Thursday, September 18, 2014, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)
We will continue our discussion on fracking, this time focusing on the articles that Bill distributed in the last meeting. Please take time to read the articles and use this week to find supporting or opposing material on the web.
Natural gas is now so plentiful, that it needs new markets. It is replacing coal to generate electricity and it will soon be exported as LNG. Bill has several articles about how natural gas will provide the feedstock to a revived chemical industry.
However, natural gas does not convert economically to the liquid fuels needed for transporation. Our last TED speaker, T. Boone Pickens, wanted to covert our commercial truck fleet to run on natural gas to free us from imported OPEC oil. However, this became a moot issue with the boom in fracked oil, as shown in this TED talk.
---------------------------- Update 9/18/14 ----------------------------------
During the meeting we discussed the minority opinion that the current shale gas boom is not sustainable. Here are two books that take this stance:
1) Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future, by Richard Heinberg. We showed a portion of his talk from YouTube. His talk used data from the first shale gas play, the Barnett.
2) Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Supply Myth, by Bill Powers. His book covers many of the other shale plays in the U.S.
Here is a clarification of the governments role in the development of fracking technology: http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/shale_gas_fracking_history_and
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