shale

Kurt Cobb has a great article at Resource Insights about why I think the best case against fraccing in my area isn't the water, it is the boom and bust cycle - with a predominance of bust. The last thing rural PA or upstate NY need is another short term boom and bust cycle that leaves them with a lot of played out gas heads and environmental consequences. Or worse, just a plain old bust. But, in its early release of the Annual Energy Outlook for 2012, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) cut its estimate of technically recoverable resources of U.S. shale gas from 827 tcf to 482…
The comments over at More Misc are trailing off, but I am (as ever) astonished by peoples' desire to have the last word. Let it never be said that KK is uncontroversial. Still, what more could he ask? So, time for something else. I didn't comment on Al Gore's latest (did I?) or even watch it, but David Hone has what look like some perceptive comments. I'm beginning to get google circle spam in unmanagable amounts: too many X's are adding me to their circles, and I can no long bother check them all out, let alone reciprocate. Still, I did find Climate Deniers Campaign Against the BBC…
Once upon a time, I advised people looking for a peaceful and happy future to choose land under which there were no energy resources. I should have taken my own advice - I'm on the fringe of the Marcellus Shale and the discussion and debate is becoming heated here. Like everyone, I don't particularly want a natural gas flare and dig across the road from me, but that alone wouldn't be enough to make me object - they have to drill somewhere, and Americans use a lot of energy. NIMBYism itself isn't sufficient. What's much more important is that I'm not convinced that the results will be…
This is a thin section from some Colorado shale. It's part of the Green River Formation, which is a series of rocks laid down about fifty million years ago when the West was wet. The shales come from a set of lakes that occupied part of what is now Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. If you look carefully - behind the white blotches, where the contrast is too blown out to say much but they might be grains of sand or bits of shell that fell into the lake where this was forming - you'll see that the shale was deposited in alternating layers of dark stuff and light stuff. The dark stuff is organic…