Arkansas Canoe Club Forums

Seems the Non-Prophets Profits would not amount to much . . .

Actually, if you light a copy of The Economist on fire and view the flames through tracing paper printouts of the NPR and Fox News websites precisely overlaid on top of each other, you will be able to squint at it for several minutes and clearly read "The Official Truth", as published daily by the Illuminati.

- Fish

Go to bed, Bill

I guess that I need to clarify my problem with the gas fracking and drilling and prove that I am sane. I have been working on a report on the environmental impacts of this technology for a couple of years now and I can tell you that they are serious. We can argue all day about whether or not any seismic activty is drilling related, but water wells all over the nation which once were clear are now muddy and contain unidentified compounds.

Last year, after the construction of the main trunk gas line which will take gas from the Fayetteville shale to the plant in Mississippi was well underway a new faultline was discovered in the area. This fault was not discovered during the EIS and its existance has not been considered during pipeline construction.

In addition, evidence from across the nation is adding up that fracturing is have impacts on groundwater and in some cases increased eartquake activity.
Texas:
http://shaleblog.com/2010/water-injecti ... -activity/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Arkansas:
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kuar/ ... l.Arkansas" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

New York, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado all have similar stories.


Now the EPA is finally going to study the issue:

http://www.propublica.org/feature/epa-l ... fracturing" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

You guys really crack me up! All this chatter over a silly post about a "fracking" 1.7 earthquake near Cadron Boy's place. Funny stuff!

Yeah, and we who live in the drilling zone are laughing all the way to the bank . . . earthquakes and all. But it is still a shame what they are doing to our environment, especially the water. :shock:

Thanks, Gordon, for giving us something to rant about. Got any tips on making an aluminum foil cap for my dog?

The frac jobs do "fracture" the Shale zone but the width of the crack is less than an inch. After the job is pumped the pressure is released and the fracture closes on the sand put in place and is "propped" open by an even thinner sand layer. Not sure what the definition of an earthquake is though
This is at depths of 3000'-5000'. This is happening everyday somewhere in the Shale area and is and has been done for years all over the US so recent concerns of causing real earthquakes seems unlikely to me. I would be more concerned with surface issues common to all extractive resources. These are at a maximum now due to drilling activity and will eventually slow down and the pipeline right of ways and locations will heal. I've learned from the best that one person's destruction is another's wildlife opening.
We need to protect our backyard but consider the bigger picture. if you use energy you have to decide where it comes from and the other choices are coal, nukular , hydroelectric, etc. until other technology catches up. choose wisely

My dream is to live off-grid. Near a floatable stream or lake, of course! That's one reason I am so protective of the springs here.

I have one of the gas wells about 300 yards from my home that I've lived in for 18 years. I recently had to work on my well because it was overpressured and blew out part of the pipe. The well water leaking from the break also had oil in it.

I wasn't mad about any of this until I called Chesapeake just to give them a heads up on the situation and the representative I talked to immediately got snotty about it and turned me over to their lawyers. Bummer for them, I just hung up and called the sheriff's office to come document it with a report and take pictures of the oily water oozing out into my yard. I then made a trip to Little Rock to the EPA. They seemed very interested in what I had to show them.

I had always thought a landowner had rights, until the gas well situation started. Eminent Domain has a whole new meaning now. Landowners are just pawns to the big dogs, "SUCCO" and "Cheesespeak" and they don't seem to care about our environment.

Many (if not most) landowners have leased or sold the mineral rights to their property. They only technically own what's on the surface and they legally have to provide access to those who own the mineral rights to get to their "property" underground (like an easement through property). However, that's not eminent domain, which is government taking of your property (ostensibly for the public good) with compensation that they decide to pay you.

When you buy a piece of land, the mineral rights lease will transfer to you, which means the gas company will pay you royalties, but it also means they can drill, mine, etc. and you have to provide them a reasonable easement. When I owned property in Washington Co, I tried to buy back the mineral rights from the oil company, but they were in no hurry to do that. It bothered me to not have control over my property (which I was paying lots of interest on), but I knew that when I bought it. And if you're drilling for oil or gas, it's important to have a long term lease so that a sale of the land doesn't close you down, keeping you from paying for your investment.

I sympathize with you big time, but it's not anything like eminent domain, which may be necessary I suppose, but still seems to me to be completely unfair to a landowner.

- Fish

They do something called "integration" if you own your mineral rights but do not want to lease to the gas companies. If the majority of people in a section lease their minerals, the minority can be forced to join in. They pay the landowner, I'm not sure if as in for royalties or what, but it all smells like eminent domain to me. I leased my minerals, get royalties, spend it on kayaks, road trips, good wine . . . and spent a couple years "on vacation" in Eureka Springs. :roll: Definitely a love/hate relationship! The money does not make up for the overall negative environmental impact. I am not the "usual" energy-hungry citizen, and resent having to give up my serene surroundings. One day, people will need the water that is being wasted now.
Jan

That "integration" does look a lot like eminent domain. If you don't have your mineral rights leased, you shouldn't be made to. With modern drilling and extraction techniques, not sure why they need to anyway. I drink your milkshake...

- Fish

They also go "under" your property and do horizontal drilling. I suppose they could do that instead of integration, but I am not sure of all their tactics. I still cannot accept that all they are doing under the surface does not somehow influence earthquake activity. Small ones or otherwise. There's just so much underground activity going on. I've learned a lot by watching the Rigzone site the past few years. With XTO (EXXON) in the mix with Chesapeak and SEECO, we "little guys" don't stand a chance. We can just stand by and watch to see what they will do next.

Waaaaa. I'll stop whining for now.

i'll try to explain a few things, will probably make it worse.

in Arkansas a "drilling unit" generally consists of a full Section of land, which is a square 1 mile on each side which consists of 640 acres. When a gas well is drilled, completed and produces into a pipeline, each person owning minerals in that Section share in the revenue of the well or wells in that Section based on their percentage of the 640 total acres. For a well to be drilled all 640 acres must be leased. State law allows the "integration" of unleased minerals to keep a minority owner from holding up the majority from developing their minerals. The people "integrated" get paid the highest amount of bonus (cash) and royalty given to anyone in that Section. The leases are negotiated for a certain number of years and then they expire unless commercial production occurs, then they exist until the well(s) in that Section quit producing. This type of system was set up to protect against overdrilling which occurs when drilling units are on a lease basis instead of an entire section. If Joe Blow had ten acres and a well was drilled on him then each of his neighbors are forced to drill wells to protect themselves from drainage of their gas and too many wells get drilled. That's the logic of the system.
To my knowledge the only companies that can actually use eminent domain are the utilities companies which may or may not include the pipeline companies. Standard leases give the O&G companies the right to "reasonable use" ofthe land to drill and the right to lay a pipeline.

One reason there are so many rigs running is that the O&G companies are trying to establish production in each section they leased before their term runs out and the leases will have to be bought again.