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Foxnews...
Shale Oil in
America: Economy Fix or Dangerous Fantasy?
By Mike Tobin
December 27, 2011
After sitting idle for two decades, there’s steam billowing from the
top of the big old steel plant in Youngstown, Ohio.
This does not represent a renewal of the steel production that once
created the Rust Belt. Instead, this is a product of a new industry
proponents say can be a game changer, not just for the depressed
Youngstown Warren area, but for the U.S. economy and the bigger energy
game. It is the exploitation of oil shale.
The former steel plant now builds things like seamless piping for
extracting the natural gas and oil deep underground.
There’s enough natural gas down there, some experts claim, to end U.S.
dependence on foreign oil and completely turn around the current
financial state.
It sounds fantastic, but opponents call it a fantasy. They claim big
oil companies will ravage the land, contaminate groundwater, even
create earthquakes, then pack up and leave once the profit has been
exploited.
It’s a battle that has been raging for years. But a “new and improved”
process for pulling massive deposits of fossil fuels from the ground in
financially devastated areas of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia,
is bringing a lot of hope to communities where homelessness and poverty
run rampant.
In northeastern Ohio, oil companies from across the U.S. are setting up
shop, developing wells and putting people to work, trying to get the
oil out of the sedimentary rock. The controversial process used
to get the oil out is called “fracking,” which involves a highly
pressurized fluid injected into the shale as a way to extract the
fossil fuels caught between the rock.
“Years ago we couldn’t figure out how to get it out of there in an
economical way, but somebody came up with a better mousetrap,” said oil
analyst Phil Flynn of PFGBest. “Instead of only getting maybe 10
percent of that oil and gas out of the market, now we get 75 to 80 to
90 percent of that oil and gas out” he said.
The latest fracking process, which developers claim is less
environmentally damaging, involves a seamless pipe drilled thousands of
feet into the ground, which then curves horizontally. Water and
chemicals are pumped through to break up the shale. The water is then
withdrawn, pulling with it oil and natural gas.
Flynn, who is very enthusiastic when talking about the possibilities of
natural gas, said this can change everything, including foreign policy.
“We’re the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. This single-handedly can change
the US economy” he said.
The potential of 5.5 billion barrels of oil and 15-billion cubic feet
of natural gas has companies like Exxon Mobile investing in
impoverished eastern Ohio.
“People who have opportunities in many other places in the country or
elsewhere in the world have elected to come to Ohio and seek
opportunity here, that tells me that people who are making very
rational decisions spending shareholder money are coming to the
conclusion that this is worth chasing,” said Tom Steward of the Ohio
Oil and Gas Association.
The shale oil industry seems to have many heading toward Ohio with
dollar signs in their eyes. On its website, the Ohio Department of
Natural Resources posted this statement: “In the spring of 2010, the
Division started receiving a number of calls from landowners who were
being approached by land persons seeking to lease the Marcellus Shale
and subsequently, the Utica Shale beneath their property for oil and
natural gas exploration. We expect the permitting and drilling to the
Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale to increase but at a gradual pace.”
It’s too soon to say business is booming, but Tom Humphries, from the
Youngstown Warren regional chamber of commerce, estimates more than
400,000 jobs could be created in the area from the shale oil industry.
But extensive exploration of land and growth in the natural gas
industry will need to involve the federal government. Proponents
accuse President Obama of focusing too much on renewables, like wind
farms and low return energy sources.
And environmentalists, like Tina Posterli from Riverkeepers, said the
industry’s falsely putting a positive spin on it. “The gas and oil
industry greatly exaggerate the benefits of fracking” she said.
“They have these hopes of jobs, when the reality is they come into
communities, they contaminate the water with their process, they
destroy the land and people’s properties and then they leave.”
Posterli worries that concern over the economy and eagerness to make
money from fossil fuels will lead to bigger, long term problems, like
earthquakes and destruction of natural resources .
“Fracking is growing because there’s this fallacy that we can hurry up
get in there and solve all of our energy problems through this process
and through getting there first.”
An EPA report said the risk to groundwater is minimal and that no
earthquake has been definitively linked to fracking.
Still, for now shale oil is tightly gripped in a tug of war with
environmental concerns versus jobs and a domestic fuel source.
People on both sides are eagerly watching to see what happens.
Read this and see the video, plus other articles, at Foxnews
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