Natural Gas Now Best Picks – June 17, 2023
Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.
This week: forest fire lies spread like wildfire, 50 shades of tyranny and fracking technology continues to innovate.
Look for these stories below, including links to the original articles!
Wildfire Lies Spread Just Like It!
The lies are predictable and less believable with every utterance of them (much like the fractivist memes regarding natural gas a decade ago), which is why the lying is accelerating:
[T}he media have been filled with articles making the wildfires-to-climate-change link:
From the Washington Post, June 3, 2023: “It’s already a wildfire season for the record books in Canada, with the blistering heat of summer and howling winds of fall still ahead. . . . The rash of blazes, intensified by record heat in many areas, is an ominous sign of the ill effects of climate change, which are not confined to Canada.”
From Carbon Brief, June 9: “Huge clouds of smoke from the blaze have blown thousands of kilometres down to the eastern US, shrouding cities such as New York and Washington DC in an orange haze and causing levels of toxic air pollution to reach record levels. Scientists have been quick to make the link with climate change. The hot and dry conditions resulting from rising global temperatures are known to make wildfires more extreme. Many US commentators said the fires should act as a “wake-up call” for climate action.”
From CBS News, June 12: “One month in, Canada is on track to have its most destructive wildfire season in history. Climate change-driven extreme temperatures and drought have created a tinderbox.“
And don’t forget our ever-authoritative Senator Chuck Schumer (quoted in The Hill):
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the Canadian wildfires “truly unprecedented” in floor remarks Wednesday and warned of the ongoing damage caused by climate change…
Atmospheric CO2 goes continuously up; acreage burned in wildfires goes continuously down. How can that negative correlation be explained? Yang, et al., have many theories as to causation, some of them contradictory. But this one may be important:
CO2 can suppress fire occurrence by retaining more water in the soil [Nelson et al., 2004] through reducing transpiration [Ainsworth and Rogers, 2007].
In any event, whatever the underlying causal mechanisms (which may be complex), there is no denying that the simplistic “climate change causes increased wildfires” narrative cannot be right.
The remarkable thing about this is the extent to which the Washington Post, CBS News, Chuck Schumer, and dozens more of like thinkers just repeat a narrative that is clearly wrong, and see no need to ever look at actual data to try to understand what is going on.
Mainstream media types are fully aligned with Chuck Schumer who, in turn, is fully aligned with corporatists promoting the climate scam, which is threatened by natural gas, of course. So, what else is knew? We are being lied to at every turn by every major institution.
Hat Tip: S.H.
Power Grabs Lead to Desire for Ever More Power
Could it get any worse than what happened during COVID as ruling class elites made a crisis far worse by their wholly unjustified power grabs? Yes, it can. It can much worse and that’s where our ruling class—perhaps the worst since Nero—is determined to take us there.
It is now clear that those responsible for the Covid response aren’t looking for amnesty or forgiveness; they seek a government structure that codifies their authoritarian impulses and a legal system that offers citizens no means of demanding accountability from their rulers. Publicly, they are searching for any “emergency” to increase their power. Privately, they are looking to put that system into law.
With the East Coast enveloped in smoke, the political class immediately saw the temporary crisis as an opportunity to implement permanent change. Despite evidence that arson caused the wildfires in Quebec, the same groups that adopted mantras of “public health” to collect power announced that the smog was evidence of a “climate crisis.” Like Covid, the emergency demanded centralizing power and overturning American society…
But while the smoke clears, a more insidious development is taking place. The largely unknown Uniform Law Commission (ULC) has proposed a law that would drastically increase executive power in the United States and reduce citizens’ legal right to resist unconstitutional edicts.
The ULC is an influential interstate organization that works to make state laws more uniform. Since 2021, the group has worked to draft a “Model Public Health Emergency Authority Act.”
The…ULC seeks to codify a system that shields and promotes unchecked executive authority. Zweig writes, “It wants the legal authority that’s given to governors to be clear. And a memo indicates that the ULC expects the adoption of the Act will result in people suing only if the Act itself wasn’t followed, rather than suing based on a claim that the governor’s actions were unconstitutional.”
The Act threatens to strip Americans of their legal ability to oppose mandates, lockdowns, or other government orders. It offers total deference to governors in deciding what constitutes an emergency. No evidence would be required for state leaders to impose arbitrary and irrational limits on human liberty. Schools, businesses, and churches would be subject to the whims of executive power.
If this happens, we will have lost every bit of freedom forever. We are at war and it’s time we acted like it and demanded the reform of every major institution and the dismantling of many of them (e.g., the FBI, EPA, CDC and CIA). They are all corrupted beyond hope of remedy in their current form. Consider the natural gas stove bans for a tiny example.
Hat Tip: R.N.
And, The Innovation Continues!
Well, this surely has application to natural gas as well:
There’s already a proven technology for oil producers to return to existing wells and give them a second, high-pressure blast to increase output for a fraction of the cost of finishing a new well: shale well refracturing.
Refracturing is an operation designed to restimulate a well after an initial period of production, and can restore well productivity to near original or even higher rates of production as well as extend the productive life of a well. Re-fracking can be something of a booster shot for producers–a quick increase in output for a fraction of the cost of developing a new well.
While refracturing has never really gone mainstream, the technique is seeing higher adoption as drilling technology improves, aging oilfields erode output, and companies try to do more with less. According to a report published in the Journal of Petroleum Technology, new research from the Eagle Ford Shale in south Texas shows that refractured wells using liners are even capable of outperforming new wells despite the latter benefiting from more modern completion designs.
JPT also estimates that North Dakota’s Bakken Shale straddles some 400 openhole wells capable of generating an excess of $2 billion if refractured. Mind you, that estimate is derived from oil prices at $60/bbl vs. this year’s average oil price of almost $90/bbl. According to Garrett Fowler, chief operating officer for ResFrac, a refrac can be up to 40% cheaper than a new well and double or triple oil flows from aging wells…
Another key benefit: re-fracs do not require additional state permits or new negotiations with landowners. They are also less disruptive to the environment because well sites already have road access.
The innovation never stops!
Hat Tip: D.S.
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