>They are not required to disclose the contents of the fracking wastewater fluid.
Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. This is normal water with friction reducers added to it. Typically 1%. Though can change based on the design of the frack. These are maybe not disclosed to the public since they typically are proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their own. Each wanting to protect their IP from other vendors supplying the friction reducers.
>It gets pumped back down underground where it dissipates into the rest of the water system.
This is the most inaccurate and hyperbolic part of your response. It is markedly false. The slick water is typically reused after the well back flows. They store the water onsite for the remaining wells. Or transport to another pad for continued hydro fracking use. Any water that is produced during well production is pumped into non-human use reservoirs. These disposal wells are called SWD’s, saltwater disposals. The depths of the wells vary, in our field it was 7500’. Whereas freshwater wells for human and cattle use were 300’. Regulatory bodies strictly manage the creation of SWD’s with significant research and paperwork to show the reservoir you are disposing into is not or has ever been used for human consumption. The water at this reservoir will not magically make its way into the freshwater reservoir.
>These people claim that it's safe for decades when our computer models can't predict the weather accurately next week.
This seems more emotionally driven than anything. Who are ‘these people’. How does this correlate to weather? I have worked with hundreds of wells that are +80 years old still in good standing. If the well integrity is in question a cement bond log is run, along with other logs. If it is found there are any discrepancies they are fixed. Or the well plugged and abandoned, is filled with cement and the wellhead removed.
I have not heard of fracking water ever being used for crops. Apologies for any spelling or grammar errors as I am on my phone writing this message.
>Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. This is normal water with friction reducers added to it. Typically 1%. This is like saying "dihidrogen monoxide is the largest component of acid rain". Technically true, but the toxin is toxic enough even at low concentrations. You wouldn't enjoy having it in your eyes no matter how much of it is water that day. This is frankly a strange argument for someone who's worked with the stuff to make, it's not quite H2S but nobody I worked with took the toxicity lightly.
>The slick water is typically reused after the well back flows. That is what's told to the people in the office but it's not reliable. A volume of fluid is pumped down the well, the same volume is pumped back up. So long as there's no water at all downhole, you would recover only fracking fluid. Typically if people are worried about fracking, there is water downhole and no way of preventing mixing.
>If it is found there are any discrepancies they are fixed. The payment structure incentivises the field crews to under-report those kinds of errors. Some crews are diligent and take the reputational hit of reporting a fracking blowout, others simply kick some dirt over it. From my experience it's about 50-50. And in the latter case it certainly does often land on an unfortunate farmer's field.
This is America, there is no strict regulation anymore unless someone rich is being affected by it. Otherwise it's all rubberstamps, revolving door appointments, or outright bribery.
>Majority of water used in hydro fracking is slick water. This is normal water with friction reducers added to it. Typically 1%. Though can change based on the design of the frack. These are maybe not disclosed to the public since they typically are proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their own. Each wanting to protect their IP from other vendors supplying the friction reducers.
How does this make the claim that they are not required to disclose the contents of the waste water false? Are friction reducers mostly similar and non toxic? It is irrelevant that it is 99% water as most industrial waste is mostly water. If I pumped out water that was 99% water and 1% mercury it would be incredibly toxic. The issue is certain chemicals end up lingering in water and bio accumulating for a very long time.
I've never heard of this use of fracking water in CA, and if it's real it sounds to me like frackers IP be damned, we need to know what's in the damn water!
I think that was from Nebraska and not CA, and also from 2016. But it's pretty interesting anyway.
> not disclosed to the public since they typically are proprietary formulas that each vendor creates on their own.
So, you’re agreeing with the poster then? Fracking wastewater is opaque and undisclosed to public.
> If the well integrity
My understanding was that the poster was talking about the fracking procedure and resulting wastewater, throughout their post. Nobody was questioning the integrity of concrete.
I had no idea about this previously but your comment is causing more concern to me than the GP's.
It's like you guys looked at the Aral sea disaster created by USSR and said 'hold my beer'
These crops are dead, it's just a question of time, even if you diverted every drop of water and leave households to die. The sooner we accept it the better.
The diversion was actually being pushed at the federal level, but Sacramento successfully fought back.
Almonds also do not respond well to periods of drought since the trees need to be watered each and every year. Annual crops can be rotated based on water availability.
I hadn't heard about them using the water for crops, that is a little more alarming to me. I suspect it's not being done quite as cavalierly as you're suggesting - they are clearly treating and testing it, as discussed in the article.
In my (maybe biased) opinion, all of this should be weighed against the alternatives. Gas is much cleaner than coal, after all. In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking, and also eliminate nuclear energy (in some countries at least). Some of the gap can be filled increasingly with renewables, but as recent history has shown, not all of it. Most of the gap is filled with Russian gas, which has its own issues. And overall it makes the energy supply less robust, which allowed their current energy crisis to happen, when the wind doesn't blow enough and the Russian supply has hiccups.
I don't think it's fair to paint this as oil and gas companies reaping all the benefits while everyone else pays the price: everyone benefits from lower energy prices, directly or indirectly. In my opinion, consumers bear some of the responsibility for environmental issues, as well as the producers.
The calculation is going to change if there is a higher probability of drinking water contamination for whatever reason, or if more people live in the area and would be impacted by an event, just as the risk matrix is different building a nuclear power plant in France compared to building one on the Japanese coastline. Of course every jurisdiction makes its own decisions, as is their right, but the consequence of always taking the least risky option can leave a country in a tough situation when those options don't cover their energy needs, like in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) right now.
The issue a lot of people have with fracking is not just the local environmental damage, but also the deeper issue of whether it's worth pouring investment into an obsolete industry that is going to produce inputs for other obsolete industries, all of which are environmentally damaging on any scale, just so you can gain a bit of energy security in the here and now. It's not just kicking the can down the road on your future energy security - it's also pushing us towards an extremely chaotic and difficult future for everybody.
For example take coal one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. Steel plants making carbon steel steel need to convert that coal into coke. Even an electric arc furnace needs coke to make carbon steel.
Similar things with other hydro-carbons. So its not like we are gonna stop using them even if the grid was entirely renewable and nuclear.
Now industrial processes that use such hydrocarbons to produce useful stuff other than energy are certainly a minority of the market. So mines and wells for such things will still exist. So the tech is still useful, but we just ideally stop using these hydro-carbons as fuel.
As I understand it, most fracking isn't even profitable right now - it is only profitable if oil prices are relatively high.
What is the cost of not fracking? Very, very debatable.
On a case by case evaluation, the risk from any single fracking well seems much higher than the risk of not using that well. On the aggregate, the calculation may be different. But again, it is all very arguable.
In an argument of this consequence, the side that says, "That's secret information" should lose.
Well the difference being fracking for natural gas is an environmental disaster that will leave untold problems for the future to clean up, and nuclear energy is one of the cleanest forms of energy we have.
Until now, government authorities have only required limited testing of recycled irrigation water, checking for naturally occurring toxins such as salts and arsenic, using decades-old monitoring standards. They haven’t screened for the range of chemicals used in modern oil production.
No one knows whether nuts, citrus or other crops grown with the recycled oil field water have been contaminated. Farmers may test crops for pests or disease, but they don’t check for water-borne chemicals. Instead, they rely on oversight by state and local water authorities. But experts say that testing of both the water and the produce should be expanded.
I can't believe a farmer would intentionally use this to water their crops, it wouldn't make any business sense.
I think this is a pretty unusual situation. As far as I know, most spent frack fluid is reused in oilfield operations or disposed of in deep disposal wells.
The models may or may not be accurate but they have nothing to do with predicting the weather. There isn't any weather underground... It's all slow diffusion and buoyancy.
A better starting place might be asking where the model inputs come from.
Like, why does it make more sense than "the people at the LHC claim they understand well enough to be confident that the LHC wont produce a black hole that swallows the earth, but how can we trust that when computer models can't predict the weather next week?" ? What does one have to do with the other?
It is not at all clear to me that the inability to predict the weather is at all a good reason to significantly doubt the accuracy of their models of the impact of the wastewater fluid. There may be other good reasons to doubt it! I'm not claiming their models are good, I know very little about it. But, without a further explanation as to why the two are comparable in this way, I don't see the "but we can't precisely predict the weather for next week" argument as having any non-negligible weight.
That's not what your linked article says. The article says treated wastewater is being used. That being said, it appears to be in dispute if the water is treated enough, with the water district claiming that it is and an environmental group claiming its not.
We can model the climate decades into the future, which this situation seems more similar to. Obviously the fracking companies would be biased, so I am not siding with them, just that particular argument feels like a straw man
If you don’t like fracking, that’s alright, but sustaining ourselves without it it’s not really an option. Right now our options are:
1) Use coal, accept the consequences of the increased climate change.
2) Keep using gas, reduce the future costs of climate change, deal later with the speculative consequences you mention.
3) Switch to renewables and drastically increase energy costs, which will trap millions of people into poverty, and put millions more in risk.
That may be true, but I was referring to the effects of switching to renewables too early. Since given our technology, the cost per MW is higher from renewables, switching to renewables (as a society) has massive costs. If we rise the price of the MW a 10%, that's a +10% on every MW from now until we find something better. That could be a long time, which means the impact of these costs could be gigantic. As I've commented elsewhere in this article, a 0.75% reduction on GDP over 100 years is equivalent to losing more than the entire (current) annual GDP, that's not nothing! Growth is how we've managed to move millions out of poverty, we should think it through before sacrificing growth.
I don't disagree with your basic premise. Personally I think the answer to 1) is 140 years, so no reason to panic or dawdle. But it's important to remember that the more the economy grows before the switch to renewables is complete, the harder it becomes to make the switch. And, a better invention in renewables without the energy to scale it up won't do us much good, a significant part of our nonrenewables needs to be invested in renewables or the next 140 years of invention won't be much use.
Smaller yes, but I wouldn't call it negligible.
> the more the economy grows before the switch to renewables is complete, the harder it becomes to make the switch.
That one I think you got reversed. Think that one through, the economy now is way greater than it was in 1980, do you really think we were better prepared for the switch back then?
I wasn't clear. We become better prepared to switch but the switch itself becomes harder. The 1980 economy was smaller, therefore it would have required fewer renewable energy sources to replicate using only renewable energy. Sure, renewable energy is more available today than in 1980, but that's due in large part to people since 1980 being willing to invest in something other than fossil fuels, despite the lower margins.
But that’s the trick, for instance, now that solar is under the cost of gas, improvements in solar have slowed down, but now everyone is trying to make batteries.
It’s very unlikely that the pattern won’t repeat itself, in 2050 (or 2070), we will probably be in a better position to do the switch, even if total energy consumption has grown.
The only way to end climate change is to have a serious debate about population control. But no one wants difficult debates (at least people that matter). Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. I foresee a population explosion into areas once uninhabitable.
> Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse.
What a foolish thing to say.
Doubling the population will make things worse in 40 years. How is this hard? Double chickens? Double cows? Double coal plants? wtf? lol. You are the fool. Trying googling "when does population double".
Ooooff.
1. The population isn't projected to double even in the next century much less the next 40 years. In the next eighty years, the population is expected to increase by only 40%. If you took your own advice ("Google") then you'd know this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
2. You're incorrectly assuming that the greenhouse gas emissions scales linearly with the population size *even as the emissions per MWh approaches zero. The demand for energy does indeed scale with population (probably sublinearly, but not going to pick that nit right now), but the goal is to drive down the emissions per unit energy to nearly zero much faster than population grows.
Better luck in the future.
https://theconversation.com/7-5-billion-and-counting-how-man...
"You're incorrectly assuming that the greenhouse gas emissions scales linearly with the population size *even as the emissions per MWh approaches zero."
No it will not be linear. If you have a population that is exponential.
Do you know what that means? The way you responded seems to suggest you didn’t.
It’s always disturbing how quickly this stuff goes from here to “we have to prevent other people from having kids rather than having Americans stop consuming”. Get your neighbor out of their F150 before trying to sterilize the global south.
> Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse.
Fusion. Fission has been done for your entire lifetime.
> I foresee a population explosion into areas once uninhabitable.
Apparently your foresight doesn’t involve actually bothering to check the fertility rate in any nation. If you’d done that, you’d realize that birth rates drop as nations get richer. Most of the world is below replacement rate, and world populations are expected to peak in the year 2100 and begin falling.
The thing that actually limits reproduction isn’t resources, but child mortality and interest. Once you can expect your children to survive infancy, most people want fewer of them.
Right. So people not buying a f150 will help combat the climate destruction of a doubling population in the next 40 years. Is this a joke? I don't understand how a smart group can say such stupid things.
More seriously, "getting your neighbor out of their F150" or any other "personal responsibility" approach is doomed to fail because citizens don't have appropriate information to make informed environmental choices (we can't accurately estimate how much carbon goes into the manufacture of the products and services they consume) which is why carbon pricing is necessary.
As a society, every extra dollar spent on pricier energy is an extra dollar that can’t go to social programs, or to new start up, or anywhere.
I am not buying it, energy is cheap, so we waste it by shipping a pair of jeans three times across the world, to deliver fast fashion the consumer needs, so that on average they can wear some low quality bullshit made woth slave labour 7 times and then throw it away, to be shipped into some poor country for 'recycling' and have it end up in the ocean.
Or catch shrimp near our shores, ship it to philipines to be peeled, and then shipping it back.
Passivehaus standard was developed decades ago, it is several times better than the maximim energy efficiency rating in UK of 'A+'. The number of houses that meet either of these standard is a fucking 0%. Check newbuilds in Uk, half of then can't manage energy rating of C, its, disgracefull! Almost none of them have a heat recovery ventilation system or a heat pump. We waste 20-30% of energy we generate on heating leaky homes.
My parents used to buy groceries at the market by weight, today a 300 g steak comes with 200g plastic packaging. 70% of my trash is plapackaging. The recycling rate is 9%. Efficient free market my ass.
The only place I know that sells food without plastic us an hour travel away, it's a hipster place with organic-artisian authentic beans at 1,000% markup. There is nobody who sells milk in a container I could return to them when it's empty, mo matter how much I pay.
What bancrupts an average consumer? Unaffordable housing, education and healthcare. None of these things are dictated by energy price.
If you are arguing to stop subsidies for fossil fuels, sure! Let's do it.
Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than renewables.
I'll be all in on that. That's not my point at all.
> Without any subsidies and with externalities accounted for, fossil fuels would be even more expensive than renewables.
Wow, slow down there.
First, subsidies are a confounding factor. I don't care who signs the check, we're all paying for it in one way or another. Let's just assume we join all of the worlds wealth into a big pot somehow, and can magically distribute it as we desire.
Externalities are important though, because we will pay them anyway, so that one counts.
LCOE for solar and wind is lower, but we can't build a whole network with wind and solar because they're unreliable. The "popular" (hyped) solution is storage, but storage is so expensive that the LCOE for Solar/Wind + Storage blows us through the roof again!
I'd love to have some real solution, a renewable and reliable source with LCOE similar to natural gas, but until we have one we need to accept the fact that natural gas is in our mixture of energy sources is a good thing.
Except it's not more expensive, and likely cheaper, than nuclear.
There's plenty of room for a reduction in consumption with minimal impact on lifestyle in the developed world.
I think there’s some in-between here.
Swapping to renewables at once would have an impact that can very easily overshadow any remediation costs. Even tiny cost increases now will produce vast difference 100 years forward due to compounding.
Just as a thought experiment, if the costs of switching to renewable energy are >0.72% of GDP, and the remedial costs are around 18T$ (in today's money) in 100 years, you're still better off not switching to renewables.
The point of my comment is that it doesn't matter where the money is. Even if you were to pay it through massive taxes to the rich (assume no loopholes, no funny accounting tricks possible), the ones picking up the tab are the poor people of the future, because even if all millionaires are evil movie villains, taking their money will hurt growth, and growth compounds. Reducing growth now can be a catastrophe when compounded over 100, 200, 500 years.
This feels like a bad faith take out of the gate (whether or not it's intended)... are there no mechanisms for subsidies to abate these issues? are renewables more likely to increase wealth gaps than other fuels?
Every dollar spent on higher energy costs is a dollar not spent in other things. This will impact growth.
I get it, renewables are still more expensive, but are they really doomed to trap more people in poverty?
Couldn't one argue that the unbalanced economic systems are the primary thing that traps people in poverty and the cost of energy is simply a minor factor? There are certainly countries with low energy costs and high poverty rates.
Moreover, it's disingenuous of the OP to suggest that renewables lead to "millions trapped in poverty" while fossil fuels merely result in "climate change" (as though climate change doesn't imply billions trapped in poverty).
Yes, that has to do nothing with my point.
> Haven't the costs been reduced due to the economies of scale and time?
That's a sunken cost fallacy. What we have already spent doesn't matter. What matters is what we choose today, and what consequences does it bring.
> Are the environmental downsides not considered part of the cost?
Off course, that's the main issue. Environmental costs are gigantic, but they are also far into the future.
> renewables are still more expensive, but are they really doomed to trap more people in poverty?
Anything that hampers growth will have massive consequences on the long run. Higher energy prices will heavily reduce growth, even if we assume that there's margin for efficiency to be gained from economies of scale and technology improvements.
> Couldn't one argue that the unbalanced economic systems are the primary thing that traps people in poverty and the cost of energy is simply a minor factor?
You could argue the first one if you'd like, I won't because it would be getting off topic. As for the second, the cost of energy is a massive factor into the economy, because energy underpins anything we do. The only real solution we've found to poverty is growth. The worlds wealth follows an exponential, tampering with the base has serious implications when you are looking at climatic timescales.
> There are certainly countries with low energy costs and high poverty rates.
Let me try to explain in another way. We are at a crossroads. Whatever our past is, our current situation, it's no matter now, that's behind us. We can choose path A, or path B.
Path A (continue to use natural gas) keeps us going. We know that at some point we'll have to deal with the consequences of climate change, but we can modulate our use, and take our time. We are making the future costs higher, there's no doubt about that, but we might be better equipped to switch to renewables in 40 years. There's no reason to rush the switch.
Path B (completely switching to renewables now). This will limit our growth for sure. It will also require us to sort out now how best to handle the transition, because rising prices with our current system will leave a lot of people without heating in the winter, or unable to use appliances like dishwashers (I'm in Spain, our energy cost has been rising constantly, we are seeing this happening). We will need to change a lot in very short time. Our future climate costs will be lower.
In some sense, by choosing path A, we are betting that we will find better solutions at some point in the future. If we choose path B but if some new amazing renewable technology appears in say, 75 years, we've made a huge mistake.
Does moving towards B also produce growth because it's a process that will take decades?
All the more reason for a carbon price. If the cost from renewables is genuinely more expensive than climate destabilization, then make the price explicit and the market will sort the practical from the pointless.
If there's one thing markets are good at, it's choosing the cheaper option. But they need a price signal to work on in the first place.
Given that renewable generation solutions can be purchased by a much larger percentage of the world population than nonrenewable ones, they probably do a lot to decrease wealth gaps. Since they require more energy invested per energy paid back though, it's probably accurate to suppose that the total wealth in the system would be reduced by such a trend.
Storage is currently very expensive, and this is not likely to meaningfully (as in decrease by an order of magnitude or more in cost) change anytime soon.
That means that you need to buy and maintain more equipment for the same kwh at the plug than you would with a typical power plant. Fossil Fuels are incredibly energy dense and really cheap to extract, even with the nutty new technologies required in many places.
With fracking in the USA at least the people involved can set up an LLC that dissolves after the well runs out. They are not required to disclose the contents of the fracking wastewater fluid. It gets pumped back down underground where it could dissipate into the rest of the water system. These people claim that it's safe for decades when our computer models can't predict the weather accurately next week.
In California now they're using fracking wastewater on crops because of the water shortages. Without disclosing what's in it. And not testing for if that stuff ends up in the food. These people are using loopholes to take the profits now and leave society with the bills for cleanup and the health consequences. That isn't sustainable or IMO fair or just. If the real cost of fossil fuels was clear up front they would not make sense.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-drought-oil-w...