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Massive Fracking Plan Near Yellowstone National Park Threatens Wildlife, Air Quality, Climate

 
 
 
Well we all know how this will play out.

A plucky young female geologist will be fired from the USGS by her evil director, when she refuses to ignore a report that the fracking has caused an instability that will cause the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt.

Undeterred, she enlists the help of a US Airforce pilot, who got a dishonourable discharge for standing up for the correct security protocols for nuclear warheads.

Between them, they formulate a plan to re-seal the supervolcano by stealing a warhead from a nearby airforce base (incidentally pointing up the fact that he had been right all along about the poor security), and placing it in the vent of Old Faithful.

A car and helicopter chase through spectacular scenery ensues, and due to the delay caused by evading the Military Police, the ex-pilot is caught by the steam jet, just as he heroically places the warhead.

Massive explosions, the bad guys are killed by a huge lava flow that engulfs the office where the evil USGS director is in the process of collecting his kick-back from the fracking company.

Miraculously the ex-pilot escaped the blast, and comes out of a cloud of steam and ash, carrying a rescued kitten, and with photogenic soot stains on his face and a torn shirt showing off his abs; Female geologist falls into his arms and tells him that the nuke worked, and the world is saved.

Frankly, it would be shocking if it turned out any other way.
 
If enough took saving gas seriously, it wouldn't pay nearly as much for this industry to be so desperate.
 
Yeah it's not the greedy corporations making decisions to destroy the planet, it's consumers whose fault it is after being lied to by the corporate marketing campaigns.
 
The recent increases in demand for gas are largely driven by the installation of wind and solar power generation, which requires gas power plants to provide dispatchable capacity for when the wind drops or clouds cover the sun.

'Renewable energy' means 'energy backed by gas', and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

If you lobby for the use of wind or solar power, then you are actively creating the conditions for fracking to become more widespread, whether you intended to or not.
 
Don2 (Don1 Revised) said:
Yeah it's not the greedy corporations making decisions to destroy the planet, it's consumers whose fault it is after being lied to by the corporate marketing campaigns.
Click to expand...

If consumers saved a lot of energy then demand would go down so the corporations would not need to supply as much gas. Isn't that just basic logic? Now whether consumers want to save energy is another story...
 
bilby said:
The recent increases in demand for gas are largely driven by the installation of wind and solar power generation, which requires gas power plants to provide dispatchable capacity for when the wind drops or clouds cover the sun.

'Renewable energy' means 'energy backed by gas', and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

If you lobby for the use of wind or solar power, then you are actively creating the conditions for fracking to become more widespread, whether you intended to or not.
Click to expand...

I don't understand how that works. Let's say 5% of energy comes from solar. Then later we improve that to 10%. Why do you need more gas than before?
 
Kilgore Trout said:
bilby said:
The recent increases in demand for gas are largely driven by the installation of wind and solar power generation, which requires gas power plants to provide dispatchable capacity for when the wind drops or clouds cover the sun.

'Renewable energy' means 'energy backed by gas', and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

If you lobby for the use of wind or solar power, then you are actively creating the conditions for fracking to become more widespread, whether you intended to or not.
Click to expand...

I don't understand how that works. Let's say 5% of energy comes from solar. Then later we improve that to 10%. Why do you need more gas than before?
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Because when the sun goes behind a cloud what takes over has to be gas or hydro.
 
But it doesn't need to be _more_ energy than before, just at different times. If you have 5% of your fuel need filled by wind, that's 5% you didn't need to burn. If it can only do 5% because of clouds, then the gas that need to be burned is still 5% less gas than before the wind turbine contributed 5%. Why would there be an INCREASE in gas burning because wind is taking some of the burden?

So now you only need gas on cloudy days. Before, you needed it every day. That's less overall gas.
 
Eventually every place on earth will be extracted. It is the nature of extractive and slash and burn human activities. Same as 100,000 years ago with hunter gatherers. Just a matter of time.

To learn more go to the archives of this website:

https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

We are all as complicit in fossil fuel use as mafia wives were in The Sopranos. It is our vanity that wants it not to be real.

None of us motherfuckers are better than that.
 
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Rhea said:
But it doesn't need to be _more_ energy than before, just at different times. If you have 5% of your fuel need filled by wind, that's 5% you didn't need to burn. If it can only do 5% because of clouds, then the gas that need to be burned is still 5% less gas than before the wind turbine contributed 5%. Why would there be an INCREASE in gas burning because wind is taking some of the burden?

So now you only need gas on cloudy days. Before, you needed it every day. That's less overall gas.
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It doesn't work that way, because gas and renewables are not the only players.

As more wind and solar are built, they displace non-dispatchable power, such as coal, nuclear and 'run of the river' hydropower. These baseload providers cannot operate profitably in a world where sometimes they are needed, and sometimes not.

Say you need 1000GW of power all the time, and another 300GW for peak loads. Before renewables, you might have:

500GW coal
500GW nuclear
0-300GW gas

Now a 100GW of wind power and 100GW of solar are added to the mix.

The gas plant has to run at 1/3 capacity at peak times on windy, sunny days; and at full capacity on calm, cloudy days. All is good; Exactly as you predicted, less gas is burned, with wind and solar offsetting its use. Yay!

So now you add more wind and solar. Let's double the installed capacity. Now on a windy day with little cloud, the gas plant doesn't run at all. But there's 100GW more power than is needed - so someone else has to shut down. But the coal and nuclear plants cannot just shut down - and if they do, and the wind drops or the clouds roll in, then someone is getting a power outage, because they take a long time to start back up once you take them offline.

So you need more gas to cover the gap, while whichever of the baseload plants ramps back up. So now you have:

0-200GW Wind
0-200GW Solar
500GW Coal
500GW Nuclear
0-900GW Gas

And either the coal or the nuclear plant (or both) is running in a very expensive way - stop-start means more maintenance costs - and they are selling far less than their nameplate capacity of electricity, so they are in a double-bind, with less revenue and increased costs. Meanwhile, the gas plant is running at well below its nameplate capacity (which is fine - they only burn gas when they are up and online, so they don't mind so much if they are only at full power on still, overcast afternoons).

At this point, the anti nuclear lobby will point out that the plant is making a huge loss, runs far less frequently than it should, and with a collective cry of 'Fukushima!!'*, will demand that it be decommissioned forthwith.

So now you have:

500GW coal
500-900GW gas
0-200GW wind
0-200GW solar

You are burning far more gas than before, and total CO2 emissions have gone UP. For the exact same supply of 1000-1300GW.

And that's pretty much exactly what happened in California. Only the actual numbers are different to keep the maths simple.

Notice that a small amount of wind/solar is not a problem, as it just offsets gas burning as long as the contribution stays below the threshold where it starts to displace baseload power. It's larger installed unreliable capacities that cause a problem. Which is why it's taken a while to get to this point, even though wind and solar have been around for a while.

The principle that "If a little is good, a lot must be better" was never a wise approach to life, and this and alcohol consumption are two prime counterexamples.

Of course, if your population are smarter than the Californians, they shut the coal plant; that way carbon dioxide emissions will fall (gas is about half as bad per GWyear as coal); But note that demand for gas still goes up in this scenario. So you might save the environment from climate change, but you are still going to need to tell the people to get fracked.










*Death toll - zero
 
Rhea said:
But it doesn't need to be _more_ energy than before, just at different times. If you have 5% of your fuel need filled by wind, that's 5% you didn't need to burn. If it can only do 5% because of clouds, then the gas that need to be burned is still 5% less gas than before the wind turbine contributed 5%. Why would there be an INCREASE in gas burning because wind is taking some of the burden?

So now you only need gas on cloudy days. Before, you needed it every day. That's less overall gas.
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Gas powers combined cycle turbines that can be turned on and off very quickly. This makes it a good technology to pair with a variable input supply like wind.

The use of gas goes up with wind because you are replacing coal with wind/gas combined.

Wind plus solar plus geothermal plus various storage solutions is an ultimate goal but gas is needed until the storage issue can be fixed.
 
Rhea said:
But it doesn't need to be _more_ energy than before, just at different times. If you have 5% of your fuel need filled by wind, that's 5% you didn't need to burn. If it can only do 5% because of clouds, then the gas that need to be burned is still 5% less gas than before the wind turbine contributed 5%. Why would there be an INCREASE in gas burning because wind is taking some of the burden?

So now you only need gas on cloudy days. Before, you needed it every day. That's less overall gas.
Click to expand...

Except before then most of that was coal or nuke. Solar/wind is causing a big shift from coal to gas.
 
bilby said:
Of course, if your population are smarter than the Californians, they shut the coal plant; that way carbon dioxide emissions will fall (gas is about half as bad per GWyear as coal); But note that demand for gas still goes up in this scenario.
Click to expand...

According to the CA Energy Commission, from 2006 to 2016, solar and wind use went way up. Coal, large hydro and gas went down.

CA Energy Mix 2006
CA Energy Mix 2016
 
Kilgore Trout said:
bilby said:
Of course, if your population are smarter than the Californians, they shut the coal plant; that way carbon dioxide emissions will fall (gas is about half as bad per GWyear as coal); But note that demand for gas still goes up in this scenario.
Click to expand...

According to the CA Energy Commission, from 2006 to 2016, solar and wind use went way up. Coal, large hydro and gas went down.

CA Energy Mix 2006
CA Energy Mix 2016
Click to expand...

Those 41,825 GW of "Unspecified Sources of Power" in 2016; What do you think they came from? Unicorn farts?

When more than 14% of the total is suddenly 'unknown', that makes me think that someone is trying to hide something.
 
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