years they have been there since they formed. Over time, they have migrated upward as far as faults, permeable rock, and fractures would allow. In the case of the rocks being fraced for new resources, those oil and gas deposits were never able to escape the rock they were formed in. They have never migrated or moved. Fracing is the only way to get them out, and fracing does not penetrate far enough to allow them to escape the rock they are in; it allows those resources to escape into a well bore, and only for a decade or so, after which the natural pressure and diagenetic processes in rock will have sealed most of the artificially created fractures. One of the main reasons that fraced well production declines so quickly is that the reservoir that is being drained is also closing back up as it drains. Your fears are mostly in your imagination, not supported by science, engineering, or even facts.
Except most of the water disposed of by the oil and gas industry was not potable water to begin with. The vast majority of it is saline water known as "connate" water that is produced along with oil and gas. This water has been in the rock since that rock was part of the ocean bottom. It was saltwater to begin with and was never drinkable water.
False. There are very few fracing chemicals that are considered trade secrets and the vast majority of fracing chemicals are disclosed online on a public website that is required by most state regulators. http://fracfocus.org/
Even the patented compounds are required to have Material Safety Data Sheets onsite and available for anyone who wants to see them, which essentially disclose the contents, just like the contents of your food are disclosed on labels. They don't tell you the exact percentages but they tell you what is in the mixture. I know this because I work on wellsites.
Your comment shows how little you know about drilling and even more how you know nothing about geology or hydrogeology.
First of all, most wells drilled for oil and gas, even in the middle of a field are miles below any known freshwater aquifers. There is typically a mile or more of impermeable rock between the well target and any aquifers, if they even exist, which in some basins they essentially do not exist. Even the grade-school level reference you have given oversimplifies how groundwater recharge works. Since oil and gas are less dense than water the only way they continue to exist in the subsurface is that they have a barrier above them that prevents them from migrating upward. If not for the natural barriers that keep oil and gas underground, all of it would spill to the surface slowly and eventually and it would have already contaminated your shallower aquifers by natural migration. In some shallow aquifers that has naturally happened already, and most of the "examples" of contaminated aquifers actually come from water being in contact with coal or oil and gas bearing rocks naturally in the subsurface. I test water wells, and can assure you that so far I have tested hundreds of wells prior to any drilling being done that were already contaminated by oil and gas from natural migration, NOT from fracing. In these sorts of water wells, when the water level is dropped by overutilization of the groundwater resource, they often begin to produce more methane because the water pressure was actually preventing the methane from desorbing. In other cases, bacteria from the surface can migrate into water wells through normal recharge channels, or through existing water wells, and begin producing methane. I am still searching for an example of an aquifer that has "had the crap contaminated out of the water" by the gas drillers since in most cases the most likely contaminant of aquifers is actual crap from actual people who use substandard sewage systems.
deprecate: verb (used with object), deprecated, deprecating. 1.to express earnest disapproval of.
2.
to urge reasons against; protest against (a scheme, purpose, etc.).
3.
to depreciate; belittle.
4.
Archaic. to pray for deliverance from.
I prefer #3 as in Microsoft is belittling their own OS, or #4. pray for deliverance from Win 10
"since global ore reserves of current substrates such as silicon and aluminum dioxide are rare and almost depleted."
That could not be more untrue. Pure silica sand (which is silicon dioxide) that is the source of silicon is in such abundance that it sells for less than $50 per ton, after cleaning and grading. The raw material is a minor part of the cost. Aluminum ores such as bauxite are some of the most common minerals on the planet. The USGS actually describes bauxite reserves as "essentially inexhaustable."
It depends on what you are presenting. As a geologist I am most often forced to put detailed maps on PowerPoint slides. The days when I could plot my map out on a 42 inch by 60 inch sheet and lay it down in front of management, describe the details and show the context from that one sheet of paper, ended when someone discovered I could cram that big map onto a PowerPoint slide.
The PowerPoint slides get distributed and often become the technical documentation of the decisions made. Yet they do not contain the technical details and often do not even include enough text to explain the ideas they are presenting. Five years later, I review a PowerPoint that explains why someone spent $50 million dollars on a drilling program and I still have no clue, because it was documented with PowerPoint. If you only put 5 items on each slide, then you either have 200 slides or you do a huge disservice to anyone who is forced to view your presentation later when you are not there to explain it.
Because of resolution problems I cannot even place a line or an arrow with enough precision to actually be in the right place over a slightly detailed image. For years, I resisted by using Adobe Acrobat presentations, which allowed me to do much more precise graphic representation, but the cheap readily available PowerPoint made it impossible to keep using the much more expensive Acrobat and the extra Adobe applications (Illustrator now, but I once used MacroMedia Freehand for all my work) are hard to get corporate IT departments to provide. At present I am not even allowed a full copy of Adobe Acrobat- only the reader version. I've worked at some companies where I provided my own software in order to avoid using PowerPoint. It is a losing battle. But believe me, RESOLUTION is the BIGGEST flaw in PowerPoint that makes it a poor solution for a technical presentation.
I stopped buying music, and mostly stopped listening to any sort of prerecorded music in about 2000 when the RIAA starting suing the bejesus out of all sorts of people for minor file-sharing incidents that essentially was legal terrorism by the RIAA- no one they sued had the ability to defend themselves against such a well-funded plaintiff. When I realized I was paying a tax on blank CD's to the music industry that I never used for recording music I was so outraged I decided to boycott the music industry. So far I am pretty happy listening to the birds sing instead. I still have a huge collection of vinyl records that I listen to occasionally, and still listen to the radio, but I never bother paying for music. They can shut down all the music services they want, but they will never get another dime of my money.
It says the problem is caused by water disposal wells. These wells are primarily utilized by the oil industry, but guess what, they are not the only industry that uses disposal wells to get rid of wastewater. Recently a controversy erupted in southern California because a local wastewater district (sewage) that wants to use a disposal well to get rid of its water because it cannot comply with the salinity requirements of the EPA for discharge into surface waters. Guess who else uses disposal wells, companies that make electronic components and companies that make solar cells. The aircraft industry used to be one of the largest users of disposal wells to get rid of solvents- but after a few Superfund cleanup sites were related to this practice it ended- mostly because they were injecting into usable aquifers, which the oil industry does not do. Conventional oil production (with or without fracking) often generates ten times more water production than oil. Most of the time that water is salty so it cannot be discharged on the surface. After all, that water was once ocean water, that got trapped in the rocks as they were deposited. In some places, like California, the oil companies actually produce fresh water that is sold to local water districts for irrigation purposes. This problem of disposing of produced water that is saline has existed as long as the oil industry has existed, and disposal wells have been used routinely for probably 100 years now. The earthquake problems are not a surprise, but are the result of a lack of regulatory supervision over what are often very small companies that do nothing but dispose of wastewater. Obviously their incentive is to pump as much water down the hole as fast as they can, and that is the problem that needs to be solved. If regulators would force them to constrain their injection to a maximum rate, determined by analysis of the injection profile and reservoir rock, this problem could easily be eliminated. In the oil industry's case, they are just returning water to deep formations after removing it to capture the oil. It is usually not the same formation but the formations that are used are known to have capacity to accept more salty water than they already contain.
Apparently you clicked past the 65 page disclosure for iTunes that Apple uses to pretty much allow them to do almost anything they want with anything they find on your device.
There was a drilling engineer that faced 20 years of Federal prison time for deleting texts and emails that might have been relevant to the oil spill. He was convicted, but his case is pending appeal. I would bet that he is now wishing he had thought to set up a server at home. Hillary is hoping for 4 years- I say let her have them, but maybe not in the place she expects.
Besides, we all know that the NSA, the Chinese, the Russians, and probably even the North Koreans have all the copies of Hillary's email that they have been getting off her server for years. Nothing is lost- it is just that the people who have it don't want to admit they have it.
Having been a grad student in the employ of various research institutions that research climate change, I can say I could easily write the same article about many research projects that support anthropogenic climate change. Most universities and other research organizations profit greatly from these types of grants and actively promote and support researchers who can generate the grants. This there is incentive for bias before the grant is even made.The typical charge to a grant for a research project is between 40% to 60% for overhead, meaning if the University of "Climate Change" has a researcher who generates a $1 million grant, they get to keep $600,000 for themselves and the other 40% is doled out as the research is done to pay expenses related to the research. It doesn't matter that the donor is the Koch Brothers, or Tom Steyer, this is how it works. Getting the funding in the first place, however, requires a grant proposal that must interest the grantor. Perhaps Dr. Soon, based on his body of work, has an easier time raising money from Koch Brothers and their likes, than from Tom Steyer and his cronies. Neither side of the climate debate is any LESS INNOCENT of this same type of conflict of interest, and the NYT has simply managed to write an article making it sound as if this ethics issue and bias is somehow unique to this side of the debate.
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I agree the article is light on details. I have been unable to find an article that explains the actual engineering problem they are dealing with. No one seems to be reporting WHERE the methane is leaking from. Is it coming from a blowout of an existing well that cannot be controlled? Or is it leaking outside of the well casing and coming up around the well through the earth (similar to Macondo)? No one seems to report that and it makes a huge difference. As someone who works in the drilling business for oil and gas I have to assume this leak is outside the well casing, coming through rock strata because controlling a blowout does not normally take this long.
Your explanation about the "pipes used in the wells" is pure bullshit however. The same well 7" steel casing is used for gas and oil, and in fact this field produced gas. The Aliso Canyon Field which is now used for storage has about 212 wells in it, and the earliest wells are not that old. The early drilling was in the 1970's. By oilfield standards that is a fairly modern field. Some of these wells produced as much as 7 Billion cubic feet of natural gas before they were depleted. They were suitably designed for gas and oil. The field most certainly held methane before they started using it, because it produced methane. For what it is worth, I currently manage an oil and gas field that produces out of 7 inch casing at about 8,000 feet, and has been producing since the 1970's. We do inject water, but have not yet considered using it for gas storage because it is still producing gas and oil.
Natural gas storage in oil fields is the norm around the world, not the exception. Building tanks is much less safe and more expensive, plus tanks to hold the quantities of gas that are stored would be huge beyond engineering capabilities. This is the most practical solution to storing natural gas. What they did wrong is probably more closely related (and I am speculatiing) to not doing enough cement bond logging, and not enough casing inspections, and basically not enough due diligence to assure themselves that every well they are using for injection is sound and can hold. However, the part that disappoints me the most is that there does not seem to be any communication with the media about what is actually happening.
For what it is worth, the Los Angeles Basin still holds the record as the most productive oil basin in the world in terms of barrels of production per acre. Few people in Los Angeles realize the city was built on oil, and much of the original wealth of Los Angeles was made by oil. Getty once owned Malibu. Doheny Drive in Hollywood is named for one of the largest oil prospectors in California, who established the oil business in Los Angeles. Recent estimates of Wilmington Field, that stretches across southern Los Angeles, estimate it still holds a Billion barrels recoverable.
I'm guessing that at a younger age this same professor thought that anyone caught buying, or selling, a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, deserved to be jailed. Or maybe not, after his generation was well intentioned when it advocated revolution. Perhaps Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and other booksellers need to be watched, since they all still sell this book.
I drove a Toyota Troop Carrier in Africa, which is just a slightly different body than the Land Cruiser. It had a 6 cylinder inline diesel, with 17 inch split riim wheels, so tires were easily changed while off road, which was all the time for me. It pulled a trailer with 400 gallons of fuel and carried 8 or 10 people and a couple of goats that rode on the roof.
I have begged Toyota dealers to get me one, or even a diesel version of the Land Cruiser, which is sold in most of the world. The problem has nothing to do with Toyota. The problem is these models no longer comply with US safety and emissions regulations, and are simply illegal to import. These days if you want a buy a good vehicle you have to go outside the United States, or rebuild an old truck or 4WD. Right now I am sticking with my Willys.
This is a Ford. Better to wipeout Detroit.
Registering drones is about as useful as licensing cats. The collar falls off. The cat can't be caught and won't allow anyone to read the tag if it is wearing one. It looks like all the other cats. When the cat gets lost no one bothers to cancel the license. When the cat dies no one reports its death. If the cat decides to live somewhere else, it does. If the cat bites someone they don't bother with the license, they just capture it or kill it to test it. No different with a drone.
My wii-fi connections are so poor and/or secured that I have never been able to download iOS9 and my current OS will not allow me to use my UNLIMITED cellular connection for downloads. I have an iPhone that has NEVER been able to upgrade itself or to back itself up because of this stupid limitation, which I presume is imposed on me because at&t wants to freeload on other people's bandwidth.
So in other words, throw the 1st Amendment, along with science that they disagree with, under the bus. I would caution that this sort of enthusiasm for a cause hurts it much more than it helps.
In the 1970's I rode a bicycle from Missouri to California, then up Highway 1 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, out to Yosemite, up to the top of the pass, and back to Los Angeles. Years later I used to ride Highway 1 for exercise taking 30 mile rides after work. I have also done a lot of riding in the Netherlands. The Dutch have it figured out and the US will NEVER be safe for cyclists. The Dutch do not mix bicycles and cars, and bicycles have special lanes for going around intersections. Bicycles never go through intersections there, except on the special lanes that cross the streets outside of traffic circles. Often the bicycle paths are a hundred feet or more away from the highway, and are much more pleasant to ride on because of that. US bicycle lanes are a joke and drivers resent them, as well as the fact that it is legal and expected to merge a car right into the bicycle lane prior to making a right hand turn. Cars who park along bicycle lanes become another hazard from the other side of the lane. Bicycle lanes simply do not belong on streets or on sidewalks. They need to be isolated from both pedestrians and autos if anyone expects safety.
A bicycle simply cannot share a lane with a car moving 30-60 miles an hour, even if you can manage to reach peak speeds of nearly 25 mph as I often do, and expect to survive. Cyclists cannot see what is behind them, no matter how many tiny little mirrors you wear on your helmet or on your handlebars. Cyclists who ignore traffic rules are only that much more of a threat to themselves, and they do those of us who do follow traffic rules a disservice by convincing drivers that cyclists are unpredictable and crazy. After being run off the road by a police patrol car, and reading of several fatal cycling accidents on Highway 1 in my neighborhood, I quit riding. A doctor finally convinced me that the risk of permanent head injury from cycling accidents was so great that I will choose to live a longer life over the benefits of cycling. I have an expensive Trek that decorates my garage.
Electronics? I just wish I could buy a truck with a manual transmission. There are almost no new truck modles left in the US that offer manual transmissions. I may drive my 2002 Toyota for the rest of my life. That means I won't be worrying about the so-called "high-tech features." I consider mechanical devices to be higher tech.
That said, self-review is clearly not peer review, but peer review has been a rigged game in many publications for as long as it has existed.
Is this like cow tipping?
You have hit on one of the biggest problems, and one that I never understood. Municipal recycling typically makes almost zero effort to educate people about what and how to recycle. In the days when you had to take your recycling to a recycling center, and there were people there to examine your recyclables and supervise your sorting, most people got some education on what was recyclable.
Now there is one big blue bin for everything. I have seen people throw in food containers with food still in them (this becomes garbage, not recycling), plastic bags (not recyclable at most facilities), and all sorts of plastics. I've even seen computers put in the recycling bin. Plastic spoons? They are made of styrene, which is the same plastic as expanded styrene foam (Styrofoam) and not generally recyclable (some places take it). Wax paper cups and wax containers for milk or juice are generally not recycled, but some places have started.
People do not realize that there are a bunch of minimum wage humans manually sorting their recycling on a conveyor belt at the recycling center. They also don't realize that if they contaminate the whole load with a broken jar of syrup, the whole load just goes to the dump. Wet paper, food, misidentified plastics, all of that can make the whole load go to the dump instead of being recycled, and yet the recycling collectors make no effort to get the public to sort for them. Maybe they know the public is just too damn lazy and too ignorant to understand those numbers on plastics to actually sort stuff.
Then to compound the problem there are folks like me who know what can be sold for money and what can't, and the valuable items are things I sell, rather than donate to the trash company to sell.
Yes, of course I do, unlike you I am a geologist. In fact, understanding fault and fracture systems is one of my specializations, so please do not attempt to school me on something that you clearly do not understand at the basic level.
I am not inferring anything. You are the one with a cartoon-like understanding of the world. Most faults actually act as seals, not conduits. Most fractures in the subsurface are actually sealed as well, by diagenetic mineral deposits. There are three basic types of faults, but all faults are much more complex in the real world. Reverse faults are compressional. Normal fualts are extensional (tensional). Strike-slip faults are transpressional and often contain both extensional and compressional elements. All faults contain material known as fault gouge. This material often forms a seal and makes it impossible for fluids to move through faults. Most faults are held closed by considerable lithologic pressure.
I will return to my original statement, which is that oil and gas are already trapped by rocks and faults under the surface, or they would not have remained there over the millions of years they have been there since they formed. Over time, they have migrated upward as far as faults, permeable rock, and fractures would allow. In the case of the rocks being fraced for new resources, those oil and gas deposits were never able to escape the rock they were formed in. They have never migrated or moved. Fracing is the only way to get them out, and fracing does not penetrate far enough to allow them to escape the rock they are in; it allows those resources to escape into a well bore, and only for a decade or so, after which the natural pressure and diagenetic processes in rock will have sealed most of the artificially created fractures. One of the main reasons that fraced well production declines so quickly is that the reservoir that is being drained is also closing back up as it drains. Your fears are mostly in your imagination, not supported by science, engineering, or even facts.
Except most of the water disposed of by the oil and gas industry was not potable water to begin with. The vast majority of it is saline water known as "connate" water that is produced along with oil and gas. This water has been in the rock since that rock was part of the ocean bottom. It was saltwater to begin with and was never drinkable water.
Methane is odorless and completely non-toxic, and is found in high percentages inside your own intestines. Or do you not fart?
Even the patented compounds are required to have Material Safety Data Sheets onsite and available for anyone who wants to see them, which essentially disclose the contents, just like the contents of your food are disclosed on labels. They don't tell you the exact percentages but they tell you what is in the mixture. I know this because I work on wellsites.
Your comment shows how little you know about drilling and even more how you know nothing about geology or hydrogeology.
First of all, most wells drilled for oil and gas, even in the middle of a field are miles below any known freshwater aquifers. There is typically a mile or more of impermeable rock between the well target and any aquifers, if they even exist, which in some basins they essentially do not exist. Even the grade-school level reference you have given oversimplifies how groundwater recharge works. Since oil and gas are less dense than water the only way they continue to exist in the subsurface is that they have a barrier above them that prevents them from migrating upward. If not for the natural barriers that keep oil and gas underground, all of it would spill to the surface slowly and eventually and it would have already contaminated your shallower aquifers by natural migration. In some shallow aquifers that has naturally happened already, and most of the "examples" of contaminated aquifers actually come from water being in contact with coal or oil and gas bearing rocks naturally in the subsurface. I test water wells, and can assure you that so far I have tested hundreds of wells prior to any drilling being done that were already contaminated by oil and gas from natural migration, NOT from fracing. In these sorts of water wells, when the water level is dropped by overutilization of the groundwater resource, they often begin to produce more methane because the water pressure was actually preventing the methane from desorbing. In other cases, bacteria from the surface can migrate into water wells through normal recharge channels, or through existing water wells, and begin producing methane. I am still searching for an example of an aquifer that has "had the crap contaminated out of the water" by the gas drillers since in most cases the most likely contaminant of aquifers is actual crap from actual people who use substandard sewage systems.
"Feature deprecation section"
Someone at Microsoft needs to learn English.
The definition of deprecate is as follows:
deprecate: verb (used with object), deprecated, deprecating. 1.to express earnest disapproval of. 2. to urge reasons against; protest against (a scheme, purpose, etc.). 3. to depreciate; belittle. 4. Archaic. to pray for deliverance from.
I prefer #3 as in Microsoft is belittling their own OS, or #4. pray for deliverance from Win 10
"since global ore reserves of current substrates such as silicon and aluminum dioxide are rare and almost depleted."
That could not be more untrue. Pure silica sand (which is silicon dioxide) that is the source of silicon is in such abundance that it sells for less than $50 per ton, after cleaning and grading. The raw material is a minor part of the cost. Aluminum ores such as bauxite are some of the most common minerals on the planet. The USGS actually describes bauxite reserves as "essentially inexhaustable."
http://minerals.usgs.gov/miner...
It depends on what you are presenting. As a geologist I am most often forced to put detailed maps on PowerPoint slides. The days when I could plot my map out on a 42 inch by 60 inch sheet and lay it down in front of management, describe the details and show the context from that one sheet of paper, ended when someone discovered I could cram that big map onto a PowerPoint slide.
The PowerPoint slides get distributed and often become the technical documentation of the decisions made. Yet they do not contain the technical details and often do not even include enough text to explain the ideas they are presenting. Five years later, I review a PowerPoint that explains why someone spent $50 million dollars on a drilling program and I still have no clue, because it was documented with PowerPoint. If you only put 5 items on each slide, then you either have 200 slides or you do a huge disservice to anyone who is forced to view your presentation later when you are not there to explain it.
Because of resolution problems I cannot even place a line or an arrow with enough precision to actually be in the right place over a slightly detailed image. For years, I resisted by using Adobe Acrobat presentations, which allowed me to do much more precise graphic representation, but the cheap readily available PowerPoint made it impossible to keep using the much more expensive Acrobat and the extra Adobe applications (Illustrator now, but I once used MacroMedia Freehand for all my work) are hard to get corporate IT departments to provide. At present I am not even allowed a full copy of Adobe Acrobat- only the reader version. I've worked at some companies where I provided my own software in order to avoid using PowerPoint. It is a losing battle. But believe me, RESOLUTION is the BIGGEST flaw in PowerPoint that makes it a poor solution for a technical presentation.
I stopped buying music, and mostly stopped listening to any sort of prerecorded music in about 2000 when the RIAA starting suing the bejesus out of all sorts of people for minor file-sharing incidents that essentially was legal terrorism by the RIAA- no one they sued had the ability to defend themselves against such a well-funded plaintiff. When I realized I was paying a tax on blank CD's to the music industry that I never used for recording music I was so outraged I decided to boycott the music industry. So far I am pretty happy listening to the birds sing instead. I still have a huge collection of vinyl records that I listen to occasionally, and still listen to the radio, but I never bother paying for music. They can shut down all the music services they want, but they will never get another dime of my money.
It says the problem is caused by water disposal wells. These wells are primarily utilized by the oil industry, but guess what, they are not the only industry that uses disposal wells to get rid of wastewater. Recently a controversy erupted in southern California because a local wastewater district (sewage) that wants to use a disposal well to get rid of its water because it cannot comply with the salinity requirements of the EPA for discharge into surface waters. Guess who else uses disposal wells, companies that make electronic components and companies that make solar cells. The aircraft industry used to be one of the largest users of disposal wells to get rid of solvents- but after a few Superfund cleanup sites were related to this practice it ended- mostly because they were injecting into usable aquifers, which the oil industry does not do. Conventional oil production (with or without fracking) often generates ten times more water production than oil. Most of the time that water is salty so it cannot be discharged on the surface. After all, that water was once ocean water, that got trapped in the rocks as they were deposited. In some places, like California, the oil companies actually produce fresh water that is sold to local water districts for irrigation purposes. This problem of disposing of produced water that is saline has existed as long as the oil industry has existed, and disposal wells have been used routinely for probably 100 years now. The earthquake problems are not a surprise, but are the result of a lack of regulatory supervision over what are often very small companies that do nothing but dispose of wastewater. Obviously their incentive is to pump as much water down the hole as fast as they can, and that is the problem that needs to be solved. If regulators would force them to constrain their injection to a maximum rate, determined by analysis of the injection profile and reservoir rock, this problem could easily be eliminated. In the oil industry's case, they are just returning water to deep formations after removing it to capture the oil. It is usually not the same formation but the formations that are used are known to have capacity to accept more salty water than they already contain.
Apparently you clicked past the 65 page disclosure for iTunes that Apple uses to pretty much allow them to do almost anything they want with anything they find on your device.
There was a drilling engineer that faced 20 years of Federal prison time for deleting texts and emails that might have been relevant to the oil spill. He was convicted, but his case is pending appeal. I would bet that he is now wishing he had thought to set up a server at home. Hillary is hoping for 4 years- I say let her have them, but maybe not in the place she expects. Besides, we all know that the NSA, the Chinese, the Russians, and probably even the North Koreans have all the copies of Hillary's email that they have been getting off her server for years. Nothing is lost- it is just that the people who have it don't want to admit they have it.
Having been a grad student in the employ of various research institutions that research climate change, I can say I could easily write the same article about many research projects that support anthropogenic climate change. Most universities and other research organizations profit greatly from these types of grants and actively promote and support researchers who can generate the grants. This there is incentive for bias before the grant is even made.The typical charge to a grant for a research project is between 40% to 60% for overhead, meaning if the University of "Climate Change" has a researcher who generates a $1 million grant, they get to keep $600,000 for themselves and the other 40% is doled out as the research is done to pay expenses related to the research. It doesn't matter that the donor is the Koch Brothers, or Tom Steyer, this is how it works. Getting the funding in the first place, however, requires a grant proposal that must interest the grantor. Perhaps Dr. Soon, based on his body of work, has an easier time raising money from Koch Brothers and their likes, than from Tom Steyer and his cronies. Neither side of the climate debate is any LESS INNOCENT of this same type of conflict of interest, and the NYT has simply managed to write an article making it sound as if this ethics issue and bias is somehow unique to this side of the debate.