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tdziemia said:
Nukes, baby.
That's the way to go.
Works for me.
Columbus Underground Messageboard » General Columbus Discussion
Natural Gas Drilling / Fracking in Ohio
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tdziemia
GV/Schumacher
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That makes three points of agreement. Before you know it we'll be at the corner pub singing together.
Yeah, in another thread that you just might be familiar with, I have used the term "fear mongering" to refer to conservative ideologues. The liberal side has an ample supply of fear mongers when it comes to debate on nuclear energy.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are the Columbine, Aurora and Newton of that argument ... all emotion, no statistical significance.
Posted 4 months ago # -
rus
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tdziemia said:
That makes three points of agreement. Before you know it we'll be at the corner pub singing together.Yeah, in another thread that you just might be familiar with, I have used the term "fear mongering" to refer to conservative ideologues. The liberal side has an ample supply of fear mongers when it comes to debate on nuclear energy.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are the Columbine, Aurora and Newton of that argument ... all emotion, no statistical significance.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, eh?
Posted 4 months ago # -
FireEngine
Blacklick or Driving Park
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tdziemia and rus agreeing agreeably? Dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Posted 4 months ago # -
tdziemia
GV/Schumacher
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Yeah, we were planning something big for just before that Mayan calendar thing, but well ... you saw how that turned out, so we set our sights on a New Years' surprise.
This thread is way to calm ... I thought my downplaying of the three famous nuclear accidents would draw a few howls from somewhere. Guess I just need to be patient.
Posted 4 months ago # -
rus
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tdziemia said:
Yeah, we were planning something big for just before that Mayan calendar thing, but well ... you saw how that turned out, so we set our sights on a New Years' surprise.This thread is way to calm ... I thought my downplaying of the three famous nuclear accidents would draw a few howls from somewhere. Guess I just need to be patient.
Peak oil is largely debunked and fracking is making money. Combine that with lowering gas prices and maybe energy just isn't the concern it was when this thread started.
Or perhaps people have decided they're not giving up their iphones and SUVs, so the matter is settled. We do what we have to to keep the lights on.
Posted 4 months ago # -
groundrules
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This isn't ohio, but it's fascinating to me.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a-mysterious-patch-of-light-shows-up-in-the-north-dakota-dark?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130116
Posted 4 months ago # -
Patch
Schumacher Place
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groundrules said:
This isn't ohio, but it's fascinating to me.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a-mysterious-patch-of-light-shows-up-in-the-north-dakota-dark?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130116
I think I heard a one bedroom was going for $3,200/month there, did I hear that right on NPR?
Freakin Crazy.
Posted 4 months ago # -
tdziemia
GV/Schumacher
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Basic rules of supply and demand. It's what keeps both incomes and cost of living eternally high in Alaska.
We can also predict what will happen next: developers will over-build to cash in on those rates, leading to a swing in the other direction as supply exceeds demand.
It's what happens historically in economic cycles on a much larger scale.I assume, of course, the spot of light in North Dakota is a lot of flares burning off excess gas (have you ever driven sounth of Houston at night?)
Posted 4 months ago # -
joev
Merion Village
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rus said:
Peak oil is largely debunked and fracking is making money. Combine that with lowering gas prices and maybe energy just isn't the concern it was when this thread started.Or perhaps people have decided they're not giving up their iphones and SUVs, so the matter is settled. We do what we have to to keep the lights on.
Wait - peak oil is debunked? What planet are you living on? It is a fact that there is a finite amount of oil on Earth. At some point (up for debate when that will be) more will be used than left. I understand that technology for getting at what oil is left is getting better and cheaper, but you don't get to choose your facts - there is a finite amount of oil.
Posted 4 months ago # -
tdziemia
GV/Schumacher
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You're right. In theory, we could still be close to peak oil. I think there are enough problems with the techniques for estimation of reserves and the politicization of the info that we will never know how close we really are, until supply really gets tight, and it's too late to do anything.
But I think the general tone of rus' comment was "all of the sudden, we have a new glut of cheap hydrocarbon," which has deflected attention from the long term issue, and in this I agree with him.
I mentioned in another thread that it's ironic that the one capability of humans that's generally seen as our greatest species differentiaor -- the ability to envision the future and plan for it -- is also the one that seems to be in rather short supply at the onset of the 21t century.
Posted 4 months ago # -
groundrules
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gramarye
In Exile
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joev said:
Wait - peak oil is debunked? What planet are you living on? It is a fact that there is a finite amount of oil on Earth. At some point (up for debate when that will be) more will be used than left. I understand that technology for getting at what oil is left is getting better and cheaper, but you don't get to choose your facts - there is a finite amount of oil.Peak oil as a political cause was more than that, however. No one denies that we have a finite supply of petroleum (and efforts to synthesize a passable substitute from biomass have not yet borne fruit). However, the threat of peak oil, particularly as trumped up by the environmental movement for political purposes, was a sudden, dramatic price increase spurred by declining production, rising demand, and economic inelasticity (which can create a sharp spike in price from a comparatively modest decline in supply, or even an increase in supply slower than an increase in demand for a given product).
We all know that at some point, even with our new extraction technologies, that there eventually simply won't be enough oil left to recover, barring a technological breakthrough on the synfuel side. However, our new technologies have given us the critical benefit that peak oil alarmists denied that we had: time. Fracking has enabled the economic recovery of enough conventional energy to buy time for alternatives to develop to the point of scalability. That was all we ever needed to defuse peak oil as an economic threat, and therefore as a political issue.
Several of those aforementioned alternative technologies are already in prototype form, and others have at least reached the proof-of-concept stage. If we needed to have them ready to roll out by 2015, we were going to be in trouble. However, we've probably bought ourselves another 10-15 years with fracking technology. From an economic development standpoint, one would obviously prefer developments with a much more distant expiration date, but 10-15 years is still nothing to sneeze at, especially in areas like Youngstown (or North Dakota) that are not in a position to be choosers. And from an economic and technological viability standpoint, a lot can and will happen before 2025 that will make the decline in oil extraction then far less of a concern than it would be today. This presumes that we don't rest on our laurels in the interim, of course, but research funding in alternative energy has remained sufficient to pursue all the most promising research paths. The smart money knows that fracking will not be an eternal game-changer. Like I said above, we're all well aware that the ability to drill better wells doesn't mean the ability to conjure more oil into the ground.
Posted 4 months ago # -
NEOBuckeye
Ohio At-Large
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gramarye said:
We all know that at some point, even with our new extraction technologies, that there eventually simply won't be enough oil left to recover, barring a technological breakthrough on the synfuel side. However, our new technologies have given us the critical benefit that peak oil alarmists denied that we had: time. Fracking has enabled the economic recovery of enough conventional energy to buy time for alternatives to develop to the point of scalability. That was all we ever needed to defuse peak oil as an economic threat, and therefore as a political issue.Several of those aforementioned alternative technologies are already in prototype form, and others have at least reached the proof-of-concept stage. If we needed to have them ready to roll out by 2015, we were going to be in trouble. However, we've probably bought ourselves another 10-15 years with fracking technology. From an economic development standpoint, one would obviously prefer developments with a much more distant expiration date, but 10-15 years is still nothing to sneeze at, especially in areas like Youngstown (or North Dakota) that are not in a position to be choosers. And from an economic and technological viability standpoint, a lot can and will happen before 2025 that will make the decline in oil extraction then far less of a concern than it would be today. This presumes that we don't rest on our laurels in the interim, of course, but research funding in alternative energy has remained sufficient to pursue all the most promising research paths. The smart money knows that fracking will not be an eternal game-changer. Like I said above, we're all well aware that the ability to drill better wells doesn't mean the ability to conjure more oil into the ground.
Gramarye, you appear to assume that fracking is about giving alternative energy enough time to ramp up for when the global oil supply finally does take a nose dive. I'm honestly not convinced by all the hype that fracking is anything but a desperate 11th hour ploy by Big Oil & Gas to extend the the reign of the petro-economic hegemony just a few more years, long enough to either find another fossil fuel substitute they can control that will allow them to push the day of reckoning back yet a few more years, or for all the industry magnates to secure land and fortresses for themselves as the world collapses into shortages, riots and immense chaos.
Call me cynical, but history suggests that particular industry is anything but a club of humanistic altruists. More like violent druglord pushers turned addicts to their own drug and in constant search of their next fix. Ecotopia, a humane world powered by sun and water, of organically grown food, dense, walkable communities sans cars, and connected by a vast network of trains and bike paths, is their absolute mortal nemesis.
Yet had we followed through on President Jimmy Carter's plans to transition society away from oil-dependency into conservation and efficiency during the 70s energy crises, we would be living in that world today. Guess who intervened?
The other problem with fracking besides screwing up your aquifers? Carbon. Another 10 or 15 years of pumping it into our atmosphere, exacerbating climate change and all of its associated effects on food production, weather conditions, the acidification of our oceans and even oxygen levels, and economic development will be the least of Youngstown's, or any place's worries.
Posted 4 months ago # -
gramarye
In Exile
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NEOBuckeye said:
Gramarye, you appear to assume that fracking is about giving alternative energy enough time to ramp up for when the global oil supply finally does take a nose dive. I'm honestly not convinced by all the hype that fracking is anything but a desperate 11th hour ploy by Big Oil & Gas to extend the the reign of the petro-economic hegemony just a few more years, long enough to either find another fossil fuel substitute they can control that will allow them to push the day of reckoning back yet a few more years, or for all the industry magnates to secure land and fortresses for themselves as the world collapses into shortages, riots and immense chaos.Call me cynical, but history suggests that particular industry is anything but a club of humanistic altruists. More like violent druglord pushers turned addicts to their own drug and in constant search of their next fix. Ecotopia, a humane world powered by sun and water, of organically grown food, dense, walkable communities sans cars, and connected by a vast network of trains and bike paths, is their absolute mortal nemesis.
Yet had we followed through on President Jimmy Carter's plans to transition society away from oil-dependency into conservation and efficiency during the 70s energy crises, we would be living in that world today. Guess who intervened?
The other problem with fracking besides screwing up your aquifers? Carbon. Another 10 or 15 years of pumping it into our atmosphere, exacerbating climate change and all of its associated effects on food production, weather conditions, the acidification of our oceans and even oxygen levels, and economic development will be the least of Youngstown's, or any place's worries.
My analysis does not depend on the good intentions of oil and gas magnates, though I admit that I don't see them as Machiavellian gangster overlords the way you do. My analysis was a systemic-level view, and its real premise is that economics will trump politics rather than the other way around, at least after a point (i.e., short-term political resistance from oil and gas companies may slow their decline but cannot trump intrinsic system-level factors, i.e., the physical depletion of recoverable reserves).
However, I believe neither the contemporary global warming alarmism (like peak oil, I see it as a mountain being made out of a molehill for political advantage by big-government advocates) nor the utopian counterfactual of what would have happened had we simply rolled over and let Jimmy Carter run the entire economy and plan the entire country's built environment. There is essentially no chance that we would actually live in "a humane world powered by sun and water, of organically grown food, dense, walkable communities sans cars, and connected by a vast network of trains and bike paths." Had we made the effort, we would likely be substantially poorer and less healthy due to sharply decreased energy supplies over the past 30+ years.
Posted 4 months ago # -
News
Columbus Underground
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Utica, Marcellus shale plays could represent more than $10 trillion in new economic activity
Jan 17, 2013, 2:27pm EST
Jeff Bell
Staff reporter-
Business FirstThe Utica and Marcellus shale plays in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York could represent more than $10 trillion in new economic activity when fully developed, says a new report from a bond rating firm.
READ MORE: http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/news/2013/01/17/utica-marcellus-shale-plays-could.htmlPosted 4 months ago # -
News
Columbus Underground
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Shale development already lifting Youngstown area, lawmaker tells colleagues
Jan 23, 2013, 2:33pm EST
Jeff Bell
Staff reporter- Business FirstState Rep. Sean O’Brien had some numbers to share Wednesday with his fellow legislators about what the Utica shale play has meant for his district in the Youngstown area.
READ MORE: http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/blog/2013/01/shale-development-already-lifting.htmlPosted 3 months ago #
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