Free Republic

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, federal policymakers acted quickly and decisively to make school meals available to all children at no charge. This policy remained in effect for two and a half years. It was a game-changer. Across the country, school nutrition staff reported numerous benefits in the Food Research & Action Center’s (FRAC) Large School District Report, including removing the stigma from program participation and eliminating school meal debt to the benefit of both families and school districts. The policy also helped address household food insecurity, which rose significantly due to COVID-19 and allowed an additional...

A federal judge in Wyoming has issued an injunction against new Department of Interior regulations that tighten controls over hydraulic fracturing on federal lands. The move grants some of relief to producers who would have confronted higher costs at a time when oil prices are already hitting their profits, curbing activity, and reducing headcounts....

The precipitous fall in oil prices in recent months has led to a lessening of demand for fracking services. Where once there were more than 60 companies engaged in hydraulic fracturing, there are now 41. And one industry expert expects that number to halve over the coming year as demand slides even further. Bloomberg: Half of the 41 fracking companies operating in the U.S. will be dead or sold by year-end because of slashed spending by oil companies, an executive with Weatherford International Plc said. There could be about 20 companies left that provide hydraulic fracturing services, Rob Fulks, pressure...

POTH — The oil and gas industry has proved it can tap massive natural gas deposits found in dense shale rock formations from New York to Texas. Its next big challenge: cleaning up the process. A recent visit to a shale well site in this tiny ranch town about 50 miles southeast of San Antonio offers a glimpse of how it will happen. Today, the roughly 5-acre site is crowded with big trailers and trucks. Heavy equipment runs even when idle. Some 50 storage tanks, each with a swimming pool's worth of water, line the peri­meter. And workers and delivery...

-- snip --The Wall Street Journal however reports good news today in its story, "Edible Ingredients Used to Drill for Gas." Apparently Halliburton and Baker Hughes have developed fracking chemicals using fatty acids and other ingredients found in toothpaste, ketchup, ice cream and beer. The enemies of cheap natural gas of course won't congratulate Halliburton for being a good steward of the planet and switch their position. I wonder where the next attack will come from. Fatty acids in the edible fracking chemicals lead to an obesity epidemic in the caribou population?

... There have been two huge lies, the first that hydraulic fracturing somehow causes natural gas to migrate upwards through the geological formations, infiltrating drinking water aquifers. The second, is that “chemicals” mixed with the fracturing fluids will contaminate the same drinking water. One of the chemicals in question is diesel, as has been all of a sudden singled out in a press release on August 5 by something called the Environmental Working Group and another called Earthworks. I have worked on hydraulic fracturing for more than 25 years, mostly as an academic, and while I consulted with the new...

The Marcellus shale gas exploration rush that has washed over Pennsylvania has created concerns over how hydraulic fracturing impacts local water supplies. A single well hydrofracture in the Marcellus may require two million to five million gallons of fracturing fluid, of which 25 percent to 100 percent may be returned to the surface as "flowback" or "produced water." Historically, flowback and produced water has traditionally gone to metals-precipitation plants, where metals and items are removed. The fluid that leaves the plant is clean salt brine, which has gone to sewage treatment plants where the salt is not removed, but diluted...

General Electric Co. is launching a mobile device aimed at helping natural gas drillers recycle water used in a controversial gas drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing. The truck-sized, transportable device would cut down on both the amount of fresh water used and wastewater currently trucked long distances for disposal. The company’s mobile evaporator would allow natural gas producers to reuse some of the millions of gallons of water used to extract natural gas from dense shale deposits deep underground through the so-called “fracking” process. Water is mixed with chemicals and sand and pumped at high pressure thousands of feet...

Should Oil and Gas Investors Fear the FRAC Act? By Toby Shute August 19, 2009 In June, Democrats introduced the FRAC (Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals) Act via companion bills in the House and Senate. The FRAC Act seeks to amend the Safe Drinking Water Act so that hydraulic fracturing would be regulated on a federal level. Hydraulic fracturing is the technique that, combined with horizontal drilling, has allowed domestic E&Ps like Devon Energy (NYSE: DVN), Southwestern Energy (NYSE: SWN), and XTO Energy (NYSE: XTO) to unlock massive shale deposits like the Barnett and the Fayetteville. Big Oil's lobbyist,...

With Fort Worth sitting on one of the nation's largest natural gas fields, 150-foot drilling rigs are rising over golf courses, churchyards, even tree-lined neighborhoods. "If you don't have a gas well ... get one!" a billboard urges commuters zipping along a busy interstate near downtown. But not everyone is celebrating the natural gas bonanza here, despite the 55,000 new jobs and extra $5.2 billion it brings to the North Texas economy each year. Once confined to the lonely prairies, oil and gas exploration has gone urban. In Fort Worth, Los Angeles and other densely populated places, that sometimes pits...