The Leaking And The Lemon, A Fraccing And LNG Story(Non technical version)

Written by Grant G


Madness becomes intertwined in the fabric of everyday life, spin, promise and the vague are weapons of control, so subtle is the illusion, so numbing is the machine, insanity sold as easily as elixir drawn from the mythical fountain of youth.....

That above paragraph doesn`t sound like the start of another LNG article, but it is...The more one delves into the fracked world of liquefied natural gas the more one comes to the conclusion that the world truly is mad, or gone mad, extracting gas and extracting gas, drill a vertical hole in the ground, find a deposit of gas and presto, gas shoots out of the pipe for years and years, that is indeed a gas deposit, lay a pipe and deliver gas in gas form to business, industry and homes, this is called traditional drilling, old school, deposits were numerous and large, these wells and fields can produce gas for decades, to pipe this gas a few hundred miles, or even a 1000 miles and use domestically is a good use of this energy, and yes those traditional drilled wells do leak fugitive gasses like methane, all wells do..

 http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/01/09/Leaky-Fracked-Wells/

EROI....Remember that, {Energy Return On Investment)..Sheesh, and I called this the non-technical version, where was I...

EROI..Fraccing and LNG export, once you start to consider all the energy required to make that industry function one starts to wonder..to what end, are we actually ahead on the energy, meaning did we expend as much energy to produce LNG for export as it will deliver on the other end of the curve, that being the consumption end in other countries...

Fraccing, drill a vertical hole...slowly turn the drill sideways, reach your target depth, continue to drill horizontally(sideways) for some distance, remove the drill, then pipe, drive, divert from rivers, lakes, streams millions of gallons of water, add special secret sauce to the water and pump it at high pressure kilometers deep in the ground, then drop in a water concussion bomb and set off a underground explosion, thus stunning, sending a high-pressure shockwave through the underground shale formations to extract gas..well golleeeeee Andy, ain`t that special.

It is proven that all gas wells will leak methane and other fugitive gasses into our atmosphere, also what has risen to the surface in recent times is the undeniable fact that fracced wells and fields leak methane gasses but also deplete of their gas holdings quickly, meaning to produce continuous large amounts of feedstock gas for LNG exporters there must and will be a continual flurry of hole drilling, water pumping of millions of gallons and underground explosions..I wonder why mother nature gave us underground shale rock formations, perhaps to keep us lowly humans amused by allowing us to blow up said formations, we do like blowing up things, I remember a show once, forget the name but the two characters used to say.."Theys blow up good, real good"..the show was comedy, or was it a documentary, either way..

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(updated here, 11:55 pm)...I found that blows up real good skit, it was a SCTV ongoing segment featuring the departed and missed John Candy, here`s the video. courtesy Youtube.

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So now we`ll be pumping millions of gallons, no, with LNG we will be pumping billions of gallons of water underground, blowing up shale, leaking methane gasses in our air, piping the gas hundreds of miles to our pristine northern coast, where LNG companies will burn vast volumes of natural gas to freeze the gas into a liquid form, thus blasting our skies with millions of tons of greenhouse gas everyday, year after year, 24/7..365 days a year..we still aren`t there yet, at least not to the end where the consumer buys the gas, now this frozen gas is placed on specialized ocean going tankers, they look like this..

These ocean going vessels give off emissions, lots of emissions, newer LNG carriers actually burn natural gas to operate, oh yea, I almost forgot, if one of these ships exploded, terrorism, malfunction, human error, a collision with an oil laden tar sand goop carrier, the explosive power contained within that one LNG tanker is the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb..(That was highlighted here, in this article)..

http://powellriverpersuader.blogspot.ca/2013/06/kitimat-and-prince-rupert-in-line-of.html

Yikes to all those port town families, pleasant dreams.

How far does that tanker have to travel across the Pacific ocean to Asia...3000 miles, no, 6000 miles because it returns empty, we still haven`t finished the energy curve, this tanker once in Asia has to visit another LNG plant, a regasification plant where this gas is off-loaded, put in containers where it is warmed up back into gas...warm gas is now piped in and around Asia...Wow, all that energy required to produce energy, was as much energy burned to produce LNG as was delivered, I don`t know, I do know B.C. along with Australia and a few other countries will be world leaders in broken shale rock tourism, and we will have our deep ground not only not thirsty, but saturated with secret proprietary chemicals, nasty little chemicals, a witch`s brew of chemicals pumped in the ground with the water to help ease the exploded shale rock gas out, trying not to be technical here folks, maybe these waters deep underground will migrate and evolve into that treasured and forever sought after fountain of youth water, or perhaps cancers, tumours and multi-headed livestock will be the result, who knows for sure, we don`t even know what chemicals are being placed in the ground, keep the faith people, we can trust energy companies, well..

How much energy was required to produce that Asian product, not sure, can`t calculate, the drilling, the water, the chemicals, broken shale, pipelines, I can simply calculate the energy use at the proposed LNG plants..The Site C dam proposal, Site C if built could power one large LNG plant and about 1/3rd of another LNG plant, Christy Clark has pontificated in her own folksy sorta, "ya know" kinda way that B.C. is going to have 10 LNG plants, or was that 12, who knows at this time, left side, right side of mouth week..

So I was curious as to how many homes, if built could the Site C dam power....and, straight from the BC Hydro web page

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 "Site C would be a source of clean and renewable electricity for over 100 years. Site C would provide 1,100 megawatts of capacity, and produce about 5,100 gigawatt hours of electricity each year – enough energy to power the equivalent of about 450,000 homes per year in B.C."

https://www.bchydro.com/energy-in-bc/projects/site_c/site_c_an_option/what_is_site_c.html

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Clean renewable energy, Christy Clark`s vision, besides blowing up all our shale("Theys blow up good, real good"), her vision would require 10 Site C dams to power her LNG industrial sized wet dream, ...10 Site C dams, enough electricity to power 4, 500,000 homes, ..That would be 4 1/2 million homes, that is more homes than we have people in B.C....B.C. has a mere 4 million people, roughly 1.8 million homes, enough electricity to power up 3 British Columbias will be expended everyday to produce LNG for export..

Now for my non-technical math and energy consumption scale...3 British Columbia`s worth of electrical use, pipelines, holes drilled fast n furious, billions of gallons of water, secret chemicals within(fountain of youth project), poor old busted up and blown up real goood shale rock formations, a floating bomb emission spewing tanker, a trip back n forth over the Pacific Ocean, a stopover at a regasification plant in Asia and another visit to the pipe for our B.C. natural gas..helloooo..hellooo...oops, I was imagining B.C. natural gas shouting that into an empty Asian pipeline, never mind. ....and don`t forget about those criminal(fugitive) methane gasses that aren`t content to stay in their now broken down shale rock abode, skyward they must travel, I hear methane is 10 times, or 100 times more damaging than regular greenhouse gasses, no need to quibble.

Did I mention this plan as advertised will expend/require 1/4 to 1/3 of a trillion dollars, ..the build-out cost, $250 to $300 billion in facilities and pipelines for the advertised dozen LNG plants, add in carrying costs, interest and we are looking at near $1/2 a trillion dollars.......$400,000,000.000.00 in profit needed just to break even, to recoup the investment, and that is before B.C. has received a dime,.... B.C. Government is claiming it will receive near $250 billlion...$650,000,000,000.00.....And the energy companies still haven`t made a profit $1,000,000,000,000.00????..How much gas is that... a lot of gas, a lot of holes, a lot of water, a lot of explosions...

Madness and the illusion converge, skilled labour shortage, the requirement of millions of workers all drilling and blowing up shale rock, intertwined as a control measure, a human control measure, present future prosperity and pacify the non-deliverance of anything tangible, move on to the next scheme, the next fountain of youth, survive your political term, fill your boots and pass the baton to the next snake elixir salesperson,

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it just might be a lemon!

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2013/11/09/Bill-Powers-Natural-Gas-Book/



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