…[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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (COMINTERN) (AMPAS) are a bunch of suckers when it comes to Leftist propaganda films featuring outrageous, junk-science based, anti-capitalist claptrap. Just ask Al Gore, who won an Oscar a few years back for An Inconvenient Truth. One of this year’s nominees in the Documentary Feature category is a film by Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic called Gasland. | Read More »
Turesday night, CNBC featured the broadcast premiere of Haynesville, a documentary film by Gregory Kallenberg. The film tells of the impact of the Haynesville Shale natural gas field on the residents of DeSoto Parish, Louisiana. I’d recommend Haynesville to everyone. According to its boosters, the Haynesville Shale contains some 230 trillion cubic feet of gas. To put that in perspective, that quantity is roughly equal | Read More »
The President’s post-election remarks contained something of an “olive branch” to Congressional Republicans. It came in the form of a broad hint that the Administration might backpedal on its opposition to natural gas development. Obama’s Enthusiasm for Gas Drilling Raises Eyebrows “We’ve got, I think, broad agreement that we’ve got terrific natural gas resources in this country,” Obama said when he was pressed for issues | Read More »
Previously, in these pages, we’ve visited the controversy surrounding the industrial process used in completing oil and gas wells known as Hydraulic Fracturing. Despite the lack of evidence that energy industry practices have ever contaminated groundwater resources, published data do suggest that the average American is routinely exposed to potential health hazards from high concentrations of chemicals, acids and unknown additives contained in other industrial | Read More »
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 »
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