Fracking in UK given green light

Following on from another thread...

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Reply to
Mike Tomlinson
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Indeed, and to listen to some business commentators there are sufficient reserves under Lancashire to last the UK for 50 years. Such comments must obviously be taken with large quantities of salt, but they illustrate the problem of separating fact from fiction in the energy world given the hyperbole surrounding the issue on both sides of the social, political, economic and environmental arguments, not to mention self-interested misinformation.

Nevertheless it is probably indisputable that very significant deposits of oil shale are to be found beneath Lancashire. Whether the recoverable gas resources are commensurate, is an entirely different and still largely unanswered question. This underlines the futility of making predictions about when fossil fuels will "run out", and all that ensues from such pronouncements.

There are very large deposits of shale oil in many other parts of the world still to be fully assessed, just two examples out of many are China which has what are believed to be vast deposits far larger than those found in the USA, and Argentina. The latter are onshore deposits in addition to the offshore deposits of oil being explored in the Atlantic near the Falkland Islands. New gas fields have just been confirmed in the Eastern Mediterranean and the very first test well explored off Cyprus has been assessed at about 5 trillion cubic feet. This field will not require "fracking" and the gas is recoverable through natural pressure. There are other fields yet to be explored in the area and that doesn't take into account fields already found off Israel. Both countries are considering how they might export natural gas in light of their respective geopolitical situations but it is a given that they have discovered more natural gas than they consume when exploration has only just begun.

The price of natural gas in the USA has plummeted in the last year, simply because large quantities of shale gas have come onto the market and the USA is now contemplating exporting gas. The price of gas has fallen so low there and so rapidly that companies are now having to mothball up to half of the wells which they only opened up very recently.

Reply to
Dave N

Well yes, but has anyone worked out what happens to the actual ground when you do this kind of extraction. If people live above it all sorts of things might occur with time. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

The bloke on the Today programme this morning who is on the scientific panel that recommended that fracking proceed, pointed out that the same issues (including minor quakes) have always been a problem for coal mining too.

Reply to
Tim Streater

I have this picture in my head of the gas coming out and the Earth shrinking down like a deflating balloon.

Erme - only me then?

Nick

Reply to
Nick Odell

Would it then be sent frantically zooming away like a balloon let loose? No need to worry about spacecraft journey times to the stars, we take the whole planet! It's worthy of Red Dwarf.

Reply to
Davey

Dave N wrote: [snip]

Not just Lancashire. There are probably significant reserves below Derbyshire. There is evidence in the form of elaterite and the blue colouring in Blue John of petroleum below the limestone strata. There is an interesting succession of shale, grit, impermeable basalts and porous limestone with coal measures at the northern end of the Peak District. The question there would be permits for extraction in a National Park.

Reply to
Steve Firth

No, the salt mines are in Cheshire.

Pete

Reply to
Pete Shew

heh, like Kuwait into Iraq.. Gulf War 1.

Coal mining removes a large bulk of solid material in specific areas which can and do collapse as a result over the subsequent decades. Shale gas extraction does not remove bulk material, what it removes is distributed over a large area. So more likely to be trivial earthquakes rather than the (real) problem of coal mine subsidence.

Companies using fracking chemicals are intentionally contractors, and even those contractors will no doubt phoenix at some point to distance liability. So making any future litigation more an "demands for industry to face a public inquiry" with the result pre-determined and obfuscated by paid off expert testimony. Focusing on earthquakes is missing the elephant in the room, but that is a common ploy.

Reply to
js.b1

Welcome to Blackpool - Twinned with Pisa.

Reply to
Graham.

Capitalist or free-marketer? Thatcher was no free-marketer. Quite the opposite, more a Corporate Fascist - what we have now.

You are right she squandered North Sea oil on unemployment benefits to destroy manufacturing to offshore it to China. The woman was a loon.

MAGGIE, MAGGIE!! DIE! DIE! DIE!

Reply to
Doctor Drivel

You do not tax the end user. Tax the company that extracts the gas. The proceeds go into the treasury coffers keeping income tax down - hopefully.

This gas is commonwealth. The company using commonwealth must pay for the privilege to pay for our collective services.

Reply to
Doctor Drivel

The only bits of the "firewater" film that gets shown on the news is one chap setting fire to gas coming out of his tap. They never explain where he gets his water from. Borehole or piped from local water company? The American fracking plants seem to be in the middle of nowhere, so I'd guess borehole.

I can understand gases leaching into a borehole, but how are gases going to leach into the water mains? The gaseaus leachate is going to enter the public water system at the collection stage, prior to processing, and I would most expect it to dissipate from reservoirs.

JGH

Reply to
jgharston

Not a few are being shut because they don't fulfil the bullshit spouted about them.

Reply to
grimly4

It is from a (local) borehole.

A fair amount of water is actually pumped from aquifers. What Reading pees, London drinks sometime later.

Fracking involves a fair bit of diesel, hence the benzene and lighter fractions. I have a suspicion it leaks in via the original pipe route not so much the deep level fracking which is below water table (clay on top of fracking area).

Reply to
js.b1

That's the conclusion I came to - so it's a problem for the water treatment system which already has plants to remove grok and gunk from the water harvested from the environment when leachate at the fracking pipe leaches far enough to get to the catchment reservoirs or supply boreholes.

How many people are likely to have a private borehole near enough to a fracking plant to be effected? I know it's the "in thing" in back-to-the-country self-build property programs, but even the people I knew living five miles outside remotest Tarland were on the water main.

JGH

Reply to
jgharston

I know, I saw it as soon as I posted, all I can blame is my typing's gone to pot since scraping all that limescale from the toilet. You shoiuld've seen how I'd spelled "fracking" before I corrected it.

JGH

Reply to
jgharston

I would also add "economic" vs "economical" to the ic/ical list. There seem to be a lot of economical commentators who don't know how daft they sound.

JGH

Reply to
jgharston

And the most common one that makes my hackles rise.. the use of a collective noun followed by a plural

The police force are...

The vast majority of (whatever) say

The biggest giveaway comes from Labour who use words they have read, but patently never pronounced....

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Mike Tomlinson wrote on Apr 18, 2012:

Also "fed up of..." in place of "fed up with..."

Reply to
Mike Lane

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