Why Obama Hates Fracking

Fracking makes energy affordable for poor people, and helps the middle class.

ScreenHunter_8057 Mar. 21 21.51

Welfare and distributional implications of shale gas

Obama can’t stand that, because he wants energy prices to skyrocket.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4]

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
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42 Responses to Why Obama Hates Fracking

  1. gator69 says:

    Now you’ve done it! Chris will have another Chrissy fit.

  2. omanuel says:

    Yes, Obama said he wants fuel costs to skyrocket. I believe increased, one-world totalitarian control of the public is the primary goal of:

    1. High fuel and food prices
    2. Ending the Apollo space program
    3. False, consensus science directed by federal research grants to hide the abundant source of energy in cores of atoms heavier than 150 amu

    • I. Lou Minotti says:

      Thanks for sharing, omanuel. Your comments are always enlightening, but you might want to think about being a little more kick-ass.

  3. I. Lou Minotti says:

    Can you envision this creepy idiot in his Hutu hut burning yak shiite as he roasts his dog meat? His mommy Valerie Jarrett sitting next to him with her Ipad, begging for a bite?

    A man can dream, can’t he? Before we nuke Iran?

  4. Chris Barron says:

    As gas prices fall rigs in areas drilling costs are higher than in the cheaper areas, such as Pennsylvania are having to be put in standby, and the workers are not going to be paid…..

    Chevron have set 550 rigs idle in recent months and new investment in high financial risk projects are being stepped down……all thanks to low oil prices

    A low oil or gas price is good for the consumer for sure….but the tight arses need to loosen up a bit or their demands for even cheaper fuels will mean that production cannot be sustained when a profit is impossible to make

    There is a very interesting irony in all of this….

    “Will low gas prices kill fracking or just wound it?The state of New York just prohibited it; voters in Longmont, Colorado voted to ban it; many environmental groups are fighting it; but the free market, not regulation, may doom fracking in much of the United States. The low gas prices this holiday season were great shoppers and retailers, but they spell trouble for the fracking industry.

    And the Keystone pipeline may die, not by Barack Obama’s veto, but by the Canadian company that wants to build it. Low oil prices may make Keystone unnecessary.
    And, ironically, Obama’s foreign policy, characterized by Republicans as weak and feckless, may have played a role in the low oil and gas prices.

    In 2008, John McCain and Sarah Palin ran on a platform of “drill baby drill.” They lost, but under Obama, oil and gas companies drilled and drilled and drilled. Due to all the production, domestic oil and gas production is at an all-time high. We are close to becoming independent of foreign oil.

    This drilling boom occurred because improved technology and high oil prices made hydraulic fracturing (fracking) cost-effective and highly profitable. A fracking boom swept the nation from Colorado to Pennsylvania, Mississippi to North Dakota. The boom helped ease the effects of the recession on many communities, providing jobs and tax revenue. Fracking helped our balance of-trades deficit, and it reduced imports of oil from the troubled Middle East. Domestic oil production made it easier to enact sanctions against Iran and Russia which reduced their oil revenue.

    Along with the boom and benefits, however, came environmental problems. Ground water began to be contaminated across the nation, and much of that is directly attributable to fracking. Earthquakes began occurring in places that never had earthquakes. Fracking has been determined to be the cause in many of those, if not all. As a result, opposition to fracking began to grow. Big oil responded by running a multi-million dollar ad campaign to convince people fracking is safe and wonderful.

    Fracking has been around for half a century, but it was never feasible until technology improved and the price of oil soared to over $100 a barrel. According to the Norwegian firm Rystad Energy,in the Arctic, it costs $78 on average to produce a barrell of oil. Canadian tar sand oil costs $74 a barrel. Oil from fracking in the U.S. costs about $62 a barrel. This means many oil companies are selling at a loss right now.

    With production costing more than the oil can be sold for, oil companies will likely put new wells on hold. It’s estimated 60 percent of the rigs in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale will be too expensive to operate if oil prices stay below $60. Frackers will continue to produce oil and gas from existing wells, which have about a 2-year supply of oil and gas. If global oil prices do not increase before those wells dry up, fracking could largely disappear. Low oil prices and cost of building Keystone might make that pipeline unnecessary.”

    • SMS says:

      Chris, you are FOS.

      The entire US rig count is down 684 from this time last year. Chevron is not invested in shale gas as much as other companies, so your rig count numbers are fictitious.

      Fracing has been around since 1947 and was economical from the beginning. Without fracing, gasoline prices would be considerably higher at the pump than they have historically have been. Oil companies have been fracing vertical wells to quadruple production and increase a wells production and reserves since that time. The use of horizontal wells and fracing is new, but the technique of fracing is not. Yes, it is more expensive to produce shale oil and shale wells have a much higher decline. But that also means that any oil glut is soon gone and the drilling returns.

      It is environmentally safe. Cannot contaminate drinking water and cannot cause earthquakes. This is a myth put up by ignorant environmentalists.

      Obama has done everything he can to stop drilling. Your ignorance of US oil and gas leasing is showing.

      Fracing will never disappear. As the higher permeable wells deplete and wells with lower permeability are developed to take their place; fracing will become more important.

      • Gail Combs says:

        Fracking has been around since just after the CIvil War!

        http://aoghs.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Roberts2.jpg
        When Col. E.A.L. Roberts founded his company in 1865, his many patents give him a monopoly on fracking torpedoes needed by the oil industry. The stock certificate – with oilfield vignettes – is worth about $300 to collectors.

        . Roberts received the first of his many patents for an “Improvement in Exploding Torpedoes in Artesian Wells” on April 25, 1865.

        Roberts was awarded U.S. Patent (No. 59,936) in November 1866 for what would become known as the Roberts Torpedo. The new technology would revolutionize the young oil and natural gas industry by vastly increasing production from individual wells…

        Filling the borehole with water provided Roberts his “fluid tamping” to concentrate concussion and more efficiently fracture surrounding oil strata. The technique had an immediate impact – production from some wells increased 1,200 percent within a week of being shot – and the Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company flourished.

        Roberts charged $100 to $200 per torpedo and a royalty of one-fifteenth of the increased flow of oil.
        http://aoghs.org/technology/hydraulic-fracturing/

      • Chris Barron says:

        “Cannot contaminate drinking water”

        Heard it before….

        As oil comes up to the surface through layers of groundwater, it just kinda magically knows not to go where the horizontally flowing water goes ? Actually I haven’t heard THAT specific one before, lol And I’n not even against fracking, as long as the wondrous claims of safety (better than air travel by all accounts) are true

        The lower the gas price the more difficult it becomes to extract gas economically with fracking due to operational overheads

        The rig count was an example of the scale of the issue. Chevron have indeed put 550 arctic rigs to rest

        Quoted material below……

        “Chevron just put its plan to drill in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea on indefinite “hold” because of “economic uncertainty in the industry,” reports Reuters.

        A joint venture between Imperial Oil, Exxon and BP is assessing the situation, and they too could drop plans for drilling in the Beaufort Sea.

        So far, Shell isn’t giving up, however, and insists it will drill in Chukchi Sea next year. It re-hired Noble Drilling to do it, even after it pled guilty last week to eight felonies – agreeing to pay $12.2 million – for its botched attempts in 2012. Felonies include improperly discharging oily water into the ocean and covering up or neglecting to report a litany of engine and other system failures that it knew about before it arrived in the Arctic Ocean.

        On the fracking front, an amazing 550 drilling rigs will go quiet in the next two months – a quarter of all the rigs in the US! There’s already been a 40% drop in new drilling permits over the past two months, reports Fuel Fix. Goldman Sachs says the oil industry should expect to weather a lengthy price downturn. “

    • David A says:

      The US production was done on private land and had zero to do with Obama, who in fact did all possible to shut production down. Chris knows this, as well as the fact that his figures for the cost of wind and solar are grossly in error. His assertion of the cost of nuclear is not accurate. He has been given multiple detailed linked rebuttals, which he ignores and simply reposts his perspective, (wind energy talking points) even when clearly wrong. (The exception is that with oil below 50 PB, much of the current fracking is not profitable, and for now further production will be on hold)

      • AndyG55 says:

        ” are fictitious.”

        That is the barren one for you..

        All FART !!!

      • Chris Barron says:

        ” His assertion of the cost of nuclear is not accurate”

        What assertion ? I have only said it costs too much and does not make a profit.

        Nuclear costs more over it’s lifetime than it can ever make from selling it’s electricty.

        In the UK we were ahead of the game on nuclear. We didn’t know what to do with the waste (in truth nobody definitely does) and we use a site called Sellafield for reprocessing, and for temporary waste storage.

        In the short term, the cost to decommission our existing nuclear power stations comes to about £80billion

        The cost to decommission Sellafield ( essential , according to their website) is a further £80billion

        These costs would not be an issue, if it were not for the fact that end of life nuclear power stations are simply handed over from the profit making privately owned operators to the publicly owned/government run NDA http://www.nda.gov.uk/

        So this burdens the public with a bill of $160 billion, which rises year on year.

        How much electricity has been generated by nuclear in the UK ? Lets call it 8GW continuous, although in the past it was less.
        Lets say the nuclear plants have run for 30 years at 8GW (generous estimate)
        – That’s 262800 hours at 8000MW = 2102400000 MWh

        How much has the electricity sold for ? Today it sells about £55 per MWh, and in the past it was much less. Lets say all of the past electricity sold at today’s prices, this means nuclear has sold 2102400000 x £55 = £115632000000
        ROUGHLY= £116 billion

        So the electricity which the public have already paid to use, sold on the market for a very generous rough amount of £116 billion. The operators may have made 30% profit, most likely they made less, so the private companies which operated the nuclear stations made £36 billion

        The cost to decommission will cost the public at least 5 times that figure of £36billion (which the public havent benefitted from) to decommission…and there is no avoiding decommissioning

        Or to put it another way

        Cost to decommission = £160 billion (and rising)
        Amount of electricity produced = 2102400000 MWh

        Therefore the cost of decommisioning adds £76 per MWh to the cost of production….except that the people producing it never have to pay it, because the taxpayer must

        The situation is not much better anywhere in the world…and the electricity business is not obliged to pay this additional cost…in fact how could they possibly afford to pay it when they only make (generous estimate) 30%….hell, they couldn’t even pay even if they made 100% profit

        • Chris Barron says:

          Obviously the crime here, in case your moral compass needs a nudge, is that big business escapes it responsibility to clean up after itself. The public does that for them

  5. john burns says:

    I believe you are correct about the climate. I do not know about fracking. Maybe, maybe not. And it may not matter because as I think you have mentioned nuclear power is terribly expensive. Coal of which we have an abundance is cheap. All the nuclear power plants leak some; and the waste seems to be a big problem. Looking at things as objectively as I can I have to conclude that the people with the most power have in mind poisoning the planet. Now Fukushima, perhaps in a year or two crazy Ukraine will have a melt down or two. Apparently the UK has problems coming along and so forth. Perhaps we need to have more Miss Atomic Bomb beauty contests as we once had to enliven matters. Perhaps we will have a nuclear war and solve the climate change problem by eliminating the nutty climate changers. Who knows?

  6. David A says:

    Well Chris, like I intimated, read the post! five minutes is not adequate.

    • Chris Barron says:

      I assure you that I have read it, and your claim “Nuclear has about a 10,000 year lifetime” appears to be plucked out of thin air.
      That figure contradicts many estimates by people on either side of the green debate so perhaps you would like to share your thoughts which led you to that conclusion ?

      • David A says:

        Ask him. However I can tell you that second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs.

        • Chris Barron says:

          I see…so you are not Chiefio !

          I thought when you advised us to learn to think that you were going to help us do it and that it was your own work which you promoted

          For a fact, the uranium reserves are highly contestable, BUT I have never seen anyone on either side of the debate claim there to be more than 500 years worth of uranium left in ground based mines. So you can imagine how it is that when one person comes along and gives a figure which contradicts everybody who went before.

          As for cost, nuclear has never turned a profit, in fact it is very lossy and the electricity from nuclear costs the consumer twice the retail price

        • AndyG55 says:

          “nuclear has never turned a profit,”

          MORON.. the Japanese ran nuclear or ages, sos have France.. VERY profitably..

          Your LYING propaganda BULLSHIT really is below the bottom of the barrel.

          The ONLY thing that makes your wind even slightly competitive is Government legislation mandating purchase, stupidly excessive FITs, and massive subsidies..

          Without that, your wind would die its natural demise, and no-one would feel its stench.

        • AndyG55 says:

          ok.. typing accuracy diminished.. sure was a nice rosé…

          figure it out for yourselves !! 🙂

        • Chris Barron says:

          “MORON.. the Japanese ran nuclear or ages, sos have France.. VERY profitably..”

          Very profitably indeed, just like the UK

          Now add in the cost to decommission and oh dear, the public have to pay for the cleanup, not the same people as those who made a VERY large profit

          Thanks guys…taxpayers lose again

  7. David A says:

    BTW Chris E.M. Smith is very responsive to any respectful assertions/ questions. so ask. You will be surprised at the breath and depth of his answer. His time is less free then in the past, but he is an excellent communicator.

  8. David A says:

    Anyone that spends three minutes on a detailed post is being inane.

    • Chris Barron says:

      Anyone who writes ‘What about nuclear’ and then in the first line states there is 10000 years of uranium, with the expectation that they should just be believed, is expecting too much

      • David A says:

        The extraction of uranium from seawater would make available about billions of metric tons of uranium.
        This clever scientist in Japan made a polymer that absorbs it from sea water at a price of about $150 / lb. Not competitive with the land based U by a few dollars, so not counted as an “economic reserve” today; but certainly cheap enough to make cheap electricity. And if we powered the whole planet on sea water U, we would extract slightly less each year than washes into the ocean via erosion… We run out of energy when we run out of planet. Literally. See:

        How the Japanese do it http://www.taka.jaea.go.jp/eimr_div/j637/theme3%20sea_e.html

        and:

        What some Greens think http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/03/cost-of-recovering-uranium-from.html
        ======================================
        Besides this nuclear is a side bar, as we have many many other options as well.

        • NancyG says:

          Just sticking my two cents in. I think we need to move to liquid fluoride thorium reactors and get off uranium.

    • Chris Barron says:

      You write…
      \QUOTE
      The Nuclear Option

      Nuclear has about a 10,000 year lifetime from the Uranium in present mines on land before we have to get fancy. With known proven technologies we can move that out to a few million years+. No, that is not a typo…

      \UNQUOTE

      You do not support that assertion with fact

      Cab you also please explain how you compare uranium with carbon
      “Sidebar: There is more energy in the Uranium in a given mass of coal than there is in the carbon” Do you just mean that uranium is more energy dense ?.

      • David A says:

        He means that there is uranium in most of the coal we mine, and that uranium, though just a small fraction of the coal, has more energy potential.

        Ask him. E.M. Smith will likely give you a very detailed answer, as long as you avoid carping comments.

  9. Anto says:

    This is an interesting theory on CO2 from Patrick Moore, which I hadn’t thought about before:

    “Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.
    http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/03/20/why-i-am-climate-change-skeptic

    • Dan_Kurt says:

      re: ““Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution.”PM

      Probably not a significant sink as plants have a DARK CYCLE and when dead decay giving back their carbon into C4 and CO2. The real sink is the formation of Carbonate Rock, e.g., limestone and coral. The earth’s atmosphere would be bereft of CO2 if it were not for the constant upwelling of C4 from deep in the earth through the crust and being oxidized into CO2–the hydridic earth hypothesis. (Dissolved CO2 in sea water is a store not a source.)

      Dan Kurt

  10. markstoval says:

    The Demorat Party has always claimed to be “for the little guy”. Well, “the little guy” has a hard time paying for energy. A hard time paying for gas to get to work and for energy to heat his house in the winter. Obama does not give a damn about “the little guy”.

    One wonders why the Republican party is so reluctant to use the Democrats harm of the “little guy” in their presidential races. Odd that.

    Disclaimer: I am not for either party, as I am a radical libertarian.

    • SMS says:

      I have never understood how Democrats get away with taxing businesses so much when the groups hurt most by taxing corporations and businesses are the poor and middle class. When these facts are shown to the poor and middle class they are so brain washed by the democrats, they dismiss them as lies. And the Republicans just can’t seem to communicate the clear message that the poor are getting hurt most by taxing others. They only see the “free” stuff they are promised. The poor don’t seem to have much forward thinking because they are just trying to get by day to day.

  11. Don says:

    Who needs uranium when you’ve got thorium? We proved a thorium reactor back in the 1960’s.

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