Fracking

[Hygro]

Intended in my first sentence was "...do you?" But yeah you said dittohead which is definitely a Rush brand. You don't particularly strike me as the type but I was not expecting to read the term.

When I saw the media having an agenda, yeah there's Fox which is Mordoch's green light on Roger Aile's paranoia/ratings genius. There's MSNBC who realized giving a center-left editorial slant would be a reliable ratings success though the material is far less organized and agenda-driven.

But what I really mean is the numerous professional media figures at the employ of various "think" tanks who would spin and misrepresent/cherry pick real dubious data, build an entire campaign around it, and stick to talking points again and again and again and again until eventually journalists and editors heard it enough times and enough American media consumers perked up the way people do at the disco when they recognize a song they've already heard before and next thing you know their slogans and ideas become the default position. Refer to Elfdemon's post for an example of this in action (not trying to pick on you Elfdemon, I just get a bit rankled by philosophies that use half baked economic consequence as a basis for morality, rather than as a tool for achieving moral ends).

As Krugman puts it, there's liberal professional economists and conservative professional economists. And then there's professional conservative economists. The rich were getting richer but as a share of the nation's wealth they were losing ground in our economic sort-of-golden age (post WW2 pre oil crisis). That's when literally rich folks bankrolled all these media-meets-"academia" foundations got started. They played the long game and they won. There was a parallel religion channel too but I've studied that less.


So when you have TV stations and newspapers that regular book guests from these organizations and treat them with credibility, and you have other stations that don't, then there is a difference in one station facilitating agenda driven rhetoric vs. the others which is just more of a mix of everything good and bad. One is editorial malfeasance and the other is editorial incompetence.

 

[onejayhawk]

Fox has no more of an agenda than CNN. There is an editorial bias, but that is unavoidable. I would put both within one notch of center. When you go to print, the variance is to the left. Radio is almost exclusively conservative, which is one reason I listen to ESPN.

None of this has relevance to oil and gas secondary recovery. If I want knews about that, I know people in the industry.

J

 

[Cutlass]

There is a good deal of validity here, but it still falls short. The bulk of government aid is funding, not funds. Bonds are sold and paid off, returning the money with interst, literally . Taxes do not support nuclear plants over the long haul. In simple cost vs return, nuclear winds hands down over everything but hydro.

The major cost of a nuclear plant is political, not financial. Wind and solar are starting to hit a lot of this as well.

J

The major cost of nuclear is that the government funded all the R&D, and will fund all the long term cleanup and disposal. And the most important thing, the government fund all the insurance, because no private company will touch that at all.

 

[peter grimes]

But what I really mean is the numerous professional media figures at the employ of various "think" tanks who would spin and misrepresent/cherry pick real dubious data, build an entire campaign around it, and stick to talking points again and again and again and again until eventually journalists and editors heard it enough times and enough American media consumers perked up the way people do at the disco when they recognize a song they've already heard before and next thing you know their slogans and ideas become the default position. Refer to Elfdemon's post for an example of this in action

Or KmDubya's:

How can you honestly say that solar does not get massive subsidies after the billion dollar Obama boondoggle with Solyandra and the rest of his "green" industries?

Solyndra facts:

n a March 2009 press release announcing a $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, the Energy Department said: “This loan guarantee will be supported through the President’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provides tens of billions of dollars in loan guarantee authority to build a new green energy economy.”

Solyndra was the first company to receive a loan guarantee under either program. Since then, the program has helped nearly 40 projects at a cost of about $36 billion — mostly under section 1705. Jonathan Silver — the former director of the Energy Department’s loan office who recently resigned — testified that the section 1703 program did not generate much interest perhaps because start-up companies found “the potential self-pay credit subsidy cost to be prohibitive.”

Source:
http://www.factcheck.org/2011/10/obamas-solyndra-problem/

So please stop ditto-heading the phrase "billion dollar boondoggle". It's wrong and so discredits anything else you might say.


[QUOTE ]The loan guarantee program came under fire after the bankruptcies of a few high-risk companies — most famously Solyndra — that received backing. But according to John McCain’s National Finance Chairman, Herb Allison, the overall cost to taxpayers will be $2 billion less than actually budgeted for. Backing up the findings of Herb Allison, the Congressional Research Office also concluded that the majority of loans were extremely low risk. In fact, over the last 20 years of experience, the U.S. government has shown a knack for managing risk — with loans and loan guarantee programs only costing tax payers 94 cents for every $100 dollars invested.

Since Solyndra went bankrupt, House lawmakers have held 12 hearings and official meetings, acquired more than 300,000 documents, issued two subpenas, and likely spent more than a million dollars on the investigation. What have they found? “No evidence of wrongdoing,” reported Bloomberg Businessweek. And in a more detailed investigation, the Washington Post went further: “The records do not establish that anyone pressured the Energy Department to approve the Solyndra loan to benefit political contributors.”[/QUOTE]
Source:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/20...know-about-solyndra-during-the-2012-campaign/


Solyndra opinion:

Aldy is particularly critical of the loan guarantees handed out to the now-bankrupt Solyndra, along with a handful of other firms. The guarantee program was slow moving and bureaucracy-intensive; it took 100 to 200 federal officials and contractors to decide who would receive the eight loan guarantees. It left taxpayers with a $500 million liability when Solyndra folded and no discernible benefits across the board.

The program “had no meaningful impact on the economy, no meaningful impact on the energy system,” Aldy said. “The dollars spent per ton of carbon avoided are very high… as an economist, you actually can’t estimate infinity.”

Contrast that with the big success of the green stimulus: a grant program that partially subsidized any new renewable power project that met its specifications. It helped fund nearly 5,000 projects and about 10,000 megawatts of renewable electricity. Because the program gave the government no discretion in handing out grants, it kept politically connected firms from influencing the results.

There’s a clear lesson there for policymakers, and not just in the energy space, Aldy said. “If you want policies that drive investment, and you want to support them in some way, make the program simple and transparent. And if you want to get rid of the politics, get rid of the discretion.”

source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/09/solyndra-stunk-the-green-stimulus-didnt/

 

[El_Machinae]

There's an economist making the rounds these days giving talks on innovation.

Her statement is that Google, Apple, the Internet, and GPS were all begun using government seed investment money. Now there WILL be some failures, but the idea is that the investments need to occur at a risky enough level that the benefits realized from 'pseudo-risky' ventures will vastly outweigh the failures. And then pseudo-successes (not wild successes) can just be 'steady state' and not be counted in the wins or losses.

My impression with Solyndara was that they got outcompeted. So, let them fail, call it a day, and the consumers are better off given that they purchased from the competitors.

 

[Cutlass]

Solyndara, and the whole solar industry, also took an exceptionally hard hit because of the Great Recession. Had that not happened, or had we decided to fix the economy completely, there's a good chance it would not have failed.

 

[Arwon]

The major cost of nuclear is that the government funded all the R&D, and will fund all the long term cleanup and disposal. And the most important thing, the government fund all the insurance, because no private company will touch that at all.

And in terms of carbon emissions abatement, nuclear power takes a very long time to start causing net emissions reductions from electricity generation. If you give the go-ahead to a nuclear power plant tomorrow you're not going to start getting electricity until 2024 at the minimum and paying off the life cycle emissions to start making a net abatement might take several years longer depending on the energy emissions of what went into it.

And if you're not concerned about reducing the carbon emissions of the electricity market then you'd just keep going with coal generation.

Electrical engineer and energy policy mate of mine wrote this in the subject: http://evcricketenergy.wordpress.co...-is-nuclear-you-dont-understand-the-question/

 

[Whomp]

I think it is certain that wind and solar will replace coal and gas for utility generation. The only question is whether it will be 30 or 70 years? Same for land transportation with electric and fuel cells. Next 20-40 years?

I wouldn't export gas since it is locally priced unlike other energy sources. Big advantages for local businesses and transporting it more than doubles the cost so why bother. Those with a property right advantage (many property owners in certain countries don't even control whats under their property) should use it to their fullest since that ship may sail. In particular considering fracking is both labor and capital intensive. The fact that it's great at creating lots of new jobs should tell you that.

I would be more focused on pipelines vs. fracking...they are getting old (globally) but I won't bore you with that here.


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[Cutlass]

Something on an NPR show the other day, by the time you take cheap fracked gas from the US, compress it into LNG, tanker it to Europe, warm it again and pipeline it to someplace like Ukraine, the price advantage is entirely lost. So it doesn't make a lot of sense for exporting.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I also heard that East Asia would pay more for the gas than Europe.

 

[Arwon]

The gas market is fairly globalised. Though not entirely yet.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I also heard that the gas market has in contrast to other natural resource markets like oil in deed no global price.
I hear many things
I got both tidbits out of a documentary about fracking on a German public channel I recently saw.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

Fidel says don't frack.

I say don't frack.

 

[Borachio]

France says it doesn't give a frack.

French engineers say "Let's go frack in the UK".

 

[gangleri2001]

Thread... needs... more... Battlestar Galactica... references!!!

 

[peter grimes]

And in terms of carbon emissions abatement, nuclear power takes a very long time to start causing net emissions reductions from electricity generation. If you give the go-ahead to a nuclear power plant tomorrow you're not going to start getting electricity until 2024 at the minimum and paying off the life cycle emissions to start making a net abatement might take several years longer depending on the energy emissions of what went into it.

And if you're not concerned about reducing the carbon emissions of the electricity market then you'd just keep going with coal generation.

Electrical engineer and energy policy mate of mine wrote this in the subject: http://evcricketenergy.wordpress.co...-is-nuclear-you-dont-understand-the-question/

Good link, that was.

I see his point - I really do. But....

Yes, if your answer is Nuclear you don't understand the question as he defines it. He frames the choice by the IPCC's CO2 reduction targets. And that's valid. But I think most developed nations are rejecting those targets (Please, somebody prove me wrong here!!), so just because nuclear can't meet those platonic ideals doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of the mix.

Especially baseload.

 

[onejayhawk]

Good link, that was.

I see his point - I really do. But....

Yes, if your answer is Nuclear you don't understand the question as he defines it. He frames the choice by the IPCC's CO2 reduction targets. And that's valid. But I think most developed nations are rejecting those targets (Please, somebody prove me wrong here!!), so just because nuclear can't meet those platonic ideals doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of the mix.

Especially baseload.

You are not wrong, but not just third world. Iran is using very dirty fuel, because their refining capacity was primitive, then they killed or drove off most of the engineers. China is famously filthy. I gather it has improved in the densely populated areas ( I could easily be wrong), the countryside is lagging. IPCC targets are a rich country thing.

J

 

[tokala]

Especially baseload.

You won't have "baseload" anymore in a grid with a meaningful fraction of intermittent renewables.

We don't have even reached 10% solar over here, and it's already eating into the "baseload" on summer weekends.
With 20% solar it would be able to supply roughly all electricity midday on summer workdays in priciple.

 

[amadeus]

I think a lot of people are opposed to it because of the name "fracking." Do these people even know what it is or how it works?

 

[peter grimes]

You won't have "baseload" anymore in a grid with a meaningful fraction of intermittent renewables.

We don't have even reached 10% solar over here, and it's already eating into the "baseload" on summer weekends.
With 20% solar it would be able to supply roughly all electricity midday on summer workdays in priciple.

Oh yeah, the IEA paper I linked above mentions that.

I think a lot of people are opposed to it because of the name "fracking." Do these people even know what it is or how it works?

I'm a modestly informed layman on the subject, and the name isn't what bothers me. It's the fact that the companies don't have the proper oversight, liability, disclosure requirements, and so on and so forth. The name has nothing at all to do with my opposition. It could be called The Unicorn Method and I'd still be against it the way it's currently done here.

I'm also not a fan of pursuing energy sources that add carbon to the atmosphere and oceans.