Gasland’s Josh Fox Can’t Be Bothered with Facts

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  June 23rd at 01:11 PM  | 

Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox, he of the burning water tap, loves to scare people with the provocative word “fracking” and misleading images and claims of its potential to damage the environment, specifically groundwater. To wit, this screenshot of a cute little animated .gif at Fox’s website gaslandthemovie.com. It clearly depicts fractures from a horizontal gas well invading a freshwater aquifer. Scary! Now, consider the detail | Read More »

Fracking is Blamed for … Well, Everything, Really.

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  April 7th at 11:00 AM  | 

Blaming natural phenomena on fracking is this year’s fad, reminiscent of the mood ring, the pet rock or Anthropogenic Global Warming. Item 1. Vice-President of the United States Joe Biden may not know what hydrofracking is, but he does know that it sounds plenty scary. “… There’s a thing called fracking. They’ve got to go crack the rock in order to get [oil and gas] | Read More »

President Obama, Dr. Chu and Their Fracking Whopper

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  February 11th at 04:16 PM  | 

…[It] was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock – reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground. – Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address On Thursday, Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu visited the National Energy Technology | Read More »

Coming Soon: FrackNation

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  February 7th at 09:00 AM  | 

Phelim McAleer and his wife Ann McElhinney are journalists and documentary filmmakers. You may remember Not Evil Just Wrong (2009), their takedown of Al Gore and Global Warming hysteria. Now they want to tell the truth about natural gas development and hydraulic fracturing in a full-length documentary titled FrackNation. McAleer says: FrackNation will skeptically examine some of the scarier claims made by anti-fracking activists and | Read More »

Gas Pains

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  January 7th at 08:00 AM  | 

1. Despite a natural gas drilling moratorium in New York, that state’s Chemung and Broome Counties are feeling the economic lift from drilling next door in Pennsylvania. But to the New York Times, the ex-pat workers, largely from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, have awfully low-brow tastes, don’t you know. (NYT link below the fold.) 2a & 2b. The Daily Beast seems to have turned over | Read More »

The New York Times and Its Anti-Fracking Cargo Cult

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  December 13th at 07:00 PM  | 

Another day, another distorted and fear-mongering attack from the Old Grey Lady on America’s natural gas industry. Headline: Add Quakes to Rumblings Over Gas Rush (originally published under the headline “Some Blame Hydraulic Fracturing For Earthquake Epidemic”; link may require subscription/signup) Nine quakes in eight months in a seismically inactive area is unusual. But Ohio seismologists found another surprise when they plotted the quakes’ epicenters: | Read More »

Drilling in New Jersey? No Fracking Way!

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  August 25th at 11:30 PM  | 

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie issued a conditional veto on a measure that would have imposed a permanent ban on hydraulic fracturing — a/k/a “fracking” — in the Garden State. Instead, Christie has suggested a year-long moratorium on the practice. The debate over fracking in New Jersey is mostly symbolic. New Jersey has exactly zero oil and gas wells. It is, however, the nation’s #7 | Read More »

Drilling Rigs in Pennsylvania! Hide the Womenfolk!

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  August 17th at 03:30 PM  | 

Democratic State Rep. Michael Sturla is apparently not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Speaking of the impact of the Marcellus Shale drilling boom on Pennsylvania, Sturla said: “Also, aside from building roads so their trucks can get to drill sites and doing a little stream work to mitigate damage from their road building, exactly what are all those things the drillers are doing for | Read More »

It’s Not Easy Going Green, Part II

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  July 17th at 01:00 PM  | 

This week, American Electric Power scuppered plans for a $668 million carbon sequestration project at the utility’s Mountaineer Power Plant in West Virgina. The Mountaineer project had been heralded as the flagship of “clean coal” technology: the process involves using an ammonia chilling process to extract CO2 from the combustion exhaust. The CO2 would then be injected in its liquid state into underground rock layers | Read More »

The New York Times Says Shale Gas is a Giant Ponzi Scheme. Erm, No.

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  June 28th at 11:59 PM  | 

The New York Times really hates natural gas. Just in the last year, the Times has run scaremongering articles on the dangers of hydrofracking and Gasland-inspired tales of groundwater contamination in the “shale plays”, the unconventional sources of natural gas that have redefined domestic gas supply withing the last decade. On Sunday, the paper drifted into unfamiliar and inhospitable territory: petroleum economics. The Times published | Read More »

Energy 101: Hydraulic Fracturing

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  January 23rd at 12:00 PM  | 

This week, several news stories converged on an odd topic: hydraulic fracturing. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, has been used since the 1950s to stimulate oil and gas wells. The process involves pumping a sand-laden slurry into a well and subjecting it to enough pressure that the rocks in the productive formation fracture, or break. The purpose of the sand is to prop open the fracture, | Read More »