To Frack or not to Frack?

G

Geezah

Senior member
 Monifieth
On the face of it, as a power hungry nation, it doesn't appear that we have much choice to satiate our immediate energy consumption.

I get the sense that as a nation we are getting sick of paying green taxes supposedly to fund green energy, yet there are trade barriers to stop the import of cheap Chinese solar panels flooding the UK market - as an example.

Green initiatives all seem a bit of a mess and just serve to line the pockets of a few smart operators - wind turbines - land owners, PV solar panels - suppliers and installers.
Funny how expensive it was to put these things on your roof, but you could get a decent government grant to help pay for them. Then, when the grant was removed, the price crashed almost overnight such that it was the same cost to install them without the grant as it was with the grant. Still too expensive though, I mean how cheap would it be to stick these panels on every roof in the UK when compared to the money spent on other green initiatives?

What is really going on? I'm not in the energy industry, just a confused and concerned consumer.
 
I really don't know enough about it to have an opinion. I've heard some scare stories but some people oppose anything. So I'll have to read up on it, especially as some of the first sites are in Nottinghamshire/Lincolnshire.
 
For now we need to frack. The deal with green energy is that even though on the face of it, it sounds good. However when one looks at the actual numbers it can't really be done.

I've posted this before, but it is very telling. Especially as it comes from a guy that is an engineer at a green energy company.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xoi5c5_renewable-energy-and-the-future-some-calculations_tech
 
If there's water ie shallow, DO NOT frac. It poisons the locals, ask the us citizens that have been poisoned !
If its down deep and dry , Frac away, we've been doing it for donkeys years. Years ago,my pal Murray had a nickname , Frac. He ran a Frac truck for Halliburton . Hence the nickname

Frac = Fracturing the formation to allow gas/oil to flow

And wind energy is the most expensive energy to harvest, it's always last on the grid and first off it . Not a good investment.
 
Thanks for that bigdog, more or less backs up what I thought all along. I see that you are in Germany, one of the world leaders in green energy as I understand it? Yet with all the investment, the country can only produce between 5% and 10% of its total energy requirements if I remember correctly.
Is it true that you are looking to build more coal fuelled power stations?

Interesting caveat there mcbee, we cant just dive in willy nilly. I suppose Canada isn't one of the worlds richest countries for nothing, JFDI! I even got full 3G on my mobile 8,500 feet up in the Rockies! I can't even get 3 bars GPRS in my frigging High Street!

I say, for frack's sake lets get on with it and stop dithering, though this being UK it won't mean that energy costs will go down just as the discovery of the North Sea oil bonanza hasn't reduced energy costs. Hopefully it might mean us being less reliant on the Arab states and all that goes with it..........
 
I'm also not someone who knows much about the energy industry or fracking, and will confess to being sceptical to something that's new for lack of knowledge of issues, but these are some questions I would pose:

- understood fracking has taken place in the US and Canada, my knowledge further to this is limited, though the UK is a MUCH smaller land mass so with regards to contamination of water, which Mcbeee has mentioned, what chances are there that shale gas can be 'farmed' without harm to water and poisonous to humans / wildlife / farm animals and end up in the food chain affecting humans? On a slight side note, we already have over development in some areas (in terms of everything being tarmaced / concreted over resulting in flooding after heavy rainfall as we are seeing in various parts of the UK right now) so where amongst the dwindling greenery will sites be accessible? (I understand we need more housing for a growing population so not arguing against building on green land.)

- what are the political motives for Prime Minister Cameron backing fracking (reports in the news)? What incentives are being offered by the EU for entering into fracking? Is there therefore more emphasis on this rather than long term non-monetary/political reasons? I read in a newspaper over the last couple of weeks that fracking is banned in France - now why is this? Total(e? sp), a French company is the biggest investor of this in the UK.

Quite late in the day so those are my offerings right now.
 
What exactly are they looking at frac'ing ?

Does the the north sea field go underneath the UK .

Where does your water supply come from ? The Petroleum engineers know what drilling mud and all the other injected chemicals do to a water table..... We frac'ed deep gas... Not shallow so it was never a problem.

And the money from the north sea should have made the UK a hell of a lot better off !! Stop pissing it away on welfare schemes and the price of fuel could drop..... Fat chance of that I guess :thumbsdown:
 
Its funny how the french have banned fracking yet the British PM wants to bribe councils into permitting fracking sites here, to be run by Total (a French company). Apparently fracking would mean cheaper energy for the consumer, but our energy would be cheaper if the profit margins for the companies involved weren't so obscenely high. Something doesn't smell right about all this but I don't have the knowledge or hard evidence to say specifically what's wrong.
 
I deal with a company who will be fracking very soon and I'm always very impressed by their obvious care and concern for the environment they operate in. Interestingly they know where the mistakes can and have been made and as usual much of this is down to those who want to turn a quick buck.

Personally, I'm all for this but I sincerely hope investment continues into alternative energy sources except for the biggest con of the lot i.e. wind power. Again, I'm dealing with numerous and very promising companies developing greener fuel sources and some of these are viable solutions but none of them can yet match the mega watt output of a coal, gas or nuclear power station but one and possibly two of them has the potential to do so.

Regretfully the dreadlock rent a mob will make camp in their tepee's and claim they know all about fracking when in reality they know diddly squat. They'll create significant disruption and unfounded concerns based on piss poor knowledge and their own crack pot green agenda's.
 
we need the gas, simple as that. We can't control the price increases by other countries and our suppliers don't care because they are allowed to make a % profit, so the higher the price, the bigger the number for them.

I do have a concern though, my insurance went up 15% ..... and they claimed it was because of fracking risks

either the insurance companies are profiteering (never...) or there are real risks that the frackers need to consider. Either way the insurance risks should be borne by the beneficiaries not the homeowners
 
Geezah said:
Thanks for that bigdog, more or less backs up what I thought all along. I see that you are in Germany, one of the world leaders in green energy as I understand it? Yet with all the investment, the country can only produce between 5% and 10% of its total energy requirements if I remember correctly.
Is it true that you are looking to build more coal fuelled power stations?

Interesting caveat there mcbee, we cant just dive in willy nilly. I suppose Canada isn't one of the worlds richest countries for nothing, JFDI! I even got full 3G on my mobile 8,500 feet up in the Rockies! I can't even get 3 bars GPRS in my frigging High Street!

I say, for frack's sake lets get on with it and stop dithering, though this being UK it won't mean that energy costs will go down just as the discovery of the North Sea oil bonanza hasn't reduced energy costs. Hopefully it might mean us being less reliant on the Arab states and all that goes with it..........
Click to expand...

I do live in Germany, But I'm an American citizen and so I don't follow it super closely. My issue with the green folks and their energy, Is that they take the same shady tact as the government does. And that's that they try to sell their positions by making misleading statements, Like if we stop all drilling, stop coal & nuke plant usage and just do the green stuff It will solve all our energy problems. Which is not true. All one has to do is look and listen to the posted Brian Cox video. I do think that the posted video hits hard as I have posted it here in the Z4 forum at least two maybe three times. You are the first to make a comment about the video. That's rather telling and I think it's all down to the info in that video that Saul Griffith (a green company founder) provides is a hard pill to swallow after all the government & environmentalist decades long campaign to convince the citizens that green is a panacea. Most don't know what to say when one of their own refutes the mantra of the greens with silly things like facts instead of emotional Polar bear videos & noble intentions. I would love for a green solution to be possible.

And I see again the oil company profits have been raised. (FROM Dev's post: our energy would be cheaper if the profit margins for the companies involved weren't so obscenely high.) And again I will refute the way in which the profit figure is misused. It's all down to economies of scale. The oil companies in 2011 had a profit margin of 6.5%. One must also take note of whom makes the MOST profit from gasoline at the pump. For you Brits that would be HRM's tax department. In America the tax revenue to the government in 2011 from one US gallon of fuel was 700% higher than the profit to the oil company from the sale of the same gallon of gas. And as the cost of fuel is the same every where as it's traded in US dollars. Which means you Brits are hosed by your government to the tune of 1400-1500% more revenue to the Queen's tax office than to the oil companies bank account per unit sold at the pump. And the oil companies are the problem?
http://www.forbes.com/2011/05/10/oil-company-earnings.html
 
the profit margins aren't obscenely high, the taxes are whats killing you.
Yes, the plant I worked in was medium size and made an average profit after tax of $ 250,000 a day and as high as $350,000 when the price of gas was higher. To build the plant today would cost about 2 Billion, the cost of drilling a well on spec is anywhere from 10 million to 30 million, add in the infrastructure to get the product to a market, operating costs and labour costs , then add the govt. royalties to be paid and the additional taxes, that's the wholesale value, then add the profit margin for the retailers and everyone else involved and you start to get the picture. They make large numbers because they deal in larger numbers. Go to the annual reports and look at the Return on Capital figures....net profits are not unusually high either but when you deal with hundreds of billions of $$ its not hard to make what seem to be obscene amounts of profit. I was with Royal Dutch Shell for most of my career and don't necessarily promote them, I believe they make money by accident but that's my opinion. The rest of the big boys are pretty much the same.... large profits because they supply a product that is in demand and supply large volumes of it.

And don't forget that the prices are set by world demand in the markets, not by the supplier companies.

The last thing I worked on (as a contractor after I retired) was on an R&D site, they paid half a Billion dollars for the rights to drill in an area , then dropped a little over $100 million on a small experimental plant that is looking at a way of getting oil out of the sand without screwing up the water tables or messing up the environment. The plant had no way of bringing up product to the surface and that cost $100 mill !! just to test a process and see if it would work. Greener than I ever thought they would be, I was impressed with the ideology.

I wish they'd put that $600 million into our pensions but WTF, that's not good business is it :thumbsdown:
 
Just for a bit of insight .....
Fracking is not new, it's been going on as long as the oil field has been around .... It's an integral part of oil / gas production ......

What we are talking about here is fracking zones in whats known as shallow gas reservoirs .....
Zones that are close to the surface ....
Reservoirs oil or gas have a cap rock above them, that's why they are there in the first place, the cap rock effectively keeps it in place not allowing it to dissapate ....
When you fracture the zone,it's the reservoir rocks that are frac'd , which provides a larger surface area to produce. The cap rock does not get frac'd ......

There have been instances in the US where gas has migrated into the water table above ..... This is because of poor production strings / maintenance .....

Imagine sucking up cola through a straw that's got holes in it .......

The big operators involved in UK frac'ing have proven track records .... Not like the mom and pop operators in the states ......

Basically I don't believe there is anything to worry about and in all honesty it will happen anyway.
Upside is ..... Its cheap energy, drilling a hole on land is a fraction of the cost of drilling offshore


I should add that I'm oilfield ....... So I'm biased..... But I do know what I'm talking about
 
i know bugger all about it, if we frac and its a success then how long will it last, we need something that will last for ever
 
Taz, it only has to last until 2055, I would be 100 if alive so that's all we need ... 8)

Teamemmenracing , exactly :thumbsup:

and imagine what the anti gun folks would say if they knew about perforation guns ? :D
 
mcbeee said:
and imagine what the anti gun folks would say if they knew about perforation guns ? :D
Click to expand...


Indeedy ..... Perforating guns, sonic seabed charges, radioactive sources, mud chemicals ......... :D
 
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