Easy, but he's not any more to blame than any other politician in Washington. He, Obama, congress and even local governments are all working in the best interest of those that get them elected. The problem is that any pretense that the American public elects these people is fallacious. At least they kept the act up well enough for the previous 150 years or so. ...

 

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That hydrologic fracturing is so fuct. It's really going to bite us in the ass

 

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It's like anything else. It can be done right and it can be done wrong. The problem right now is that everyone is rushing so quickly in to doing it that little work has been put in to figuring out how to do it right.... The sad part is that most companies are losing considerable amounts of money trying to figure out how to do it at all just because they know if they aren't the first to the punch, they wont get any return.

 

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Well I guess it's ok that those companies are raping the environment then

 

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No, it's not right. I actually turned down three jobs in the past two weeks working as an oil well geologist for a lot of reasons. One of them, admittedly not the main one, was that it's not a very established process.

When doing the phone interview with two of the companies, I expressed that I'd like to move over to the environmental side... they gave me weird responses. hehe


Any of these jobs would have been about 40-60k/yr more than I'm making at the moment.

 

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That's the biggest load of bullshit I have ever read.

Yes George Mitchell is an amazing man and an innovator and genius at drilling, but claiming he created hydraulic fracturing without government support if fecking ludicrous. The US Dept of Energy spent 10's of billions of dollars creating the tools that allowed such a process to happen in the first place. The invention of micro seismic underground mapping at the National energy technology lab (part of the Dept of Energy) is what made horizontal drilling economically feasible and led directly to slick water fracking, which was developed in partnership with Mitchell energy and the DOE. (Holy shit! No government support there eh?).

Interestingly, Mitchell energy soon stopped using the process they helped create, as George Mitchell is a HUGE environmental advocate and slick water fracking had some seriously bad effects on the environment in many cases. They moved on to using another technology that they in partnership with NETL at Morgantown, WV developed that uses polymer coated sand pellets instead of chemicals.

Pinnacle Technology (A division of who else? Halliburton) then took over the development of slick water fracking (again in partnership with the DOE) and became the official license holder of the currently used technology in the US. This tech, though widely used in the USA currently, is coming under very serious condemnation for not only it's propensity to directly contaminate ground water with the chemicals it adds to the fracking water, but also it's demonstrated effect of pushing hydrocarbons into that same ground water.

The ideas behind directional drilling were both formulated and supported by the US Government, despite the blatantly false and completely factually incorrect claims made to the contrary in the OP. DOE and it's NETL division in particular created both the tools required for such tech to work in the first place, and were instrumental in the development of both slick water fracking and the much less environmentally damaging improvements and advancements on the tech that will eventually replace it (after the government forces companies to use the new tech which is slightly less efficient (at this time) but costs about the same to utilize).

Tax credits played little or no role in their development, in fact, they helped create our current situation where drastic cuts to the very agencies that created them have been called for by the "We are doomed and broke" crowd (AKA idiots). Some of these idiots actually want to eliminate the DOE entirely....talk about stupid? That's fricken stupid.

The only thing the OP got correct was mentioning George Mitchell as a great innovator and his vision. The guy is a god damn national treasure and should be someone everyone in this country knows about.

Only if it was done in conjunction with a cradle.

 

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