The irony is almost too much to bear. This week, Senate Republicans voted to approve a bill to President Obama’s desk that would mandate the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline — the project that would transport the thick, dirty oil harvested from the tar sands of western Canada across the American prairie to ports and refineries on the Gulf Coast. Opponents are hoping that the...
The big oil companies love to portray the rise of fracking as a great American success story — using 21st Century technology and know-how to locate and extract pockets of cheap energy that were thought to be unreachable, reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil and lowering your energy cost. But Big Oil doesn’t want you to know the sausage-making, as it were, that goes into...
So the original take on fracking for natural gas was that it was good for the environment, for one simple reason — natural gas is a cleaner fuel than what it normally replaces, particularly coal which is rich in carbon emissions. In other words, they told us that more fracking meant fewer greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere. Even with a flood of disturbing reports that...
There are reports that the federal government is thinking about allowing the export of American oil again. The U.S. used to be a large oil exporter, decades ago, but that stopped in 1973 as crude production on domestic soil reached a peak and an Arab oil embargo threatened our economy. But then came fracking, which has been a game changer for producing oil and natural gas, from Pennsylvania to...
Did you ever do the laundry and find that you’ve lost a sock…or two? It’s one of the great mysteries of modern life — but at least it’s one that we can laugh off. But when the oil industry of North Dakota starts losing its socks — now that’s a completely different story. That’s because the oil socks of North Dakota are chock full of TERM —...
Philadelphia — the densely populated 5th-largest city in America — dodged a bullet this week…but just barely: IT COULD HAVE been worse – a lot worse. None of the seven CSX cars – six of them loaded with volatile crude oil – that derailed on the 128-year-old rail bridge over the Schuylkill between University City and Grays Ferry about 12:30 a.m. yesterday fell...
The website Midwest Energy News asks a very good question: When a ruptured pipeline spilled 20,000 barrels of oil into a North Dakota wheat field last month, a state health official said it was “the best place it could’ve occurred” — far from population centers and water supplies. But what if a similar spill occurs in the worst place? For better or worse, the year 2013 will be remembered as the...
I could tell you about the out-of-control drilling boom in North Dakota, or you could see it for yourself. From outer space! The picture at the top of this post — taken by satellite of the United States at night — reveals an amazing truth: The gas flares in and around tiny Williston, North Dakota, now burn as brightly, and are as visible from space, as major U.S. metropolitan areas...
