The new draft rule relies on an online database used by Colorado and 10 other states to track the chemicals used in fracking operations. FracFocus.org is a website formed by industry and intergovernmental groups in 2011 that allows users to gather well-specific data on thousands of drilling sites.  the announcement by the Feds is very disappointing, but I have come to expect nothing less from an Administration beholden to environmental special interests and these new proposed rules on fracking on federal and tribal lands is unwarranted and unnecessary.

Consider Karnes County, Texas. A few years ago, the community was plagued by poverty. Today, it’s not uncommon for local residents to collect $70 million each month in royalties for letting energy companies drill on their land.

The wealth has increased the county’s tax base almost six-fold in two years. Last year, more than $15 billion in royalty checks were paid to private landowners by energy companies in Texas alone.

The energy and economic boom in the Lone Star State is largely the result of hydraulic fracturing — “fracking” — a process that enables the extraction of previously intractable natural gas and oil reserves.

A solution that is 99.5 percent sand and water with a few trace chemicals is pumped underground at high pressure to break up rock formations. Aside from Texas, many other areas of the country — including large swaths of the Midwest and Northeast, as well as North Dakota — also are benefiting from fracking.

But despite the economic gains, radical environmentalists have bombarded the public with misinformation about fracking. It’s time to debunk some of these false claims.

• Claim 1: Fracking will contaminate the underground water supply.

Subsurface contamination from fracking is almost impossible. Fracking involves the injection of liquid 7,000 to 15,000 feet underground — far deeper than drinking water aquifers, which often are about 300 feet below the surface.

Last year, an exhaustive University of Texas study done by a former head of the U.S. Geological Survey looked into alleged incidents of fracking contamination. “None of the water well claims involve hydraulic fracturing fluid additives, and none of these constituents has been found by chemical testing of water wells,” the study concluded.

A popular, Oscar-nominated documentary, “Gasland,” shows landowners in Colorado lighting their water taps on fire and blaming fracked wells nearby. But Colorado regulators already had determined the actual cause was naturally occurring biogenic methane, unrelated to fracking.

In fact, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission felt compelled to put out a press release to “correct several errors” in the film.

• Claim 2: Fracking does lots of damage to the land surrounding a drilling rig.

Drilling operations do involve trucks, heavy equipment and facilities to store waste and other byproducts. But any impact on the surface easily is restored, and waste products are very carefully disposed of.

Increasingly, the waste products are recycled for use in other wells or converted to de-icing agents and distilled water.

Fears also have been raised about surface spills involving fracking fluids. Not only are such spills rare, but also the fracking fluid involved is almost entirely water.

Any harmful chemicals are used at such low concentrations that environmental damage would be negligible. John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, recently told Congress he’s so confident fracking fluid is safe that he drank some of it. At least one energy company has even developed fracking fluid that is sourced from the food services industry.

• Claim 3: Fracking causes earthquakes.

Last year, Congress asked the National Research Council to study the relationship between fracking and earthquakes. Every year, there are about 14,450 naturally occurring earthquakes worldwide of magnitude 4.0 or greater. According to the National Research Council, just 154 earthquakes over the past 90 years have been the result of manmade activity.

Of those, only 60 were in the U.S., and nearly all were moderate to small.

The council’s report concluded that fracking is extremely unlikely to cause earthquakes.

• Claim 4: Fracking needs to be federally regulated.

Since it was introduced in the 1940s, fracking has been used to extract oil and gas in America more than one million times. Over the past 70 years, fracking has only been regulated at the state level and has an unimpeachable safety record.

An Environmental Protection Agency study confirmed fracking was safe and adequately regulated by the states in 2004.

“States are stepping up and doing a good job [regulating fracking],” said former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who stepped down from President Barack Obama’s cabinet in January.

Even one of the nation’s largest environmental groups admits that federal regulation of fracking isn’t necessary. “The states actually have a lot of knowledge and experience in regulating well construction and operation,” said Scott Anderson, senior policy advisor for the Environmental Defense Fund, to the Energy and Environment program in 2010.

“We think that states have every reason to be able to tackle this issue and do it well.” It’s worth noting that the Environmental Defense Fund is a strong proponent of the economic and environmental benefits of natural gas and of the use of fracking techniques.

It’s clear that new energy sources are required to meet America’s needs and reduce dependence on foreign oil. It’s further estimated that fracking will lead to $2 trillion in U.S. capital investments through 2035.

This resource boom also is a rich source of jobs. In 2011 alone, the oil and gas industry supported an impressive 9.6 million jobs.

Every community in America stands to gain from fracking, and despite what detractors say, there’s almost no downside.

Faulkner is CEO of Breitling Energy Cos.

“To the oil and gas industry, the EPA’s revisions are proof that the environmental impact of fracking – which involves injecting millions of gallons of pressurized water, sand and chemicals into wellheads to break up gas trapped in shale rock formations – can be contained and managed. ‘The new EPA estimates reshape the entire fracking debate,’ says Chris Faulkner, CEO of Dallas-based Breitling Oil and Gas. ‘It shows the industry is taking proactive steps to reduce escaped methane emissions and has made great progress. What environmentalists don’t want to admit is that the oil and gas industry [has] a vested interest to capture the gas and not flare or vent it. It’s a commodity, and it has real value.”

Article Source Link: http://www.stocksandnews.com/week-in-review.php

The Consumer Price Index, a key measure of inflation, fell 0.4% in April, according to the Labor Department. Compared to a year earlier, prices are up only 1.1%, a level of inflation that’s considered rather low.

Falling gas prices were the main driver for the broader decline for the second month in a row

The average price for a gallon of unleaded gas fell by about 13 cents in April

On one hand, lower prices at the pump can act “like a tax cut for consumers, offsetting some of the payroll tax hike and tame inflation can boost consumer spending.

That said, low inflation can also be a sign of weak economic growth so be careful what you wish for.

MLA mandates that the federal government pay states where the federal government controls most of the land 50% of any revenue it collects from mineral leases there to offset taxes which otherwise would have gone to the state and county.

The federal government diverted nearly $110 million of revenue their states should have received to offset sequestration impacts. The state of Wyoming saw $53 million in royalty funds disappear right before their eyes already this year.

The new State Mineral Revenue Protection Act would amend the MLA to grant states the option to collect their share of the mineral royalties, and grant those states full property interest in their share.

Project Information

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The new rules, establishing safety standards over “fracking,” received more than 177,000 public comments in a 120-day period after they were initially proposed last year. Variance procedures within the rules accommodate stricter standards set by individual states.

My comments: the announcement by the Department of Interior is very disappointing, but I have come to expect nothing less from an Administration beholden to environmental special interests.  The new proposed rule on hydraulic fracturing on federal and tribal lands is unwarranted and unnecessary, and is yet another example of the growing number of burdensome administrative regulations that are prohibiting real economic growth in this country.

My thoughts: I am gangbusters on the Utica Shale play in Ohio and I can tell you it’s the real deal, and that it has already brought unprecedented growth in oil and gas production, and it’s going to produce staggering amounts of oil and gas in the future.

HERE ARE SOME NUMBERS

Eleven drillers including us reported production from 87 Utica wells last year

Those wells more than 600,000 barrels of oil and 12.8 billion cubic feet of natural gas in one year.   That is a lot of oil in a short amount of time folks

Although it’s still very early in the development of the Utica, this shows the enormous potential of this play,”

California’s Monterey shale is estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration to hold 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil – as compared to the North Dakota Bakken shale’s 3.6 billion barrels. The state currently produces around 10 percent of the nation’s oil, about the same as Alaska. California’s total reserves, however, are thought to amount to more than 400 billion barrels of oil, representing a whopping two-thirds of the total shale oil reserves in the entire U.S. and about half of the conventional oil in Saudi Arabia.

California, as usual, presents unique challenges

So why isn’t California enjoying an oil boom blowout that would make the others look puny in comparison?

Well, when it comes to geology, not all states were created equal. California’s shale isn’t as old as other areas in the U.S., and because of the seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault, the shale layers are thicker and crumpled together. Monterey shale doesn’t lend itself to the same hydraulic fracturing techniques that have unlocked shale reserves across the nation.

Though the younger age of the Monterey shale means that it’s at its peak for oil generation, the thicker, less “frackable” formation carries a higher risk that it won’t yield enough commercially useful product. It’s also likely that different methods will be required for different sections of the shale, raising risk and costs as producers cannot use the same approach from one site to the next. This has slowed exploration and production in the state as even the big players have been reluctant to pour investment dollars into these potentially difficult plays.

There are some companies taking the gamble, of course. California-based Occidental Petroleum has been testing deep acid injection with some success, and has partnered with Venoco in a 3D seismic survey and other exploration projects. Leading developers in California include Chevron, Plains Exploration and Linn and Breitburn. New York-based Hess has also set up shop in California, bringing its Bakken shale experience to bear on Monterey shale.

Fracking foiled by Monterey shale

Deep acid injection holds more promise for the Monterey shale than the type of fracking used in other plays. Large-volume hydrofluoric acid has been used to increase well flow volume and production by breaking down limestone, sandstone, drilling mud and other elements. It’s cheaper, doesn’t use as much pressure and requires lower volumes than fracking, making it potentially less controversial.

Whatever the technology that opens up production of the Monterey shale, the stakes are high. Development of the 1,750-mile formation could generate a half million new jobs by 2015 and nearly three million by 2020, according to a study by the University of Southern California and a Los Angeles think tank, the Communications Institute. Under this forecast, California stands to reap $4.5 billion in oil-related tax revenues by 2015 and nearly $25 billion by 2020. In a state where unemployment still hovers just over 9 percent, the 3 percent unemployment rate of other boom states like North Dakota looks like mighty strong incentive. Governor Jerry Brown has clearly indicated a keen interest in increasing the state’s wealth by encouraging oil and gas production in California. “We want to get the greenhouse emissions down, but we also want to keep our economy going,” he said during a March 13 press conference.

While fracking is not looking like the key to unlocking California’s reserves, there is nonetheless plenty of anti-fracking fomenting going on in California. As a result, the State Department of Conservation released a new draft set of fracking rules at the end of 2012, which could take a year to establish as regulations. This despite the fact that fracking has been used for decades in California without a single incident.

It seems likely that the huge energy and wealth potential of the Monterey shale will overcome the objections of environmentalists, but development and output will still be a slow process due to the technological challenges. As producers continue exploring better ways to extract oil and gas from California’s Monterey shale, however, that state could one day become synonymous with oil.

Article Source Link: http://www.oilgasmonitor.com/californias-monterey-shale-promises-americas-biggest-oil-boom/5177/

The 45-minute presentation, entitled “The ongoing development of U.S. shale gas – Update on the major fields,” will be delivered by Breitling’s chief executive officer, Chris Faulkner, and will occur at 3:00 p.m.

Chris Faulkner, Breitling Oil and Gas CEO, said, “It’s great to be back in Turkey, a country with vital roles as an oil-transit gateway and power broker in the eastern Mediterranean.”  Faulkner added, “Turkey’s place in the global energy system is drawing greater attention from the international community every day.”

Mr. Faulkner serves as an advisor to the ECF Asia Shale Committee and sits on the Board of Directors for the North Texas Commission. He has been featured in numerous media outlets, including Reuters, Bloomberg, Financial Times, US News & World Report, FOX Business News and CNBC.

For more information on this and other activities of the Company, see the Breitling Oil and Gas website at http://www.breitlingoilandgas.com.

Breitling has current oil and gas exploration projects all over the United States.