Posted on 12/13/2012 1:38:52 AM PST by STARWISE
For months, federal agencies and the White House have sidetracked dozens of major regulations that cover everything from power plant pollution to workplace safety to a crackdown on Wall Street.
The rules had been largely put on hold during the presidential campaign as the White House sought to quiet Republican charges that President Barack Obama was an overzealous regulator who is killing U.S. jobs.
But since the election, the Obama administration has quietly reopened the regulations pipeline.
In recent weeks, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rules to update water quality guidelines for beaches and other recreational waters and deal with runoff from logging roads. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, meanwhile, has proposed long-delayed regulations requiring auto makers to include event data recorders -- better known as "black boxes" -- in all new cars and light trucks beginning in 2014.
*snip*
Obama has spent the past year "punting" on a slew of job-killing regulations that will be unleashed in a second term, said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. With the election over, it's now "full speed ahead" for federal rules limiting greenhouse gas emissions, requiring cleaner gasoline and putting controls on drilling for oil and natural gas, said Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Senate Environment Committee.
"Under an Obama EPA that has earned a reputation for abuse, American families will be subjected to a regulatory onslaught that will drive up energy prices, destroy millions of jobs and further weaken the economy," he wrote in a 14-page report on expected EPA regulations for 2013. The report predicts an influx of regulations that "spell doom for jobs and economic growth."
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Obama will ‘nationalize’ the oil patch. It’s already in the works.
Water is needed to mine oil shale; hence water as the target for the moment; then the land.
You pay less than $200 a year for car insurance?
Many already have been putting them into their cars for a few years now - CNBC had a documentary a couple of years about the surveillance industry and they had a segment on the car’s black boxes. Toyota has been putting them in for a few years now, that’s how they were able to debunk the accusations about their cars accelerating on their own.
“typical Government Engineering standards. . . .they’ll be hacked in no time,”
By Jove, I think you’ve just defined, once and for all, the Democrat vision of Job Creation.
They’ll Job us into Their economy where reverse engineering and defeating all of their idiot regulatory improvements will provide work for 10s of Millions of us.
I’ve had to drive Off the freeway at 65mph and onto the shoulder to keep from being rear ended as the poor devil at the tail of the 20mph jam up in front of me got it.
When will we get recorders to log that?
And what will the Govt fines for it be?
The water is the overwhelming majority constituent in the frac fluid used to hydraulically fracture the shale and let the gas out of pores which normally are not interconnected. The fractures induced are propped open by a proppant, usually washed and graded sand or ceramic grains. That preserves the cracks in the shale, and provides a pathway for the gas and/or oil to come out of the rock when the pressure required to induce the fractures is let off.
Water, inexpensive, non-compressible, and with a good ability to mix thickening agents to help carry the proppants has been the fluid of choice. There are even companies which reclaim produced frac water for re-use.
The attack angle that fracking contaminates aquifers persists in the pop press, but there are no examples of such contamination in tens of thousands of wells. Even studies which went in and tested water wells before any drilling or fracking in the area found there is some natural, preexisting contamination in aquifers which is related to the underlying geology or other surface sources. I personally know of at least one oil field in Nevada which was found because the springs in the area which were used to water livestock had trace amounts of oil in the water. Drilling in the area led to wells which produced up to 10,000 barrels of oil a day. (Blackburn Field, Eureka County, NV)
The complaints about the land have been greatly defused as well, especially with pad drilling, where horizontal wells can tap oil from under twelve square miles from a single grouped location on the surface (about 5-10 acres). The reduction in footprint from 6 to eight surface locations to one, from multiple lease roads to a single access, and a single access for production infrastructure preserves the natural lay of the land far better than older methods. Waste is hauled out to disposal facilities. As much as can be re-used or reclaimed as far as materials go, is, generally, and often at tremendous cost savings.
So what is left is the air.
With drilling outpacing the emplacement of the pipelines and construction of gas processing facilities, raw gas produced with oil is often flared off at the wellsite until the feeder pipeline can be built, while the oil is separated and stored in tanks on location until trucks haul it away. Flaring gas seems to be the angle of attack at present, considering others have failed. That gas would have to be processed before use, something which is best done with the economy of scale a gas processing plant has at present. It can't be simply vented (too hazardous), and it can't just be stored because the component gases liquefy at different temperatures and pressures, so flaring is the option of choice until someone devises a way to convert the gas into a useable and storable by-product on site, something that can be hauled out by truck until the pipeline is built.
Generators have been suggested, but then the temporary infrastructure to handle the electricity must be put in, and that would be subject to much the same sort of time delays as a feeder pipeline.
It isn't difficult, considering the stumbling blocks the administration has put in the way of development, to see why they think it takes 10 years (or more) to get oil from drilling the well to the refinery. Not so, really.
Consider I worked one of the first Bakken wells in the latest round of drilling only 13 years ago, over in Montana. Within five years, we'd doubled Montana's oil production, and in another eight years, North Dakota's production passed Oklahoma, Louisiana, California, and Alaska to become the second largest producer of oil in the US, only second to Texas, putting an additional half million barrels of oil daily (above previous production) into the system.
During that time period, Natural Gas production skyrocketed (especially elsewhere) using similar technology, dropping heating costs for millions of families. Only the War on Coal (cleaner than ever before) will cause those prices to rise, as power plants are shut down or converted to natural gas and supplies are diverted to generate electricity, all for the sake of making "renewable" electricity sources economically competitive to justify the billions this administration has diverted from the public coffers to solar and wind energy companies (likely corruption thinly masked).
Only the people in our Federal Government could take what should be a time of prosperity and the rebuilding of our economy and production (manufacturing) infrastructure and turn it into a jihad against American prosperity, and they are doing one heck of a job.
Black boxes recording data will allow the government to require us to start giving a record of our driving miles on our income tax each year. We will be taxed for all miles over what the government will allow us as what they say will be the max miles, like maybe 10 or 12,000. Or maybe just tax us for every mile we drive. Even at a penny a mile, they stand to make billions off us.
hopefully, that governor module will be open source/readily available...
State Farm. Multicar, multiline discounts.
I drive older vehicles, and I pay cash for them, so I don't have to carry more expensive insurance. (It helps to have a clean driving record.)
The commercial insurance on the two vehicles I drive onto drilling locations is more expensive, but that' a business expense.
Informative. Thanks!
You’re welcome!
Don’t you think Obama will want to get in on this opportunity? As long as Big Government can control it, anyway. There’s too much opportunity there for him and I suspicion that he’s already on the prowl to make it happen. Thanks for the interesting backstory.
There is a problem, however. Almost everyone I know in the industry is strongly Conservative. Does he think for a second he can force us to work? We'll walk.
The government proved in Nevada (The Mustang Ranch) that it couldn't make money selling high-priced drinks and running a whorehouse. Really.
Do they think their "experts" can produce so much as a drop of oil without making a total mess of it? They don't have the people.
Okay, no collision, no comprehensive. Thanks!
Joe, I hope (and pray) that you are correct.
Just read that the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming is planning to open federal land for oil shale development.
Which Shale? The Niobrara has promise in places, but the Green River there would be a challenge (too close to the surface, not as oil rich as it is in Colorado or Utah). Please post a link if you can.
Google oil shale; go to CNN money and look for CLR and read news about this firm and related articles. I don’t have any current links but there is an abundance of information on prospects in the western states.
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