Fracking

Our Ohio featured an interesting piece how fracking for oil has changed the little town of Carrollton, Ohio, home of the Ohio FFA Camp.  Our son Matthew was there just last week with his students, like I did 30 and 40 years ago.  It showed a guy that reminded me of myself telling how fracking was making local land owners so rich so fast they didn't know how to spend it all.  Can you imagine an extra $5000 or $10,000 per month as a farmer or landowner?

This affects every business and institution, even public schools.  The rough necks who do this work "don't have a pot to pee in."

A search found this data:

•In 2011, the USA produced 8,500,983 million cubic feet of natural gas from shale gas wells - that's a value of about $36 billion.

•According to the EPA, natural gas-fired electricity generates half the carbon dioxide of coal-fired production.

•researchers must refine our thinking of the economic benefits of rapid expansion of energy production.
If an average American heard the word 'fracking' ten years ago, chances are he or she would have worried about the manners of the speaker. Today, however, opinions about fracking are solidifying, and battle lines are being drawn, even if understanding remains sketchy. For many on the American left, fracking connotes something dangerous, unhealthy - even, as in a recent Hollywood production, potentially nefarious. For those on the right, fracking is often regarded as the best hope for a struggling economy.

While the outcome of the policy struggle is impossible to predict, the economic stakes could hardly be higher.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is more commonly called, is a process that's been used to extract oil and natural gas since it was first introduced by Standard Oil in the 1940s. Over the past decade, as other technologies have combined with the use of fracking to make the tapping of shale profitable, it has contributed to a resurgence of oil production in the USA and a dramatic increase in natural gas production. Proponents of fracking have hailed it as a major development in the energy industry, one that has allowed for tapping of reserves of gas and oil that were previously prohibitively difficult to reach. In some parts of the country, most notably in North Dakota, this has lead to massive expansions of energy production, and gold rush level increases in economic activity."

When we drove to New York I was shocked to see gasoline at $3.35 per gallon in Erie, Pennsylvania when Ohio was still at $3.59.  New York has higher gasoline taxes and it was very little higher than what we paid in Ohio.  In 14 years of driving there, I've never seen this happen before.

Whether you believe in hydraulic fracking of oil from shale or not, it is having a big impact in regions close to me.  Our thirst for cheap oil or oil at any price hasn't dwindled in this country.

Ed Winkle