The Big Squeeze

It's really hard to have much sympathy for an industry that makes obscene profits every quarter.

The profits are rising every year. Consumers pay more for gas and oil than ever before.

A quart of oil that costs over $6.00 USD today cost a fraction of that 10 years ago.

Oil trains are polluting never before polluted parts of the country. Pipelines? They too fail due to heavier pressures and lack of maintenance.

Suppliers close refineries to drive profits up, while using diminished capacities as an excuse.

Now, we are asked to approve pumping sand, mixed with oil, across the USA so it can be shipped to China for refining.

Billions of dollars worth of Bakken gas is flamed because no provision for using it was put into place before the fracking frenzy began. What earthquakes, you say?

I could go on, but what's the use. The "Big Squeeze" is being put on consumers and the planet.

My boots are wet, inside and it ain't raining.

I think you are lumping the large oil corporations and the exploration companies into one basket. This article is primarily about the exploration and development segment, which contains many independents. I was in that end of this field, (pun intended) and know we had no input to what became of that which we found and what was done with the product after it was refined. The exploration end of the industry doesn't build pipelines or ship liquids in tank cars, doesn't set end prices, doesn't make the decision to flare gas..... This is "big oil" putting the squeeze on the little guy again, as they have for years.Big oil never has a problem with profit percentage - just the companies that work for them, because they crawl on their hands and knees to get the work.

No argument here - just direct the criticism correctly please.

My brother worked for Schlumberger for 10 years. I worked for a subsidiary of Total for 10 years, building equipment that used the upstream products as consumables. I am familiar with the difference.

I understand that the obscene profit is made by "Big Oil". But I made good (enough) money doing what I did for the Total sub. Traveled a lot. Had a good expense allowance. Worked a lot of trade shows in San Diego.

Maybe explorers, drillers and transporters aren't getting paid what they think they should be, "because they crawl on their hands and knees to get the work".

I get your point.

I tend to agree with lyn on this one, why should we feel bad that oil companies are not getting as many billions of dollars per quarter as they were a few years ago, hey I ain't makin' the kind of money I was makin' a few years ago either but I still have to suck it up and buy gas every week or so at what ever price I'll find at the pump this hour.

I believe I heard an oil company representative say a few years ago that they had a "right to turn a huge profit thats what free enterprise is all about" this during the last recession when everyone was broke.

Well guess what? not making the obscene ROI you've gotten used to is a "right" that you have too!

Suck it up and deal with it!!!!!!!! (try doing that without passing it on to your customers, bet ya can't won't do it)

I think it would be hard to show that gasoline and oil are overpriced today when you factor in inflation and taxes. If we really want cheaper fuel we could be using (and not flaring) natural gas. It can be used for any engine we want to convert. Fracking is a real blessing to the world, and will provide inexpensive fuel worldwide. Just think, not long ago we had an "energy crisis" , now we are exporting. The whole world is learning to frack so prices will drop even lower.

See Useful References for The Natural Gas Revolution: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19Yf0MWpo91vrlu-mmJtjB1ERukjJo5W41oi4RZVQBug/edit

Inflation and taxes?????????????? Really?

If you use fuzzy big oil numbers, it's almost free.

Fracking is a blessing? Ask those who can no longer drink their water. Earthquake swarms are happening where they never happened until fracking was instituted.

Money buys silence and inaction, as demonstrated by federal agencies declaring "no jurisdiction" and ending investigation into burning faucet water.

WE flare natural gas because WE didn't make any provision for storing it because WE ARE ONLY INTERESTED IN LOCKING IN THE LEASES at a cheap rate.

Profit rules all.

The fire from the water was naturally occurring before the drilling and was a hoax. The earthquake threat is virtually nonexistent as the Richter scale is usually under 3 and would be like a big truck going by your house. Fracking occurs thousands of feet under the water table and does not directly affect water quality. Bad drill casings may cause minor contamination problems, and the industry is being pressured to improve their practices.

You are right on about the lack of preparation for capturing the natural gas, and I applaud your concern. I hate to think about all the natural gas that is being wasted, and how much has been wasted over the years. Almost all of the natural gas can be captured and much of it used onsite. The rest can be processed with modular plants nearby, and compressed or liquified for shipment.

I have been studying fracking for over three years and have over seven thousand links to stories on fracking and natural gas. Best practices should be used, but fracking has been going on for decades with little environmental problem. All energy production has environmental concerns. The concerns with coal and nuclear are far worse. Solar and wind are great, but not really competitive at this point.

Don't waste your time - I've hit Lyn with the same facts at least 3 times before with no success. As some one who actually was on a site during fracking many times and know of hundreds of fracked wells, as I perforated them just before Haliburton took over the site, at depth far more shallower than the shale wells, I figure I have a bit better knowledge than the over reactionists spouting off currently, but they don't buy experience - they but the sensationalism stirred up by the main stream media.

I have 2 shale wells at rather shallow depths of around 5000' within 3 miles of my house and within a thousand feet or so of the town well, and can not report any water issues, or earth quakes, nor do I know of anywhere within Pa where many many fracked wells exist. I will note the drillers of the 2 local wells were a bit on the stupid side placing their pond to accumulate water returned after fracking, as it is within several hundred feet of the town well, but it has created no issues either. Other than some serious truck traffic during fracking on a road I ride quite often on bike, there has been no side effects.

I will note that they flared this dang thing for an entire week when done with the frack to clean it out - quite a waste, but very spectacular site at night.

Also note that the one you are trying to argue with lives where gas is of little concern - the middle of the SW desert. He needs air conditioning - not heat. We saw -20 degrees F several times last winter and lost some shrubs to the cold - give me lots of gas this winter - please.

You may just be lucky with your wells.

But, just for the record I run the gas heat all winter long in the house in Minn.

So, while I live in the desert, I have a house that sees -30°F outside in the winter and stays toasty warm inside.

As is the case usually, the truth probably lies somewhere between your total denial and my total condemnation.

I am not denying that there can be a methane in an aquifer issue - just that it is from fracking. Latest study I read last week shows what I always suspected - the water contamination is during the initial drilling, before casing can be set over the aquifer and from bad cement bond jobs on the casing allowing gas to travel up along the casing to the aquifer - NOT the frack job. This has been an issue for decades but the main stream media never bothered to jump on it. I know I saw wells completed (perforated/fracked) where I had told the customer's on site engineer that the cement bond log was not good. (think Deep Water Horizon) The customer's engineer figured after gas pressurization the pipe would be pressed against the cement hard enough to seal - well seal well enough so no one would ever know. but those were at 1500 to 3000 foot depth - low pressure gas. Now take a good shale well at 10000 feet and the gas pressure is tripled - now we have some serious push to get the gas to the aquifer.

I saw it happen on a highly pressurized gas storage field. An engineer before me told the gas company they had a bad well and they didn't listen - by the time I was there to log the wells, to figure out what was happening to their gas, they had pressurized a zone at 1500 foot on the mountain top, which by the bottom of the mountain, was an aquifer shallow enough to have a spring beside the highway - water spurted out of there like Old Faithful. Yes - gas gets into the drinking water - just not the way the anti-fracking zealots think it does. It has been there at least since the 1970's, but just now is being touted as an issue and incorrectly being considered as a result of the fracking. It is a bad cement job, which happened in my day, about every 5th or 6th well, and the site engineer afraid to report it. Repair after the cement has set poorly is very difficult and expensive. I only remember one engineer with enough sense to have the cement job repaired before completion.

As far as the quakes go - next time I see one, it'll be the first recently (see end of this paragraph for the exception) and we have fracked the crap out of Pennsylvania - this is a pre-existing fault issue which we need to consider when we decide to frack in certain areas. Oklahoma doesn't surprise me - there are well know faults in that part of the world. Actually we have a very large one in western Pa, but not one susceptible to quaking. I logged it for USGS several times. My one exception to the quake was caused by that storage well I mentioned - 4000 psi gas at 1500' causes real issues. About 20 wells in that field were cracked by that quake.

Thanks for your first hand information Phil. All forms of energy development have serious problems to deal with. Natural gas and oil can meet the base load demand, while minimizing coal use. I am for whatever technology is affordable and clean. If solar can ever do the job alone, I will jump on the bandwagon again. I am biased against nuclear, but have a lot of reasons to fear the waste issues, and it cannot compete with natural gas in America. I hope to soon see energy storage for wind and solar to make them more competitive.

I live 50 miles from the largest nuclear power plant in the USA. I think it's great.

Unlike all the other nuke generation plants, it takes zero water from any local lakes or rivers.

Yes, nuclear waste is an issue. Will it damage the environment more than fracking and flaring off gas? No. We will likely find a way to use the residual energy someday, unlike the gas we're needlessly flaring off today.

There is NO demonstrable, immediate need for the oil being fracked in N. Dakota, except greed. Also no need to flare millions of cubic feet of gas, either but for the fact that the leases are written with a time limit. So it's drill, baby drill to save a buck today on the leases.

Unfortunately, I could make the same statement about Three Mile Island at one time. My home town is just 50 miles upriver. (and fortunately up wind)

Enough said. (???)

I debated on this for some time, but, what the heck, I can't resist it.

Okay lets ask the residents of Chernobyl and Fukushima which they would rather face:

1. Some methane in their drinking water and a few magnitude 3 quakes

2. What they got blessed with from nuclear energy gone awry

You want to make it a tougher test? Lets throw in oil as well and compare the residents in the vicinity of Exxon Valdez or Deep Water Horizon to either of the nuclear incidents. Let them pick their poison, and which do you think they would determine to be easier to recover from?

I live forty miles from a nuclear power plant, and have no problem with that. It is on a great lake. The issue is that our nuclear power plants will all be closing and will not be rebuilt because they are too expensive to build, and when you look at the total cost including decommisioning and handling the waste for thousands of years it is not a good way to go in my opinion. Like I said I do have a bias. My links on The Dangers of Nuclear Plants and Radioactive Waste:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xhPQIIW9xpOwn92z5hCGshSF7e6TP3R9sFBAAg-eQe4/edit

Problems With Solar Plants: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xhPQIIW9xpOwn92z5hCGshSF7e6TP3R9sFBAAg-eQe4/edit

Problems With Wind Turbines: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gTwu4bI13ewq6wHYSBhvwfRptf6NL8u-03vFEnrKscA/edit

I am not against solar or wind but like to have counter arguments since fracking is always being trashed by the green lobby. It is not cost competitive, not even close.

Really?

You expect anybody to take your

"https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xhPQIIW9xpOwn92

z5hCGshSF7e6TP3R9sFBAAg-eQe4/edit

Problems With Wind Turbines: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gTwu4bI13ewq6wHYSBhvwfRptf6NL8u-03vFEnrKscA/edit"

seriously? Maybe Sarah P.?

Breitbart? Come on! Breitbart News Network is a conservative news and opinion website founded in 2007 by Andrew Breitbart

I see no news here. I see opinions that are slanted. FAR to the right.

I'll stop here, cause it'll only go downhill from now.

These stories are just as valid as any, and I use hundreds of sources. I guess you like the mainstream (left wing) media. I have lots of facts on them too: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wRT5HEiDNrHBqPooMW9i7I0DzQN7texTZKzq0u-IvLo/edit

I like the truth. I don't think either (far leaning) side actually speaks it.