In the last 22 years, protecting and caring for the planet has gone from a “we’re all in this together” part of our culture to a political wedge issue.
And it isn’t just your average pedestrian wedge issue that surges and wanes with each election cycle. No, this one is volatile, vengeful, and all-consuming. [bold, links added]
We were once a country that worked together in cleaning up pollution and using technological and scientific developments to produce energy cleaner and safer.
But a lurch leftward has turned environmentalism into a one-sided virtual religion from which no deviation is permitted. Anyone who disagrees is instantly labeled a bigot or otherwise irredeemable person.
How irredeemable? Well, on Sunday, former Vice President Al Gore connected the dots between deniers of an apocalyptic climate crisis and the police officers in Uvalde, Texas, who let 21 schoolchildren and teachers being gunned down in their classrooms.
“The climate deniers are really, in some ways, similar to all of those almost 400 law enforcement officers in Uvalde, Texas, who were waiting outside an unlocked door while the children were being massacred,” Gore said on NBC News.
His over-the-top fear tactics and demonization have been effective for two decades now. The children he first filled with fear in 2002 are now parents casting fear into their own children.
This past weekend, the “climate families of New York City” marched in front of White House chief of staff Ron Klain’s home with their small children, demanding that he tell President Joe Biden we are in a “climate crisis.”
The children, dressed as firemen, carried signs with the planet on fire, which read: “We are out of time,” “Stop licensing fossil fuels” and “Expand the Supreme Court.”
One day later, a group of young Democratic House staffers was arrested after protesting in the office of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the Senate majority leader of their own party.
For those of you who rely on politicians and the media, for much of the past 20 years, you have been trained to believe that climate change is the end of the world.
Nearly every aspect of our culture that touches your life has echoed that dire warning: corporations, institutions, government, academia, Hollywood, and social media have all had a hand in it.
From the coffee you drink to the school supplies you buy for your children, you can’t escape the message that fossil fuels are killing us, turning our planet into a blazing inferno.
The problem with this avalanche of opinion is the failure to educate ourselves and our children on the other side of the story in a meaningful way.
When I was a child, our teachers took us on a tour of a nuclear plant. They also took us on a tour of where they made Heinz ketchup and Wonder Bread, and a coal mine. They didn’t try to indoctrinate us, they just showed us the world.
When is the last time you saw anyone in the media dispassionately show the public what is going on in the energy industry? Or showed you what happens at a well pad?
Derek Yanchak is the other side of the story. The 34-year-old Washington County native is the Completions Engineering and Operations Manager for Range Resources at its Dalbo well site here in southwest Pennsylvania.
Yanchak is like the thousands of other professionals working in the natural gas industry—young, well-educated (Penn State 2010), and deeply connected to the land he works on.
It matters to him what goes in and out of the ground, because he fishes, swims, hikes, and hunts in the same region where his company drills.
The Dalbo well pad is just outside the city of Pittsburgh, where Allegheny, Beaver, and Washington counties converge.
To get here, you need to traverse the old Lincoln Highway, split off near the town of Clinton at the “Y” in the road, and then travel a mile or so until you nearly pass an innocuous dirt road.
Outside of the occasional truck going back and forth, no noise is coming from the entrance to the pad.
That is a sharp contrast with the old Jones and Laughlin steel mill that once hugged the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, whose operational hum echoed throughout the city. Until you get through the guard gate, the only sounds you hear here are pastoral.
The first thing you see at the pad is a solar panel. Yanchak explains that it is used from time to time as a power source at the pad.
The second thing you see is a lot of men and women in hard hats checking wells, recycling water, and using a lot of computers to measure and gauge the entire operation.
Yanchak explains that they are operating four wells right now. “It is a pretty typical operation because this is a reentry,” he said. He points to the green tanks that have just pulled up to the pad.
“That means we had drill wells before, and there are wells producing here prior to us coming back.”
He notes that they are “re-utilizing existing locations and existing infrastructure. It drives down costs and allows us to not have to build new pipelines, instead just kind of refill those existing pipelines to get to those processing facilities.”
Everyone here works a 12-hour shift, whether he is an engineer, geologist, chemist, skilled laborer, power generator, valve operator, or IT specialist.
“In a 12-hour shift, we’ll have anywhere from 25 to 30 people out here at a time,” explains Yanchak.
For years, the fleet equipment that Range Resources used was diesel—which is more dangerous and expensive.
The entire fleet went electric in 2019; the turbine on the pad is using natural gas to create electricity around the fleet.
Yanchak says traditional fracking uses diesel-fueled engines to produce electricity to power pressure pumps for hydraulic fracturing operations.
“Electric fracking uses natural gas from the well pad to power turbines to create electricity.”
Not only are the fleets half the size of diesel fleets, but they are also a whole lot quieter.
Range Resources, which drilled Pennsylvania’s first Marcellus Shale well back in 2004, is a Texas-based oil and natural gas exploration and production company with regional headquarters here in Washington County.
Hydraulic fracturing accesses the gas in a process that involves drilling a mile deep and launching a mixture (99 percent water and sand, 1 percent chemicals) into a horizontal well to crack the rock below and release gas hydrocarbons to the surface.
Because the process requires an abundance of water, the company is part of a sharing program with other regional natural gas operators and recycles everything those companies use.
Yanchak said that this share and recycle system has resulted in an over 150 percent recycle rate of the water.
The sand comes from places like Mingo Junction, Ohio, and other river town areas in the near Midwest. Because the sand they use is extremely fine, delivered in bins that are removed by truck when empty, dust clouds are not a problem.
Western Pennsylvania native Jeffrey Ventura took over as CEO of Range in January 2012. The company has come a long way from when it drilled its first well 18 years ago.
There have been a few lawsuits along the way, but for the most part, it has become a company that has changed the prosperity in this part of the state.
Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald, a Pittsburgh Democrat who has been supportive of the industry, said there is no doubt in his mind that the natural gas industry has become a game-changer for this region.
Read rest at Epoch Times
As a proud 36 year veteran & now retiree of the oil & gas industry, I’m glad to actually see a POSITIVE story about field operations! My experience as both a Landman & regulatory manager is the VAST majority of interactions between the industry with both the public & regulatory agencies is favorable. The industry does a LOT more GOOD across an array of issues than any downside. Too bad. RARELY will you ever see anything that has a balanced approach these days. The industry & the hard working, dedicated people that work in it to responsibly deliver critical products our country needs deserve a LOT better treatment than what they are getting from the activists & their media enablers…
Upbeat and informative. Years ago I had read that fracking op’s planned to go to the original sites and drill again. Yes, the well head “pads” are compact. I saw them in North Dakota around the Bakken. Each pad can have multiple wells below it. Small footprint and economical.
The more fear the Globalists scum balls can get people to surrender their Freedom and Liberty to a Global Government run by the UN
Why aren’t you reporting hourly on the record profits being made by the fossil fuel industry, surely you should be delighted they are making so much money, especially as we the taxpayers are also subsidising them.
Oh, and what about the fact that global offshore drilling rig activity is back to 2015 levels last recorded seven years ago, up by 8% since the start of the year
OK, so let’s break down your comment. So, what was the rate of return on investment on those record quarterly profits? How did the oil & gas industry ROR compare to tech, pharma or other manufacturers? My guess is oil & gas came in around the 6-10% range. That will be FAR BELOW many others. To add context, since 2014, how many quarters have oil & gas companies had losses? Nobody mentions that. As far as the rig count, how do you expect operators to invest in the current regulatory environment? Why would it surprise anyone that private businesses are reluctant to risk shareholder money given the ongoing uncertainty LARGELY created by the Biden Administrations open HOSTILITY towards fossil fuels an ridiculous ESG initiatives? Taxpayer subsidies? How is accelerated depreciation for private capital investment a taxpayer subsidy? Those are the same accounting methods afforded ALL U.S manufacturers to promote generation of plant & equipment. Speaking of actual subsidies, you can get the FACTS right off the Energy Information Administrations (EIA) website. Fossil fuels are completely DWARFED by wind & solar subsidies. The energy arena is primarily driven by physical laws & imperatives, not aspirations & ideology. The sooner we stop conflating social science with physical science we can get started on an informed & thoughtful debate regarding a coherent national energy strategy & policies…
Thought I’d share this quote from Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics from a recent CNN interview which underscores my points: “You know, I don’t sense gouging. This is age old. When global oil prices go higher energy companies benefit. They make a lot of money. Conversely, when oil prices are low and go down, they lose a lot of money. That’s been the case since the beginning of time. The other thing, is we need energy companies to produce more oil, so we need them to make money to be able to [produce more], and high earnings and profits to incentivize them to go out and put more rigs in the ground and produce more oil and get the oil prices down. That is the key to getting inflation lower.” (emphasis added) OIl & gas are in a worldwide commodity market. It is cyclical. Right now, you have a supply shortage. You won’t promote domestic investment with a hostile regulatory regime, ESG, threats of “windfall profits” or other taxes. Anyone who has had an entry level college economics course can understand these basics…
The “BIG OIL” companies were hit hard by the Wuhan virus. Remember that the spot market price for crude oil went negative! There was no storage available and people who speculated in futures delivery contracts had no buyers and no way out. Older refineries shut down, forever. The refining part of the business has become the bottleneck pushing up prices. It takes a ton of gall to expect the oil companies forget the last two years. The Europeans would be happy to pay the energy prices that we’re paying in North America. They pay much higher “sin” taxes than we do, if they can afford a car at all.
Absolutely right. BTW, when you say “Big Oil” (to me), I usually think of the larger State owned (national) oil companies like Aramco, Pemex, Petrobras, etc. I wonder if the average American understands that a privately owned company like Exxon-Mobil ranks about 17th in size worldwide? That, and about 80% (or more) of our domestic oil production is from independent producers, NOT “Big Oil.” The oil & gas industry is large, multi-faceted & complex. No “Easy Button” in the energy arena…