JC and some others have told us about this from time to time, here is a nice piece from Nigel Lawson on the technology and the implications of “fracking” to tap hundreds of years of supplies of oil and gas from shale. With attractive pictures of Chancellor George Gibson, shale rocks and Blackpool.
Has anyone been following Alan Jones and his diatribes against fracking in NSW? He makes sense on most issues apart from free trade and I would like a professional opinion on this bee in his bonnet. Lawson wrote:
Scare stories about fracking leading to water pollution are equally unfounded, with upwards of a mile of solid rock separating the shallow aquifers from which we draw our drinking water from the deep deposits where the shale gas is to be found and where the fracking occurs.
The bottom line is that, contrary to the peak oil fantasists, fossil fuels are going to become more available, not less.
Today, oil, gas and coal represent 80 per cent of the global energy mix. They will continue to dominate the world’s energy markets for decades to come. And within that picture, natural gas is going to offer the cheapest way to produce electricity: cheaper than nuclear energy and massively cheaper than renewables.
We are living in an era when good news is thin on the ground. The shale gas revolution is the exception: a game-changing piece of good news, both economically and geo-politically, both for this country and for the world.
AJ’s does qualify that he is referring to fertile ag land and below water supplies for cities, but it is so light a qualification most of his listeners would miss it.
Rafe, for context I listened to this interview between Trevor Rees-Jones & Peter Robinson which was extremely informative about the issues with water & fracking:
Through the discussion it is clear that the risk of water contamination comes down to a question of:
1. The rock structures surrounding the shale gas (i.e. if there is no gas contamination in the water, the structure is sound)
2. Care taken through the drilling process to ensure the line to the surface is secure at all times.
It would be valuable to see some graphics on the rock structures in the controversial areas so we can make an informed decision.
Token
9 Dec 12 at 9:46 am
It’s just wonderful news Rafe. Absolutely amazing news just of how much humanity’s energy reserves have risen.
I’m wondering if any of the peak oilers (most of these clowns are also AGW doomsayers) ever apologized or even recognized just how wrong they were?
Let me repeat what i always said at the height of the peak oil/energy scare. Energy production is a function of technology.
The holding capacity of the earth in terms of how may people it can hold is a function of technology.
That’s it.
JC
9 Dec 12 at 10:12 am
Despite the headline of this Guardian piece by their environment reporter, it’s also very positive for 80% of it with some interesting detail about relative oil prices and the economic effect shale is already having. The Friends of the Earth dude at the end sounds like a whacko.
I’m on board with the shale oil issue, myself. I remember arguing for Peak Oil many months ago, but I was wrong. Science has delivered another winner. I wouldn’t go so far as to pretend that there’s a limitless supply of fuel with no repercussions for burning it, as JC just did, but to my mind shale oil buys us enough time to develop low-emission alternatives without devolving into the Mad Max scenario.
There was a story in the paper the other day about possibly using Victoria’s brown coal deposits to fuel hydrogen cars. That would seem to be decades away as well, but such projects are worthy goals. Shale oil bridges the gap until science solves those problems as well, hopefully.
m0nty
9 Dec 12 at 10:28 am
x2
Token
9 Dec 12 at 10:37 am
Yay. Well done.
.
9 Dec 12 at 10:40 am
It buys us time for nuclear to become cheap and even safer.
Pity they included a pic of the US wrecker.
Rafe
9 Dec 12 at 10:41 am
I agree, but let’s not “spike the football”, M0nty was big enough to make the statement.
Rafe is correct, if the goal is to reduce the use of fossil fuels and at the same time find a way to allow the billions on this planet to share our standard of living, we should use nuclear in addition to shale.
Token
9 Dec 12 at 10:47 am
The question, Token, is whether the time that shale buys us is long enough for low/no-emission tech like hydrogen or solar to go past nuclear for scaled cost effectiveness. Is it a matter of raw investment, and are we under-investing in those technologies at present?
m0nty
9 Dec 12 at 10:53 am
I can’t say and it is a gamble, but considering there is no going back.
The way I look at it we have to hope that by providing an extra 2 billion people a modern lifestyle in countries like India, China, Thailand, the Gulf States, Brazil, etc., the combined population of people means we have more minds working on the problem.
Think how far we could be along that path if the money mis-allocated to perpetuating the fear of AGW and trying to commercial products that are not yet viable were actually allocated to pushing forward that tech.
Token
9 Dec 12 at 10:58 am
Well done Monty (no sarc).
I am not really concerned about burning things but for the benefit of those who do care I have high hopes for nuclear when it recovers from the setback on R&D in the US due to the Green wreckers. Not so wild about geothermal. Fun to do the R&D but not at my expense, and why would you bother?
Rafe
9 Dec 12 at 11:00 am
Well said, Token.
m0nty
9 Dec 12 at 11:02 am
I wrote some comments about this a few weeks ago. It attracted a host of motley critics.
These couple of paragraphs seem to have annoyed them most:
DavidLeyonhjelm
9 Dec 12 at 11:04 am
AGW is still real, the problem is getting worse and shale will exacerbate it over the next few decades. Nevertheless, the long term solution is still to find low/no-emission alternatives to the worst emitting sources, and shale is merely a bridging source to hold the economy up until then. Carbon pricing is still the answer to minimise emissions in the short term and fund the eventual replacement energy sources.
m0nty
9 Dec 12 at 11:09 am
Rafe
Fat boy hasn’t done well at all . The question he raises at the end about investment is crap.
JC
9 Dec 12 at 11:09 am
Not diluting the available-energy impact of shale gas (I’ve always poo-poohed the peak-oilers.. shale oil extraction last century told us there was energy to extract there if oil became expensive enough), but I think the most important impact is political – as pointed out in that article.
The era of middle-east influence over the west from oil-based energy dominance is nearing an end. Time to start ignoring the crackpots and build a fence around the place.
duncanm
9 Dec 12 at 11:12 am
Okay, I accept that AGW is likely… it’s not real in the sense that it can be proven because it can’t. It’s inferred.
What evidence do you have that it’s getting worse fat boy?
Shale gas won’t fat boy. Shale gas is 50% of coal’s carbon content, so if the US went to gas instead of coal because of price they would go close to halving their emissions by 2050.
You have no fucking idea what you are talking about Dunkins kid.
No it isn’t. we were on our way to free emissions anyway until “you lot” began scuppering nuclear in the US and put that technology in the back burner.
Fuck off Fat boy. You have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s always platitudinous crap from you.
JC
9 Dec 12 at 11:20 am
And what pray tell is libertarian about gate crashing other peoples property against their will and risking the polluting of their water basin.
Brian4Jesus
9 Dec 12 at 11:26 am
Don’t tell me you’re swallowing the “no warming for 16 years” snake oil, JC.
This is true in the medium term of shale gas, but in the short term shale oil is the sexier tech, and it won’t cut emissions.
And now shale has given us a time-out so that we can have a race to see which tech overtakes fossil fuels for scale, cost and safety. Nuke, solar, hydrogen… GO!!!
m0nty
9 Dec 12 at 11:27 am
FFS, what a bucketload of bombastic bullshit.
Four errors in nineteen words.
Pathetic, mUttley, absolutely pathetic.
Rabz
9 Dec 12 at 11:32 am
And what pray tell is libertarian about gate crashing other peoples property against their will
Absolutely nothing, but that is largely due to the Australian construct of property ownership being wrong. I’d like to see you try that in Texas.
John Mc
9 Dec 12 at 11:35 am
Oh, it gets better guys.
The latest news from WA.
Five years ago, the 3P (proven+probable+possible) guesstimate for the gas reserves of the Canning basin were well below 20 trillion cubic feet (tcf). The 2P reserves are now understood to be well north of 200tcf (correct!) with God knows how much more – only a third of the basin is explored at all.
And it gets better.
new technologies revealed at the last APPEA conference show that we can now interpret seismic (and re-interpret old seismic) down to unpresedented depths. And guess what? There’s vast amounts of oil at depths hitherto thought unreachable.
I have said repeatedly that we stand at the very beginning of the Hydrocarbon fuels era. When abyssal methane clathrate technology is sorted (and the Jap. and S.Korean govt.s are funding a lot of research there)… well the guesses I have seen from KoGas and the Japanese Big Five are minimum 3000 years supply out to 12,000 years supply at current growth rates and assuming every human alive has a US lifestyle in 2100.
The peak Oilers were right, too – there was a peak in the oil you could extract very cheaply and easily with 19th century technology.
So what? Those nuts thought the tech would never improve!
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 11:35 am
AGW is still very contentious, the role of CO2 is speculative and quite unproven. Meanwhile, coal is still there, in large amounts across the world, and useful. Plus, gas replacing oil is best looked at for its economic virtues, and as a solution to dependence on a disintegrating and unstable Islamic Middle East and the oilfields there as well as an alternative for some countries to dependence on Russia.
James Delingpole has talked a lot about the British lunacy of greenies wanting to resist all development of the big UK shale oil deposits. There was a mild earthquake in Lancashire or somewhere near there and this resulted in hysterias due to a manufactured belief that it was caused by some fracking tests (the best test of this is found in the US experience, which has been without serious problems). Hence the British countryside is still being covered in ‘windfarms’, big land owners are getting richer, and green madness continues to abound in Britain.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
9 Dec 12 at 11:36 am
And now shale has given us a time-out so that we can have a race to see which tech overtakes fossil fuels for scale, cost and safety. Nuke, solar, hydrogen… GO!!!
Monty is talking so much reason and sense I’m choking on my expresso.
John Mc
9 Dec 12 at 11:37 am
Not interested? What about this then, or don’t people matter if they stand between you and a bucket of money.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHQt1NAkhIo&feature=player_embedded
Brian4Jesus
9 Dec 12 at 11:41 am
[...] Shale gas, good news for Brits and the west [...]
hot is better than cold … | pindanpost
9 Dec 12 at 11:42 am
Property rights are a mess in Australia, Brian.
Nothing to do with moustachioed villains tying up the wives of landholders, it is a historical accident due to greedy, gold lusting colonial Governments.
.
9 Dec 12 at 11:45 am
Hahahahahahahahaaaa…. it’s a movie.
B4J – it;s merely the usual confected bullsh*t of hollywood propaganda. Naturally it has no actual basis in reality or fact.
This is how you obtain your worldview, is it?
pathetic.
Try facts and reality instead.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 11:49 am
Having read more than a few comments on ‘diverse’ British media outlets suggesting that the SAS get dropped into Sydney to find and pick off two dickhead radio presenters for a silly prank gone wrong, the prospect of such a sick country being bequeathed that sort of renewed prosperity is a little frightening.
Toxic
9 Dec 12 at 11:56 am
Dot I don’t quibble with the history I just query why a blog devoted to libertarianism is so gung ho about trampling on the rights of farmers, surely they qualify as legitimate small business.
Brian4Jesus
9 Dec 12 at 12:01 pm
I think I’d like that movie, especially the rural US scenery.
Brian, I’m not certain where you are coming from or whether you are having us on, but this industry is a means for those communities to continue to exist. It makes that lifestyle a workable choice in contrast to closing down the farm and moving to the city. Or even associated industries for people who want to live in a rural town rather than a city.
All the issues of land degradation, property rights, contract negotiation, broader water and environmental issues need to be managed. And they can be just like any other human endeavour.
John Mc
9 Dec 12 at 12:02 pm
No one ever supported that.
Up your meds.
.
9 Dec 12 at 12:03 pm
rafe, it is ironic that a technological innovation may previously worthless materials extremely valuable. who would have thought?
crude oil used to be waste product until the 1850s.
Jim Rose
9 Dec 12 at 12:05 pm
libertarianism is so gung ho about trampling on the rights of farmers, surely they qualify as legitimate small business.
Brian, all of us, every single one, completely oppose the trampling of property rights of farmers and consider them legitimate small businesses.
John Mc
9 Dec 12 at 12:07 pm
I’m astounded. Monty wrong. Imagine that.
C.L.
9 Dec 12 at 12:19 pm
monty is beginning a charles johnson style meltdown.
.
9 Dec 12 at 12:20 pm
There is no ‘warming’ and hasn’t been for a decade and a half.
So no. The ‘problem’ is not getting worse.
C.L.
9 Dec 12 at 12:25 pm
Fat boy, don’t change the subject. How is Global warming getting worse. Explain it.
Oil won’t likely be used for large scale energy production- just transport and even that is questionable as gas could be used far more extensively. However oil also produces about the same carbon output as gas.
Go what dickhead? Whats the question?
Tech will always be in a state of flux because people will be looking out for cheaper/utilizable production and extraction methods.
There’s nothing earth shattering in what you’re saying, fat boy.
JC
9 Dec 12 at 12:37 pm
You were doing real well until then monty; I was beginning to think maybe monty isn’t such a dickhead after all.
There are a lot of AGW nutters who can still produce a modicum of common sense about alternative energy sources; for instance Hansen and Barry Brooks are advocates of nuclear wile thinking AGW is real and the fossils are devil’s spawn.
Monty appears to be in that category of ratbag.
Actually you don’t need AGW to justify nuclear instead of the fossils; on a cost comparison from here:
Table 5.2.6 Comparison of cost of electricity (no carbon price)
Brown coal = $95/MWh
Black coal = $89/MWh
Brown coal with CCS = $192/MWh
Black coal with CCS = $175/MWh
Nuclear (Gen 3+) = $97/MWh
The comparison between nuclear and the fossils with CCS is relevant because the green fuckers will make sure that the fossils are handicapped with the CCS bullshit, and the corporates lack the balls to say both CCS and AGW are bullshit.
Where’s that evidence monty?
cohenite
9 Dec 12 at 1:32 pm
I read an excellent piece (link via Insta) from a geologist on fracking and why it cannot affect water supply. It basically came down to the depth of hard rock layer between the two – something of the order of a mile of rock, which fracking cannot touch as too impermeable, and water cannot pass, for the same reason.
Fracking involves much weaker and deeper layers of rock.
People assume fracking is from top down, therefore affecting top soil, water and the rest. And that is wrong.
Farmers are just bitching to get a better rpice for their used land – no more no less, and Jones is their paid mouthpiece.
pete m
9 Dec 12 at 1:51 pm
Hmm yes you have to wonder about Jones when a major sponsor of his is the Manildra Group.
http://www.manildra.com.au/
Dryland cereal cropping and they sell ethanol.
.
9 Dec 12 at 1:57 pm
Jim
Yup. Was reading through some material on the oil industry in the Netherlands East Indies in the 20s and 30s.
It was not very profitable, as the oil was considered to be poor quality. It was far too light. So the big job at the refineries at Tarakan and Balikpapan was distilling off the straight run gasoline (70 octane hydrocarbons) to get the marketable heavy bunker fuel for ships and power stations.
The gasoline? It was a waste product.
It was flared off!
I am a huge fan of the CSG, tight oil and tight gas technologies. Cheap fuel for millennia.
As a real side-benefit, I also gain vast personal amusement from seeing the growing desperation among the Godless pagan gaia-worshipping greenfilth.
B4J: Do not base your ‘knowledge’ on the propaganda of greens as funded by the Saudi and Qatari governments (did you even know they are funding films like this?).
Instead, go and see what the industry says:
http://www.appea.com.au/
http://wa-onshoregas.info/
http://wa-onshoregas.info/sites/wa-onshoregas.info/files/news/120829_WA%20Environmental%20Regs.pdf
(In this case, give Lucy a call and ask her for more data, or call up Bill Tinapple’s boys and girls at Dept of Mines and petroleum in WA: http://www.dmp.wa.gov.au/7105_7766.aspx and they will damned near bury you in actual, real, genuine, verifiable data)
http://www.capp.ca/canadaIndustry/naturalGas/ShaleGas/Pages/default.aspx
Also go and check the regulations. Did you even know how carefully state governments regulate this sector? Again, Bill’s staff can put you on to that.
or you can base your views on what paid agents of the Saudi and Qatari governments put into a transparent and very crude propaganda film even Josef Goebbels would be embarrassed about.
Your call.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 2:06 pm
SINC!
Oh crap.
Sinc, put too many links in a post on the oil and gas industry. Links are to industry peak bodies and WA Dept of Mines and Petroleum.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 2:07 pm
Jim
crude oil used to be waste product until the 1850s.
Yup. Was reading through some material on the oil industry in the Netherlands East Indies in the 20s and 30s.
It was not very profitable, as the oil was considered to be poor quality. It was far too light. So the big job at the refineries at Tarakan and Balikpapan was distilling off the straight run gasoline (70 octane hydrocarbons) to get the marketable heavy bunker fuel for ships and power stations.
The gasoline? It was a waste product.
It was flared off!
I am a huge fan of the CSG, tight oil and tight gas technologies. Cheap fuel for millennia.
As a real side-benefit, I also gain vast personal amusement from seeing the growing desperation among the Godless pagan gaia-worshipping greenfilth.
B4J: Do not base your ‘knowledge’ on the propaganda of greens as funded by the Saudi and Qatari governments (did you even know they are funding films like this?).
Instead, go and see what the industry says:
LINK in original
LINK in original
LINK in original
(In this case, give Lucy a call and ask her for more data, or call up Bill Tinapple’s boys and girls at Dept of Mines and petroleum in WA: LINK in original and they will damned near bury you in actual, real, genuine, verifiable data)
LINK in original
Also go and check the regulations. Did you even know how carefully state governments regulate this sector? Again, Bill’s staff can put you on to that.
or you can base your views on what paid agents of the Saudi and Qatari governments put into a transparent and very crude propaganda film even Josef Goebbels would be embarrassed about.
Your call
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 2:09 pm
Petem
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the farmers. If reserves are found on their land they are essentially told to piss right off and the state government takes all the loot.
The explorers of course can’t pay two sets of royalties so the farmer is mostly cut out of the loot.
This is more about the basic weakness of our system whereby the government rips off the land holder because of the way our property rights are structured.
We should own the land from the core to the heavens, not just the top soil.
JC
9 Dec 12 at 2:12 pm
MK, as someone involved in servicing the conventional and unconventional gas business (among other things), I regard this as the tip of the iceberg. It’s a beautiful thing being built, as cheap energy is a great thing for society in general. The environmental dangers are utterly overblown.
tbh
9 Dec 12 at 2:13 pm
Alan Jones’s behaviour on this has been simply wacko, communist and appalling. He is responsible for that gee-ed up audience of conspiratorial boneheads who abused and spat on the minister the other day. I actually suspect 80 percent of these people are more angry about not getting a sufficiently large slice of the pie than they are about “food security” and the golden soil of the beloved motherland.
C.L.
9 Dec 12 at 2:13 pm
Jones finds the idea of men drilling into gaseous crevasses an abomination.
Infidel tiger
9 Dec 12 at 2:16 pm
The most important part. I hope they haven’t forgotten how to herd camels and grow dates. Because OPEC is looking very tatty these days.
A price crash coupled with complete non-investment in their youth, coupled with medieval social policies.
Definitely time to build a fence around the joint. Somehow I don’t see the Chinese running their diplomacy efforts with as much forelock tugging as the west have in the last 50 years. No wonder they are piling onto boats – anyone with half a brain can see the trouble headed the middle easts way.
brc
9 Dec 12 at 2:22 pm
“There is no ‘warming’ and hasn’t been for a decade and a half.”
How ‘sceptics’ view global warming.
Jarrah
9 Dec 12 at 2:26 pm
AJ’s stance on this reveals him to be a populist windbag.
tbh
9 Dec 12 at 2:26 pm
By the way, I think land-owners should get a large slice of the fracking pie.
C.L.
9 Dec 12 at 2:30 pm
The problem with fraking in Australia is that the land owner has essentially zero rights, with the statist founders of the country greedily declaring all the mineral rights belonging to the crown, instead of the landowner. That is a legitimatte issue in Australia, but people with this viewpoint have been throw in with all the buttery around water, soil and global warmening. And Alan jones has let all the fools into his tent.
brc
9 Dec 12 at 2:33 pm
JC, the Crown, as in the people own the resources, not the farmer. Farmer has no right to bitch about lost income from the resources.
They get adequately compensated for temporary interference with their enjoyment of land.
pete m
9 Dec 12 at 2:41 pm
Yeah, jarrah, of course Jarrah, natch, Jarrah….
And the greenfilth and glowball warmenation scammers, conmen, charlatans and spivs did not tamper with the raw data at all to bring it into line with their computer models, did they?
Gott keep that cash flowing their way, don’t they?
And what CL said at 1430
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 2:41 pm
.
Bullshit jarrah. Where’s the evidence?
cohenite
9 Dec 12 at 2:47 pm
JC, the Crown, as in the people own the resources, not the farmer. Farmer has no right to bitch about lost income from the resources.
The whole logic behind this is perverse and leads to unworkable law and probably sub-optimal benefit being obtained from the resources. At the very least I think it’s fair to acknowledge we don’t seem any better off than countries that acknowledge the land owners rights to the resources beneath, as far as I can see.
John Mc
9 Dec 12 at 2:52 pm
I do have to say that I’m sympathetic to the argument that the mineral rights should be with the landowner and not the Crown. If you own the land, it shouldn’t just be the top soil, so to speak. It should be all of it.
tbh
9 Dec 12 at 3:24 pm
Agree. The landowner should own the mineral rights.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 3:28 pm
MK50 So I should seek out sites that you recommend!
These no doubt would be the sites you explore to validate you prejudice. A movie highlighting the consequences of fracking is propaganda, while the statements promoting the self interest of the oil industry are some how sacrosanct. You my friend are the classic ‘captive audience’.
Brian4Jesus
9 Dec 12 at 3:32 pm
This country is stuffed. Underpinning that is the green filth and the lie of AGW which is wasting $billions and compromising our energy sources to the extent that the lying bitch in the Lodge has even woke up to the fact and has come out with her goldplating crap, which in effect means use less and if you don’t soon you won’t have any choice anyway.
On top of this we have a level of corruption in terms of how our resources are exploited which would make North Korea proud; hopefully the money which has escaped the public purse in NSW will be recovered.
There is no nuclear policy at all which puts the best out of reach at the same time when the fossils are feeling a pincer movement between the green filth and ratbags like Jones; Jone’s views on shale gas are bizarre and deserve a seperate thread.
In respect of the farmer owning the reserves underneath his land, that flies in the face of centuries of common law; what rights the farmer does have are reasonable recompense for the exploitation of the minerals under his land; apart from a period, again during the ALP period of Unsworth when coal rights from all ownership were confiscated, generally speaking farmers can make a case and get reasonable recompense; the only exception to that are Peter Spencer situations where farmers are disenfranchised by AGW policy.
It is this disenfranchisement by the green filth and AGW policies which Jones should be looking and not attacking the enormous potential of shale gas.
Anyway, fuck the greens.
cohenite
9 Dec 12 at 3:33 pm
Cohenite, fuck the Greens rather goes without saying
tbh
9 Dec 12 at 3:35 pm
Mk50 of Brisbane, great story about gasoline as a waste byproduct. A book could be written on useless by-products various that turned into gold mines.
Was it Bill Gates who asked why would anyone want a home PC?
already found a first draft of the book I mentioned at http://www.technologyreview.com/article/401601/garbage-in-innovation-out/
the abundance of coal tar, which was waste, led to synthetic-dye, photographic-film and the pharmaceutical industries. Henry Ford’s treating time as a form of waste extended well beyond the discovery of production assembly lines.
Jim Rose
9 Dec 12 at 3:43 pm
Jarrah, I might become interested in the AGW hypothesis if and when the temperatures rises sufficiently to allow farming in Greenland in areas where they were farming during the MWP, England where they still cannot grow grapes that they were during the MWP, and France, where they were also growing grapes in areas today that they can’t.
In other words the earth has not returned to the MWP temperatures. If and when it does, and continues to rise in temperature, then we might have a problem.
Otherwise global warming alarmism is simply the latest iteration of millennial doomsday expectation which many of the consensual class have fallen for, again.
Louis Hissink
9 Dec 12 at 3:49 pm
Cohenite,
Australia is, like it or not, a planned economy and hence will suffer an economic implosion as a consequence. We are simply a soft Marxist state and there is nothing we can do about it individually apart from making sure we survive, and which also means a certain degree of circumspection in our written utterances. (Expect counselling etc in the future for PIC views).
As a lawyer you would be aware of a raft of new legislation being enacted these last couple of months – it is now compulsory for companies with > 100 employees to comply with gender diversity, among others. Go to the IPA for a list of new departments etc.
Louis Hissink
9 Dec 12 at 3:55 pm
Louis, if it’s not contract law I’m not interested. I know I’m missing out on a goldmine with the multifarious legislating creating new rights and obligations but AGW is all the crap I can handle right now.
All the best for Xmas!
cohenite
9 Dec 12 at 4:02 pm
Louis Hissink, thomas schelling asked this question:
ht: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/GreenhouseEffect.html
Jim Rose
9 Dec 12 at 4:05 pm
B4J:
I’ll tiredly explain this one more time.
A movie tells a fictional story. So it is fiction, and Matt Damon really is an actor, he does not work for a gas company.
Do you have that now?
Getting your views from this sort of source merely guarantees that you actually know nothing about the subject at all.
I provided you with a number of links to BOTH oil and gas sector peak bodies AND to an entity (WA Dept of Mines and Petroleum) who regulate the industry.
If, for example, a company lies about what it is doing in WA, teh Department takes them to Court and (if they have broken state law badly enough) they go to gaol.
Therefore, you may trust the data they publish. Oh, they can sahde it, not release other data, put a spin on it sure. You have to be aware of their own biases.
But the data the publish is regulated by the resource-owner (the WA state government in this case).
Did you see the movie ‘Gasland’?
You know the scene where the guy lights the water from his tap, ‘proving’ that natural gas was ‘polluting’ his water supply?
Do you know a subsequent Court case proved they faked that? They connected a propane tank up to his water line to get that shot.
In a word, they lied.
Did you believe their lie?
Personally, yes I have worked in concert with that industry for quite a few years now and know a lot about it. One thing they do not do is deliberately lie as they did in ‘Gasland’. Youdo, you lose your job becuase you have just risked serious litigation and risked damage to the company brand (itself worth money).
The defence of the ‘Gasland’ liars?
“oh, it was a movie not a documentary and that was artistic license.”
What got them in trouble was that they advertised it as a doco – and hence factually correct. Oops.
So now, B4J, you have a moral choice. You can look at facts and arguments from both sides and make up your own mind (this BTW is the Christian, ethically correct and morally correct thing to do) or you can do the opposite.
Let’s see just how Christian, moral and ethical you are, or if you are just some lefty using an assumed persona ‘to try and fool the rubes’.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 4:06 pm
It’s still fun; they’re such jerks.
cohenite
9 Dec 12 at 4:16 pm
MK50 Thanks for that of course I have not seen the movie, just the trailer, though I did find it disturbing as I have read and heard that fracking is dangerous to water tables, I am just concerned about the plight of land holders who seem to be the poor relation in all this. I have looked at your links and will do more research, being in the industry you are in a good position too reassure those who feel most excluded from the process.
Brian4Jesus
9 Dec 12 at 5:11 pm
If the goddam farmers worried about food security were told they could subdivide their farms for lifestyle blocks at 10x the price you’d be killed in the rush.
Eyrie
9 Dec 12 at 5:37 pm
B4J; in the USA the farmer owns the mineral rights. Once devastatingly poor regions over the Bakken Shale are now getting full employment, housing booms, land price appreciations and many local millionaires. Look here and browse the videos.
http://article.wn.com/view/2012/09/08/Schafer_The_Bakken_has_proved_its_potential_to_investors/
The real issue here seems to be that the US ‘urban liberal elite’ are increasingly upset that people they despise (ie: rural Americans and farmers) are getting as rich as them.
Then you add foreign interferance (yes, the commercial competitors in the oil and gas sector, Russia, saudi Arabia and Qatar) are bankrolling the major green groups to try and delay this technology. These days, Greenpeace is basically a Saudi front. After all, once the USA passes Saudi Arabia as an oil producer in 2017 and stops importing any oil at all, who needs Saudi Arabia’s vile government any more?
There is a vast amount going on in this space.
Finally, hydraulic fracturing of tight gas and oil deposits (most are actually dense siltstones, rather than shale) rarely occurs within cooee of aquifers. Most aquifers are shallow. Most tight hydrocarbon deposits are deep. Normally there are hundreds of metres of impermeable rock between the two. And that is where regulators come in and if you look around you’ll see that the industry is very tightly regualted becuase of the huge revenues it generates for government.
Good-quality bore cementing keeps them separate. In any case, methane (natural gas) is hardly a pollutant. Millions of tons of it outgasses from swamps, weathering shales and siltstones, coal seams, marshes and lakes the world over every day.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 5:49 pm
One day the west might also work out that if they drill a little deeper under the coal deposits, oil will be found.
Few realise that Rockerfeller’s principal commercial opponent during the 19th century was the Russian oil industry. Oil politics has its roots in that situation, plus the legacy of Lyell’s hijacking of geological thinking at the time.
If you realise that the left fabricate history, wait until you start on science – they fabricated much in that area as well.
The economic implosion affecting humanity can be simply sheeted to the left in general since the end of the LIA.
Louis Hissink
9 Dec 12 at 5:58 pm
This blowjobs for jebus bloke is a really obvious, pathetic, confected left wing troll.
…and a dumb c**t to boot.
.
9 Dec 12 at 6:08 pm
“And the greenfilth and glowball warmenation scammers, conmen, charlatans and spivs did not tamper with the raw data at all to bring it into line with their computer models, did they?”
No, they didn’t, as confirmed by BEST.
But do keep your tinfoil hat on, just in case.
Jarrah
9 Dec 12 at 6:14 pm
Dot don’t despair Jesus loves you.
Brian4Jesus
9 Dec 12 at 6:19 pm
…and he hates hypocrites like you blowjobs and thinks you ought to be drowned with a millstone.
.
9 Dec 12 at 6:23 pm
The scammers did not tamper with the data? Really, Jarrah?
Care to explain this then?
Please note Figure 8. Can yopu please answer the following questions:
1. What justifies the four adjustments?
2. We have no fewer than five different records covering Darwin from 1941 and all agree almost exactly despite being from different locations in that area. What phenomena can possibly justify adjusting them all?
3. Yet, ALL the adjusted data just happens to match the later computer models. Why?
4. How does this not add an entirely artificial and imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data?
5. When five sets of raw data show a zero temperature increase trend, what justifies adjustments that magically change this to a six degree per century warming trend?
6. What was the demonstrable scientific process by which each of the four adjustments was made?
Now, I do not expect you to even attempt to answer these, jarrah. What I expect is EITHER silence (you running away, brave Sir Robin) OR you chanting utter twaddle like most warmies do when clobbered by teh facts.
So I do expect you to “… keep your tinfoil hat on…”
Science-deniers usually do, after all whe faced with empirical matters.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 6:39 pm
Oh, just so we are clear, Jarrah. Figure 8 is:
Darwin is irrefutable proof that you warmies deliberately perverted the raw data to make it fit your preductions.
There’s no ‘out’ from Darwin Zero for you warmies. There is absolutely no justification for what was done. It’s cooking the books, scientific fraud, and nothing else.
The Darwin Zero adjustments are what warmies being caught red-handed looks like.
I look forward to your response.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 6:48 pm
I’m actually against any data manipulation short of a sample wide cut along the lines of a Heckman two step procedure.
.
9 Dec 12 at 6:54 pm
Dot, you sound a hell of a lot better than I – can you please cast an eye over Watt’s work at the link in my 1839 and see if he has made any egregious error?
I can’t see one but I am not a data cruncher in that specific regard.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 7:02 pm
AJ also beclowned himself over Shapelle Corby.
jupes
9 Dec 12 at 7:07 pm
Jarrah,
as there’s doubt about the heat island affect, I like to look at the raw data at BOM.
Pick a random outback station with lots of data.. and find me some warming.
Boulia doesn’t have any for the last 125 years
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=038003&p_nccObsCode=36&p_month=13
Then lets look at the oldest temperature record in place. Central England.
The MET office wants to scare us by cherry picking a start date (1780. Note they didn’t include the 1730′s when temps were the same as 2009) and expanding the scale:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
Looking at the whole record, that is clearly alarmist bullshit, and the temp record has nothing to do with CO2 emissions:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/01/cet-temperatures.html
duncanm
9 Dec 12 at 7:09 pm
He hasn’t made an error.
He has simply reported on what the alarmists have done.
Imagine adjusting Gold Coast temps by using the temp gauge at Dubbo.
It’s just fucking nonsense.
.
9 Dec 12 at 7:13 pm
It is simply bizzare they adjust temps with stations roughly 500 km away but refuse to acknowledge the urban heat island effect in any serious manner.
.
9 Dec 12 at 7:16 pm
Pathetic trolling jarrah, even by your standards; BEST is fucked; even by the low scientific standards of AGW BEST is scraping te bottom of the barrell; this was all done and dusted when BEST 2 was spat out here.
Good comments Mk50.
cohenite
9 Dec 12 at 7:17 pm
Oh.. here’s the raw unfucked Darwin data.
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/weatherData/av?p_display_type=dataGraph&p_stn_num=014015&p_nccObsCode=36&p_month=13
duncanm
9 Dec 12 at 7:26 pm
And not even a single mention of abiotic oil. If that is true (and it may well be), then the volume of oil can be far higher. The simple fact is that shale gas technology shows that to some extent we are limited only by our technology. What we are running out of it shallow oil, cheaply obtained light crude. Oil prices will ultimately reflect higher retrieval costs, but that’s much better than relying on wind and solar.
All that’s left is to show the great majority of how big a scam is of AGW, then we can busily get on with retrieving hydrocarbons.
The Beer Whisperer
9 Dec 12 at 7:37 pm
That C3 article is fascinating.
Cohenite, your response on BEST was good stuff!
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 7:40 pm
Hmm. Jarrah’s gone quiet…. maybe he’s at dinner.
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 8:03 pm
Mk50 trots out tired old discredited rubbish. Film at 11.
m0nty
9 Dec 12 at 8:04 pm
One shouldn’t indulge in schaudenfraude, but I had a little skip at the sight of Neville Wran being dragged out drooling in all of his alzheimer glory by his spouse last week.
Wran and his then-treasurer Ken Booth (from a mining seat at Cessnock, no less) stole millions of dollars of mining rights from NSW landholders including my family when they nationalised mineral rights in NSW.
How they ever got away with that is a question that has never been answered.
mareeS
9 Dec 12 at 8:15 pm
Monty… Lambert? Really?
hahahahaha
duncanm
9 Dec 12 at 8:19 pm
You bastard monty, linking to Lambert.
cohenite
9 Dec 12 at 8:53 pm
maree – what about the quid quo pro for developers in squandering the M4 corridor?
Wran will deserve his punishment in the next life, that is certain.
Once Wran kicks the bucket, plenty of previously actionable laundry will be aired.
He will be seen as the true berk he is, and the likes of the Obeid family will pale in comparison.
.
9 Dec 12 at 8:54 pm
Eschenbach? Really?
hahahahahahahahahaha
m0nty
9 Dec 12 at 9:11 pm
You linked to Lambert’s critique of Willis monty so why are you cackling you demented weasal? And why is Willis wrong?
cohenite
9 Dec 12 at 9:27 pm
Lol… He’s linking to Shiny now? I notice shiny no longer publicizes he’s at the UNSW. Why is that I wonder?
JC
9 Dec 12 at 9:32 pm
Jarrah’s still awfully quiet.
Monty, you apparently know the answers to teh six questions above, then.
I look forward to both Jarrah’s answers, and yours.
“Lambert says’ is not an explanation. There are four points at which the data was adjusted upwards. not down (funny that) but up, and always up.
Why?
Mk50 of Brisbane
9 Dec 12 at 10:21 pm
Where is all this idiocy about ‘landowners should own the mineral rights’ coming from? Why should they receive additional rights and bounty for nothing?
Forget the government. You are on the other end of that deal. When someone purchases monopoly land rights, your interest is best served in that they get those rights for as short a time as practical, for as limited a set of rights as practical, balanced against the time frames required for benefitting from those rights.
You sure as anything don’t want to be selling mineral rights to someone who just wants to grow crops.
Yes, the land ownership regime in Australia is borked. We allow people to purchase perpetual rights to land for a capital sum. That’s about as stuffed as it can get, except of course if you were to throw mineral rights in as an added bonus.
Driftforge
9 Dec 12 at 10:44 pm
“Please note Figure 8. Can yopu please answer the following questions”
The answer to all of them is, I don’t know.
While I read WUWT’s post, I kept waiting for him to get to the point where he asks the person(s) who did the adjustment, or knows about adjustment in general, what the reason could be.
It never came. Why not?
“Darwin is irrefutable proof that you warmies deliberately perverted the raw data to make it fit your preductions.”
No, it’s not. It looks very odd to me, and I’d be interested in the answers to your questions, but it’s not irrefutable proof of anything at all. From a quick skim of the comment section, it seems that there’s doubt that Darwin Zero is even a station at all, so an analysis treating it as such would give weird results. Again, I don’t know.
“Jarrah’s still awfully quiet.”
Please forgive me for having other things to do on a Sunday night.
Jarrah
10 Dec 12 at 12:02 am
“Pick a random outback station with lots of data.. and find me some warming.”
You don’t seem to quite grasp the concept of global warming, duncanm.
Jarrah
10 Dec 12 at 12:04 am
Jarrah,
I was waiting for you to come back with that.
How about you find me a station now, like a good boy.
What, the whole country hasn’t warmed? “Countries are not global” says Jarrah.
What, neither has the UK? “The UK and the largest southern continent are not the world” says Jarrah
hmm.. there seems to be a pattern here. (Jarrah with fingers in ears so far they’re impacting the brain)
duncan
10 Dec 12 at 7:38 am
duncan == duncanm at various points in time.
duncan
10 Dec 12 at 7:39 am
It is the blatently dishonesty of people who continue to show graphs tactically with a date range of 30 years (which matches their dubious conclusions) which drives me away from the AGW cult.
Why don’t the data series start at the start of the current warming trend at the end of the last cooling period?
Token
10 Dec 12 at 9:07 am
Jarrah:
And that is why you are not a troll.
If you dig deeper into what Watts has found, you’ll see a pattern whereby urban heat island effect is delineated, marginally applied to urbanised temp recording sites, and then applied to rural sites which show no temerature increases in the raw data.
The result is that some urban sites receive a small ‘down’ adjustment, the majority of rural sites receive a large ‘up’ adjustment, and the resulting (wholly artificial) temperature increases just happens to accord with the bulk of IPCC computer models. (And can you please give me a bigger governmetn grant next year so I can refine my model)
That is why Darwin is the smoking gun in proving scientific fraud. There is no reason for the four step adjustments.
As for asking ‘why did you do that’, Watts is notorious in the warmie fraud community and I believe they rarely answer his requests unless FOI laws force them to.
If I was a conman, I’d be reluctant to answer the investigator as well.
Mk50 of Brisbane
10 Dec 12 at 9:10 am
Having been to most countries in the world I know the answer to this.
1) Be Christian
2) Work for yourself
Max
10 Dec 12 at 10:07 am
Jarrah,
What do raw temps since 1850 look like?
What do raw temps not sullied by the urban heat island effect look like?
.
10 Dec 12 at 10:17 am
Just to add to Mk50′s excellent post, the other crucial thing that Watts and his colleague found (as explained on his website in the WUWT TV clip recently posted) is that, when the US sites were weighted for quality, abiding by the accepted international standards for location and equipment, more than half of them are sub-standard, and many are so bad they should simply be discounted.
However, what the temperature adjusters have been doing is adjusting the best sites’ values (the minority) towards the worst sites’ values. The result has been upward adjustment, instead of the downward adjustment which should have occurred.
There is a lot more to measuring things than meets the eye. It has been a real education for me.
johanna
10 Dec 12 at 10:27 am
Well, I’ll answer it for you, Maree. They are from the Australian Labor Party. Move along, there’s nothing to see here.
That is what our country has become.
James in Melbourne
10 Dec 12 at 10:28 am
“Eschenbach says” is not an argument.
m0nty
10 Dec 12 at 10:33 am
Eisenbach din’t just say monty. He showed how the temperature reconstructions were dishonest or at least incompetent in the extreme.
If you adjust Darwin with the three nearest temps, sure, one is Darwin PO, but the other two are at least 450 km away.
.
10 Dec 12 at 10:36 am
Eschenbach deliberately cherrypicked Darwin Zero because it didn’t have three other nearby sources. It’s a massive outlier in that regard. It is not representative of the vast majority of the sample data. His analysis may be useful to highlight that outliers like that should be discounted, but beyond that it proves nothing.
The BOM graph is damning enough to render Eschenbach moot anyway. Unless you’re also claiming BOM is part of the global AGW conspiracy?
m0nty
10 Dec 12 at 10:43 am
No he didn’t.
You know this, how?
No.
.
10 Dec 12 at 10:50 am
Thanks Dr No, fine argument you made there.
m0nty
10 Dec 12 at 10:53 am
munty
Your argument is below that. You just lied and made more ridiculous assumptions. You won’t even explain how you know Eisenbach made errors. Have you gone through the sample?
You’re a bullshit artist, munty.
.
10 Dec 12 at 10:56 am
Are you claiming BOM is part of the global AGW conspiracy or aren’t you, Dot? I’d trust BOM over a psychologist who has been on the payroll of an oil company.
m0nty
10 Dec 12 at 11:05 am
Damn I’m late to the party. Currently in some of the more remote parts of the Kimberley (aka the Canning basin) on unconventional petroleum related business.
Fracture stimulation of CSG vs shales are very different propositions. Different pressures, frac fluid make-up, proppants, etc. etc. Fracture stimulation of coal seams is more the exception than the rule, whereas it is essential for shales to get any oil or gas production at all.
Fracture stimulation has been a common oil field practice since the 1940′s, where thousnads of fracture stimulations have occured in Australia, both onshore and offshore, since the 1950′s.
Fun fact 1. Barrow Island, off the WA coast has had over 740 fracture stimulations since the 1960′s, and remains an A Class nature reserve.
Fun Fact 2. Fracture stimulation of large water bores for municipal water supply is not uncommon.
I consider the “sleeper” issue in shale gas, is in fact shale oil. Shale oil is free oil in shales and closely located dolomite and sandstone formations. Not to be confused with oil shales which involve mining thermally immature, kerogen rich shale and heating it in a clinker to extract oil.
Shale oil production in the US is booming, particularly in North Dokota where the state has overtaken Alaska to be the second largest oil producing state behind Texas. A recent fracture stimulation job in the northern Perth basin where a section of the kockatea shale was fracture stimulated, produced approximately 30 barrels of oil across a vertical intersection of several metres. 30 barrels of oil doesn’t sound like much right? To develop this you would drill a production wells horizontally through the shale for several thousand metres. Also the kockatea shale is hundreds of square Km’s in extent through the Perth basin. Hower other shale resources vastly overshadow this in the Kimberley, the Northern Territory, SA and Qld.
Antipodean
10 Dec 12 at 12:23 pm
I don’t care who you trust. You lied about Eisenberg.
You cannot answer questions about what the raw temps are since 1850 and what the raw temps are from stations without the urban heat island effect.
Lastly, you are innumerate and too stupid to use chopsticks without hurting yourself. Ergo you invent conspiracy theories no one else is talking about.
.
10 Dec 12 at 12:35 pm
Move along folks, nothing to see here, no conspiracy, no climategate:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/11/giss-raw-station-data-before-and-after/
The before and after git would rightfully mean gaol sentences.
.
10 Dec 12 at 12:55 pm
git–>gif
Droll.
.
10 Dec 12 at 1:20 pm
Trevor Rees-Jones noted that in the interview I posted at the top of the thread. I don’t understand why it is not communicated in advertising by the industry.
Token
10 Dec 12 at 1:21 pm
This mineral rights thing…..
Farmers did not pay for the value inherent in the mineral rights when they bought their land. The bought that land for the purpose of agriculture and the value reflects the earning capacity from agriculture (+an expectation of capital appreciation).
So, no, they should not be gifted mineral rights. That said, in Qld there are some freehold, per 1919 titles I believe, which have mineral rights. But most of Queensland is covered by agricultural leases anyway, with ownership by the state.
The key thing is that if the CSG company has rights to the resource under your land, to get at it the landholder should be no worse off, and preferably, better off. I think we know things are on the up when neighbours are arguing for which blocks get developed first by the CSG company.
Entropy
10 Dec 12 at 1:30 pm
“What, the whole country hasn’t warmed? “Countries are not global” says Jarrah.
What, neither has the UK? “The UK and the largest southern continent are not the world” says Jarrah”
This Jarrah fellow seems like someone who understands English pretty well. You should probably listen to him.
But rather than erecting strawmen arguments and arguing with empty chairs, maybe you should engage with the subject? Just a suggestion.
Jarrah
10 Dec 12 at 3:10 pm
Jarrah,
the topic is AGW.. I and others have provided plenty of evidence that suggests individual station data has been artificially adjusted up to support a ‘last 30 year GW’ proposition.
The reliable raw station data, plus records like the CET record don’t show the warming the alarmists would like us to believe.
Pointing to some manipulated global data record does not convince me.
duncanm
10 Dec 12 at 6:31 pm
I believe that the distance between coal seams and water in NSW Vic is very little, not much margin for error. Trevor Reece Jones said about 400 feet disturbance by fraking, so this may be what the farmers are on about.
That said, the whole idea that we could be energy independant is very exciting.
Helen Armstrong
10 Dec 12 at 6:49 pm
The man’s name is Eschenbach, Dot, you clown.
m0nty
10 Dec 12 at 6:52 pm
Actually Helen, coal seams do not need as much fracking as shale. It is important to not mix up the two.
I don’t know much about NSW coal seams, but given as the liverpool plains ones are part of the Surat Basin, there probably isn’t a large amount of fracking happening at all. Other, more dense seams, might require a greater proportion of tracking.
The Surat Basin coal seams are already friable, so they don’t need to spend the money on fracking to get the gas out. Just depressurising the seam by pumping out the water is usually enough. I have heard that about 10% of the surat basin wells will need to be fracked, which is good, but that would still be a few thousand.
Anyway, the important thing is to get a very good idea about the surrounding geology and work out what can and cannot be done with fracking. This would include how far away any susceptible aquifers are. And then closely monitor what happens over the few days the process happens. it would definitely not be in the interests of the CSG company to make a mess.
I am aware of one case in Qld where a Surat Basin fracking test resulted in increased linkages with the surrounding aquifer. Very shallow. It was stopped immediately. There are thousands of wells in Queensland, and some have been fracked. No measurable cross contamination except in the above case.
This is not surprising when you think about it. As soon as the fracking fluid is extracted back up the well, and the seam is then depressurised by pumping out CSG water, the pressure gradient will be towards the well rather than away.
entropy
10 Dec 12 at 7:42 pm
That’s bullshit. Willis addresses that issue in detail here.
As for being representative [sic], noone knows how BOM adjusts/homogenises its raw data
cohenite
10 Dec 12 at 7:44 pm
So it’s not Doris Day, Fat Boy?
Are you even self aware correcting people about such a thing after what happened today with your Doris Day imbecility.
I think Homer is smarter than you.
JC
10 Dec 12 at 7:46 pm
Next you’ll be haranguing people about their diet.
Infidel Tiger
10 Dec 12 at 7:48 pm
helen:
If you go to Catherine Hill Bay beach you can walk across an exposed coal seam.
If you ever go down the Chain Valley underground you can see them mini-wall mining underneath Lake Macquarie in between Mannering park and Summerland point, providing about 1,200,000 tons run of mine coal for the Vales Point power station. The mine is 53 years old, see a report here.
It’s a cool mine to visit.
This is a shallow mine, only about 200m down. The deepest I know of in this basin was one 900m deep, that was the Birthday Shaft at Birchgrove Park in Sydney IIRC, closed about ’15.
You’ll find coal seams down as far as they have drilled in the Sydney basin and I know of no bores deeper than about 1100m.
The CSG guys in QLD are mostly dewatering fairly deep measures but methane is hydraulicly bonded to coal by water pressure and coal is as porous as hell. No need to fracture.
The ‘horrid chemicals’ used in tight siltstone fracturing are mostly water and sand.
Mk50 of Brisbane
10 Dec 12 at 7:51 pm
And this (see Cohenite’s link) is how the AGW scammers ‘adjusted’ the Darwin data to make it fit their computer models:
So, to the credulous warmy gullibilitariat, no actual methodology has revealed itself in anaylsis and the perpetrators refuse to say a word.
Scientific. Fraud.
Mk50 of Brisbane
10 Dec 12 at 7:57 pm
BTW, Who is Trevor Reece Jones? A quick google only delivers Princess Di’s bodyguard.
entropy
10 Dec 12 at 7:58 pm
Related:
http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_4_gulf-coast.html
I love stories like this.
JC
10 Dec 12 at 8:00 pm
Imbecility is a great term. Especially when used to describe the imbecilic. Use sparingly.
Pickles
10 Dec 12 at 8:30 pm
Pickles, when are you in town for beers? I am off tomorrow, back Thursday.
Mk50 of Brisbane
10 Dec 12 at 8:44 pm
For the people who know the fracking technology – what sort of pressures are used to fracture the rock? And what sort of pressure comes back up once the fracking is complete?
Of course : re the water contamination – the average fruitloop greenie loves to collect their own water in rain tanks, and would never dream that a rainwater tank can develop any nasty items in it.
But give something a scary sounding name, and watch them flee for the trees. I heard that fracking can lead to aquifer contamination with dihydrogen monoxide, a known killer of small children, especially when they inhale it. Shout, greenies, SHOUT!
brc
10 Dec 12 at 9:09 pm
Some day before the 24th. Will let you know. Front bar of the Boundary to start?
Pickles
10 Dec 12 at 9:09 pm
brc, the pressure just needs to be to the point where the substrate you are pumping the fluid into will fracture. No point going too far beyond that: one, you are wasting money; two, unnecessarily stressing equipment (again, wasting money);and three, also potentially causing problems in surrounding layers (which would cause a whole bag of hurt, and again, waste money).
But that would be my assumption, given some rock jockeys I have come across, logic doesn’t always get high priority, but the bean counters usually bring them into line, or they are sacked.
But on my above theory above coal seams wells that actually were fracced would undergo a lot less pressure than a shale fracc hole.
PS don’t knock the campaign against dihydrogen oxide. Damn stuff nearly killed me when I was four. I still remember that day.
entropy
10 Dec 12 at 9:30 pm
Dihydrogen oxide kills far more people than nuclear power, I am surprised that the Greens are not onto it.
Poor Old Rafe
10 Dec 12 at 9:35 pm
A bloke told me once, and i think he was talking about the old bowen basin seams deep below the GAB that are quite dense, that to fracc those coal seams the pressure would be the same as pumping water out of a 30,000 m hose placed on end and reaching up into the sky. So not small pressure. And it all has to be sucked back out once the fractures are made.
entropy
10 Dec 12 at 9:37 pm
Boundary Hotel in west end? I think most are coming by train. One can have a few that way.
or is that a place in the CBD?
Mk50 of Brisbane
10 Dec 12 at 9:43 pm
Don’t need to fracture coal, entropy. it’s porous.
Mk50 of Brisbane
10 Dec 12 at 9:44 pm
Most of the time that is true, MK, but sometimes it is needed. Much less pressure than shale though. They reckon eventually 10 percent of Surat Basin CSG wells will be fracced.
entropy
10 Dec 12 at 9:45 pm
Rafe, Penn and teller in their great show Bulls**t successfully circulated a petition to ban H2O at an environmental rally.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/05/he-yafei-china-climate-negotiator for how the 2010 climate talks failed.
Obama and other leaders sat down with He Yafei, Chinese vice-minister of foreign affairs. He Yafei was the smartest guy in the room. Wen Jiabao refused to attend most of the negotiating sessions, including the final one. He Yafei acted as Dr. No.
The response of Obama:
Given the choice of walking out of a farce or sitting down with a vice-minister, they choose humiliation.
Jim Rose
10 Dec 12 at 10:59 pm
brc, fraccing into deap shales, you generally need a pressure north of 6,000 psi, usually around 8,000 psi to get a half decent fracture propagation. Anything past 13,000 psi runs the risk of rupturing your well bore casing, which is not good.
MK 50, you may need to frack some coal seams but like I indicated earlier, it’s the exception rather than the rule. coal porosity is not the issue, it’s permeability (the rate at which a fluid or gas can pass through a solid) that will determine whether to frack or not. the other issue with CSG is if the coal is well cleated, good cleating = good gas flows.
Antipodean
10 Dec 12 at 11:58 pm
MK if the mob are descending by train then the Trannie in Roma St might be the go. Good beer, usually a bit of music and TAB so we can have an all in crack at the dishlickers (No 1 in the Red!).
Pickles
11 Dec 12 at 10:43 am
“The reliable raw station data”
This phrase is bizarre. Raw data is inherently unreliable. That you don’t know this means anyone who tries to reason with you is probably wasting their time.
“plus records like the CET record don’t show the warming the alarmists would like us to believe.”
So-called sceptics always forget that the evidence for global warming comes from many different sources. There’s the land surface air temperature record, which this discussion has been focussing on, but there are multiple convergent lines of evidence that point to global warming.
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 2:51 pm
No.
A lot of it may be. It doesn’t mean that it all is, which is what you have said.
So we ought to look at as much reliable raw data as possible.
.
11 Dec 12 at 2:57 pm
Never believe your lyin’ eyes until the data has been properly massaged eh? I know what you are meaning to say, but an extreme statement like that goes too far regardless of the reality or not of AGW.
entropy
11 Dec 12 at 3:00 pm
Mis spell on my part, sorry entrophy, from Token comment one 9.46
- very distinguished looking and sensible southern gentleman whom I very much enjoyed viewing and listening to.
Helen Armstrong
11 Dec 12 at 3:32 pm
“A lot of it may be. It doesn’t mean that it all is, which is what you have said.”
When a lot of it may be, but you don’t know which bit, then because you don’t which to trust, as a whole raw data is inherently unreliable. Which is what I said.
“Never believe your lyin’ eyes until the data has been properly massaged eh?”
Have you heard of optical illusions? Sometimes your eyes ARE lying.
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 3:34 pm
So two entirely different processes unhelpfully confused as one – some education needed here.
Like Trevor Rees-Jones (!) said – there is risk we accept without question every time we get in our car to drive, yet we expect mining to be totally risk free. That is unreasonable.
Helen Armstrong
11 Dec 12 at 3:36 pm
yes, yes I have. I don’t tend to find them in data sets though. Not without a lot of rum first. But seriously, I was a ‘avin’ a go guv, at the emphatic “raw data is inherently unreliable’. There are cases where data smoothing, windsorising, or outright chucking out are justified. But if in doubt, stick with the raw data.
entropy
11 Dec 12 at 3:40 pm
yes, Helen, fraccing shale beds is a whole order of magnitude higher pressure than in a coal seams, which usually does not need fraccing at all. You just pump the water out of the coal seam (it holds a lot of water) and the reduction in pressure bubbles the gas out like opening up a bottle of coke.
For most CSG extraction, to me the key risks (in order) are:
1. what to do with all the CSG water brought to the surface. It is brackish and has some annoying elements in it like flourines. Not universally, some coal seams have been used as a source of stock and domestic water for decades. The Qld government is requiring the CSG companies to RO all of this water to a useful standard, and then you are left with this concentrated brine you either try to make bicarbonate soda out of or you transport it out to sea or you store it in a giant concrete dump.
2. How to avoid wrecking laser levelled irrigation land by laying pipes all over the place. Part of the getting on well with your neighbours thing.
3. how to get up and running quick enough to collar the market before every other man and his dog gets in on the act.
entropy
11 Dec 12 at 3:49 pm
I will have a look at that video, Helen, it looks interesting
entropy
11 Dec 12 at 3:52 pm
So if we have big mobs of gas adjacent to big mobs of iron ore, why aren’t we making it into steel ourselves? Previously I thought USA would become our buyer after China went out of picture, maybe we joint venture with USA who make the best steel, (Mono and Cat parts are not as good made in China) instead? Oh excitement – until I remember unions and wages and all that brown tape. And Global Warmening Tax.
Helen Armstrong
11 Dec 12 at 3:55 pm
No.
If you’re correct though, all we can do is just not use it.
Even with data going back to 1850, at yearly levels, we don’t have enough data to make sense of things.
Monthly data would suffice. How much of it is good enough though, and isn’t subjected to manipulation?
Cointegrated regressions show that the CO2 forcing is basically half of what the IPCC say it is.
cohenite brings up a paper often which basically says there is an upper limit to warming and past a safe point, the earth radiates excess heat into space.
Why bother worrying Jarrah? Do you know that paper is wrong?
What about the paper mk 50 always brings up about prehistoric warming and CO2?
.
11 Dec 12 at 3:58 pm
you also need coal
entropy
11 Dec 12 at 4:00 pm
So put the coal on a boat in Qld and send it round to the Pilbara for processing iron into steel with the gas from Canning.
Helen Armstrong
11 Dec 12 at 4:23 pm
“Do you know that paper is wrong?”
No. I also don’t know it’s right. Regardless, I don’t base my views about AGW on single papers.
“What about the paper mk 50 always brings up about prehistoric warming and CO2?”
That has been debunked repeatedly, several times on this blog alone. Mk50 just ignores the refutations, and brings it up a few months later. He might not be intellectually dishonest – he might be getting senile.
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 4:27 pm
It would be a pretty important finding, Jarrah.
Single papers with new results are more important than the derivative crap that follows.
What is the main objection?
.
11 Dec 12 at 4:38 pm
Watched Harry Shearer & Rob Long at Uncommon Knowledge – just found out that in addition to doing voice-overs for Simpsons characters Shearer has done a documentary on what was the cause of the flooding of New Orleans:
Spoiler alert: The disaster was not a result of Hurricane Katrina
Token
11 Dec 12 at 4:45 pm
“It would be a pretty important finding, Jarrah.”
If correct. Something we can’t know just from the paper itself. If it is correct, other investigations will confirm it.
Things are rarely so cut-and-dried, and so more likely there will be a slow accumulation of evidence, and if there is a preponderance pointing to one conclusion rather than another, we should probably accept that – for the time being – as the correct interpretation of underlying reality.
Which is why I think AGW is real and is a threat. Because that’s where the preponderance of evidence points.
“What is the main objection?”
Can’t remember. m0nty might.
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 4:46 pm
I was going to day that the once the coal is loaded on a boat at Gladstone, the cost is the same to the pilbera as it would be to china, but then I realised that is no longer true as the feds slapped some sort of local cabotage restrictions on, with the result it costs more to ship coal to the Pilbera than to China!
entropy
11 Dec 12 at 4:52 pm
I don’t know why steel mills can’t get going in Autsralia with all the required resources.
It was always a mystery why australia dug up the coal and irone ore, sent it to japan to get melted down and made into cars, which they duly sent back again.
Surely an internationally competitve Autsralian steel plant could be built, given all the natural resources lying around.
But even the hot briquette partial processing plant that BHP built ended up a universal dud.
brc
11 Dec 12 at 4:59 pm
If AGW is real, in your opinion, why are people wasting resources on projects and processes which will not provide a solution to the effects of the problem?
Why do they continue to say that wind and solar can carry the base load power of our existing population, let alone the population in emerging third world countries?
Why are countries not spending money on mitigation instead of white elephants?
The Harry Shearer doco on the New Orleans disaster notes over 120 sites in the US where the levy banks are equally as vulnerable as New Orleans including (most startling) dozens in California where the majority of the legislators are great believers in warming.
Token
11 Dec 12 at 5:02 pm
Jarrah, the line about raw data being inherently unreliable is a bit, well, inherently unreliable.
Obviously the statement is not necessarily true, but it alllows you the option of correcting the data to improve its reliability. In my experience Raw data is more reliable, with outliers, flaws and mistakes, than ‘processed’ data. And in the field of enquiry into alleged CAGW, processed and massaged data is a serious issue.
Jannie
11 Dec 12 at 5:07 pm
So you assume it is wrong. What?
No. Please don’t ever say that again.
I don’t know the how the debate unfolded.
.
11 Dec 12 at 5:08 pm
“why are people wasting resources on projects and processes which will not provide a solution to the effects of the problem?”
In some cases they have made the calculation (rightly or wrongly) that prevention is better than cure in this situation. Hence solar subsidies, CO2 taxes, etc.
“Why do they continue to say that wind and solar can carry the base load power of our existing population, let alone the population in emerging third world countries?”
They’re gambling on technological improvements.
“Why are countries not spending money on mitigation instead of white elephants?”
Several reasons are possible. Firstly, they don’t consider them white elephants. Secondly, there are political pressures from special interest groups (environmentalists, companies that would benefit from what you call white elephants, etc). Thirdly, mitigation of some AGW consequences could be more expensive, or impossible (meaning the least preferable option of adaptation is all that’s left).
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 5:15 pm
They’re not sincere like Jarrah. They’re moonbeams and hate fossil fuel simply because it is provided by capitalism.
.
11 Dec 12 at 5:17 pm
“So you assume it is wrong. What?”
Did I ever say that? No. I don’t make any assumptions about it. I agnostically await developments.
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 5:18 pm
No you’re not. The evidence points to it being true and correct, so far.
.
11 Dec 12 at 5:19 pm
http://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-was-higher-in-late-Ordovician.htm
Um…it is my understanding the proponents of AGW tend to treat solar output in the last 150 years as a red herring.
.
11 Dec 12 at 5:21 pm
Interesting, yet they ignore / distort evidence on what is actually occuring with regard to these technologies in emerging countries.
The reality is the rise in CO2 levels in the 3rd world offsets any decrease in the first world, then raises again by a multiple.
This fails a sniff test for me.
Selectively gambling based upon a bucket load of assumptions, where as if the issue is as urgent as they claim they would take the option at hand and manage the risk.
This also fails the sniff test.
Why is California ignoring levy banks which if breech will cause billions in damage and instead investing in wind towers and a bullet train between 2 regional cities?
Why is California destroying dams, the only “green” energy source that actually delivers power to support base power.
This fails the sniff test. 3 for 3.
Token
11 Dec 12 at 5:35 pm
“The reality is the rise in CO2 levels in the 3rd world offsets any decrease in the first world, then raises again by a multiple.”
That’s true. The only way prevention will be a feasible strategy is if the third world’s just assertion of their right to industrialise can be made compatible with declining emissions. Very unlikely.
“Selectively gambling based upon a bucket load of assumptions, where as if the issue is as urgent as they claim they would take the option at hand and manage the risk.”
Mitigation and adaptation also gamble on technological advances, you know.
“Why is California ignoring levy banks which if breech will cause billions in damage and instead investing in wind towers and a bullet train between 2 regional cities?”
Maybe stupidity?
“Why is California destroying dams, the only “green” energy source that actually delivers power to support base power.”
Definitely stupidity.
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 5:49 pm
When I came to that conclusion it was clear arguing over whether warming is happening or not is moot.
If you are believe the science that CO2 emissions and warming is linked (whether the blanket effect or a lessor model) is real, you have to be looking at radical reductions in emissions ASAP as we have 2 billion people emerging at the moment, and maybe one day central asia & africa will join them.
Solar and cleaner nuclear are the only likely long term solutions. Wind is limited and comes with a cost to the environment (birds, construction costs, visual/sound polution) which should be questioned.
This is why it is important to be skeptical as there are too many irrational and stupid decisions being made, and the moves to limit free speech mean the abilitiy to question is being reduced.
6 years after Katrina hit New Orleans revealed the problem with the levy banks built by US army engineer corps. Yet when Harry Shearer reveals the truth through a good documentary there is a disinterest by most comentators which is very concerning.
Token
11 Dec 12 at 6:13 pm
“Solar and cleaner nuclear are the only likely long term solutions.”
I agree completely. The resistance to nuclear from environmentalists is perverse.
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 6:40 pm
Jarrah,
data from all these stations should be randomly ‘unreliable’.
The only plausible systematic error across many stations is the urban heat effect; and yet repeatedly, we see data being adjusted upwards.
If that ‘aint fiddling the data, I don’t know what is.
Unfortunately, the ‘many sources’ have been corrupted by group think and funding bias.
duncanm
11 Dec 12 at 7:08 pm
“we see data being adjusted upwards.”
And downwards.
“Unfortunately, the ‘many sources’ have been corrupted by group think and funding bias.”
So who’s making plants bloom earlier and birds migrate earlier?
Jarrah
11 Dec 12 at 7:47 pm
Scores of thorium nuclear reactors will solve the warming issue. It seems prudent to debate about technology than question the science.
Generic Person
11 Dec 12 at 7:58 pm
Not on average in the continental US we don’t
duncanm
11 Dec 12 at 8:03 pm
Just for a bit of fun, Barnaby:
Gab
11 Dec 12 at 8:13 pm
Joyce has been making that point well for a while now. As has Dellingpole.
Wind turbines will turn ordinary against the greens.
1. They kill birds hundreds of birds and bats at the top of the food chain (with dramatic environmental effect)
2. The power is intermittent as it has to be windy, but not too windy
3. They consume a lot of rare minerals to make in return for the poor yield
4. They are UGLY, people hate the sight of them, let alone the sound
Let’s hope the Greens / Liars Party keeps getting the Industry Super funds to build more so critical mass can be reached.
Token
11 Dec 12 at 9:40 pm
Token, and these eco crucifixes break soooo easily…
Winston Smith
11 Dec 12 at 10:07 pm