Fracking Ban Fears Overblown?
At Forbes, Christopher Helman says that some of the alarm over a fracking ban here in North Dakota may be overblown:
Analysts at Tudor, Pickering & Holt in Houston think the only worry could be over the practice of fracking with diesel fuel. In North Dakota drillers often use diesel in their fracks because it is a good lubricant even in frigid Dakota winters.
Even though the concentrations of diesel used are less than .1% of the millions of gallons of frack fluids injected down a well, the practice gets special scrutiny. According to the Safe Drinking Water Act, once diesel is mixed into a frack job the well is subject to special permitting requirements that don’t apply if there’s no diesel involved. So, says Tudor, Pickering, Helm’s concerns would only apply to the diesel-frack subset.
As for a blanket federal ban on fracking? The analysts figure that not even Washington bureacrats suffer such severe “cranial rectosis.” Stop fracking, and nat gas prices would surge from $3.37 per thousand cubic feet today to $12, in a heartbeat.
Comforting words, though as NDTA Director Dustin Gawrylow pointed out earlier today, the threat of North Dakota’s oil boom being regulated to death is very, very real. And as I pointed out yesterday, the state is in no fiscal position to lose the revenue and prosperity brought by the oil boom.
Our state has engaged in such an irresponsible level of government growth over the last decade that if the oil boom were to cease, be it through regulatory meddling or changes in the market, we’d be left with no choice but to go on a seek-and-destroy mission through state spending or engage in the largest tax hike in state history.
Regardless, you have to wonder what the beef is with fracking with diesel fuel. As the article above points out, diesel is a very small part of the fracking fluid mixture and it’s being injected into oil deposits. Meaning there’s already oil and natural gas and other nasty stuff down there anyway.
What’s the big deal with adding a little diesel to the mix?
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