
Report: Fracking raising water supply worries - ck2
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/02/05/ceres-report-fracking-water-supplies/5230583/
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throwaway_yy2Di
So this is what, about $10^11 of GDP out of 10^11 gallons of untreated
freshwater? Am I the only one with scope sensitivity, or are people valuing
natural water at +∞, or what? Because I'm not even slightly outraged.

edit: The 10^11 gallon water figure is "since 2011", so maybe 30 trillion
cubic feet of shale gas since then, eyeballing this chart [0]. That would have
been around $100 billion, at the (insanely depressed) price of $3/thousand
ft^3 [1].

You could replace (literally) that water at a cost of <1% of the shale gas.
Literal as in, that's the energy cost to desalinate ocean water in the Gulf of
Mexico and ship it to the center of the continent by freight rail. Going by
the least efficient numbers in [2], the desalination cost is <150 billion
ft^3; and by the numbers on [3], for 400 million tons of liquid cargo, and a
1,500 mile distance [4], is about the same.

I mean this is completely insane of course, it's just for perspective.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Natural_Gas_Production...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Natural_Gas_Production_1990-2040.jpg)

[1]
[http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm](http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transportation#US_Freight_transportation)

[4]
[https://www.google.com/#q=distance+from+fargo+to+gulf+of+mex...](https://www.google.com/#q=distance+from+fargo+to+gulf+of+mexico)

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melling
Sorry, we need the cheap energy, and it can't be coal. The US oil crisis is 40
years old. I think every US President since Nixon has talked about energy
independence.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis)

I guess we're getting there but I was hoping for a much better solution.

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jgalt212
Yes, fracking sucks. But it sucks less than depending on the Middle East and
Russia for our energy needs.

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wavefunction
Does it? I don't see what sort of changes fracking has had on our foreign
policy? I cannot think of a SINGLE foreign policy that has changed now that
we've begun fracking.

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danso
Fracking has been going on for a looooonnng time, so the relatively recent
attention and/or uptick in activity wouldn't necessarily propagate in foreign
policy changes, at least in easily noticeable ways.

Another thing to consider: fracking is providing energy to meet the U.S.'s
continuing growth for energy...I think foreign policy impact would most
definitely happen if additional domestic energy production coincided with a
national reduction in energy usage. As it is, though, fracking probably just
maintains the status quo, and fracking proponents would argue that things
would be much worse if we didn't have fracking at all, and energy consumption
continued to grow.

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jbellis
Like other resource misallocations, this would be a non-issue if water were
priced at market rates.

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judk
Yes, It would totally be a non issue if poor people just got outbid for the
essentials of life and just died.

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mrestko
If this were truly a concern, the trivial solution is to have tiered pricing
which steps up the price of water after the "essential" quantity has been
dispensed. This could be implemented as a yearly rebate.

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protomyth
ND isn't mentioned mainly because we are having flood problems in the east and
the Army Corp of Engineers are doing there usual cruddy job.

At some point we need to get the whole desalination plant thing going since
California has and is going to have problems with its agriculture and I am a
bit more worried about that.

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matthewmcg
There are also non-hydrualic forms of fracturing. Back in the 1960s, the
Atomic Energy Commission partnered with utilities to explore the feasibility
of releasing natural gas with underground nuclear detonations.

As crazy as this sounds, it actually worked quite well. The problem, of
course, is that it created an enormous amount of underground radioactive
debris and the natural gas that was extracted was itself radioactive.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulison](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulison)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rio_Blanco](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rio_Blanco)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy)

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davidf18
The article says far more water is being used by agriculture. Probably not a
good idea to have agriculture, which consumes vast amounts of water, in
regions where there are water shortages. Alternatively, the nation does need
lower cost oil and gas and the fracking should be encouraged.

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twoodfin
I'm going to complain about the relevance of this post just to get to read the
rationalizations for why this sort of thing belongs here. It's like "hacking"
the earth? Hackers live on the same planet as the rest of us? Fracking rhymes
with hacking?

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logicallee
IMHO hackernews is for the thought leaders of the world who are objectively
smarter and more visionary than the rest (this is not a value judgment, and I
mean "objectively" literally), while operating machinery in a capitalist
system that hugely leverages their power so that they are, or can be, like
philanthropist robinhood-tycoons, who do not need to exploit anyone or
anything, but can create value out of thin air. (As, indeed, they do, starting
by using their own labor to produce value far, far in excess of the market
price of that labor.) That's how I see startups, at least.

You might have a different opinion of course. If you don't want to be
powerful, don't found a startup, or read a site dedicated to this. If you do,
then get a conscience while you do it.

On the other hand, there is a bit of a dearth of actual startup news these
days.

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judk
I too enjoy sharing this space with fellow thought leaders Warren Buffet, Bill
Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Randy Cohen, Peter Singer, ...

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logicallee
There are indeed some people of the likes of Larry page and Mark Zuckerberg
who know about this site. It is, after all, the new Slashdot. That is one of
Paul Graham's goals.

Of course, you are right in that he's not doing well at it these days.

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logicallee
I will just say that Mark Zuckerberg spoke numerous times at YCombinator. I
doubt very much that he hasn't read this site.

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interstitial
If only the world's industries could run on bitcoins and puppies.

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iamjustin
...or on snarky Hacker News comments.

