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Don’t Be This Guy
By Isaac Orr
• Hydraulic Fracturing and Public Policy Expert.
• UW-Eau Claire, Political Science and Geology.
• Authored 34 page study on fracking and studies on frac sand mining.
• Published in USA Today, The New York Post, The Hill, American Thinker, and more.
• Not a high-schooler.
Who Am I?
The Heartland Institute is a 32-year-old national nonprofit research organization, founded in 1984, dedicated to finding and promoting ideas that empower people.
Our mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.
Government Relations: We contacted elected officials more than one million times in 2015, with 6,127 of those contacts made in person. These are virtually all educational contacts – we do not lobby.
Donations like yours help fund additional educational efforts for state legislators and the general public.
Travel costs etc.
https://giving.heartland.org/
A picture is worth a thousand words, and when you’re explaining science to a general audience, it’s worth more than that. This presentation is heavy on pictures and light on text.
Be relatable. Use analogies.
People generally receive information in this manner: • 50 percent is your body language, are you confident,
shoulders slouched?• 25 percent, how you say it. (Vocal tonality)• 25 percent, what you actually say.
Large emotional component to all communication: • People have biases, and they tend to react to
something emotionally first, and then build their case afterward to fit their initial response.
• Anti-fracking groups know this, and message accordingly. –Use emotionally charged language.
• Appeal to the Rational Middle.
Most people don’t know where our energy comes from.
Knowledge is power, but it ain’t electricity.
Ask people:
“Imagine the battery icon on your phone represents the total energy consumed in the United States. If you could have your battery charged to any percentage, which percentage would you prefer?”
• Solar power provides .4 percent of all the energy we use.
.4%
• Wind power provides 1.7 percent of energy. • Together with solar, its about 2.1 percent.• Provides 4.4 percent of electricity.
1.7%
Burning wood accounts for 2.2 percent of our total energy consumption.
2.2%
35% 28%
• Hydro power provides about 2.5 percent of all of our energy needs.
• 6 percent of electricity generation. • How many minutes of battery life do you think this is?
2.5%
• Nuclear energy provides for 8.5 percent of our total energy needs. 19 percent of electricity.
8.5%
• Coal provides 18.2 percent of our total energy and 30 percent of all of the electricity generated in the United States.
18%
• Natural Gas provides 28 percent of our total energy, and 31 percent of electricity generation.
28%
• 35.4 percent of our total energy comes from oil, mostly to power cars, trucks, airplanes, and boats.
• Electricity from oil (less than 1 percent) comes mostly from back-up power generation.
35%
Wood
Hydro Solar
Wind
Biofuels
Oil
Natural Gas
CoalNuclear
35
28
18
8.5
2.52.2 2.1
1.70.5 0.4
0.2
Energy Production By Source
Oil
Natural Gas
Coal
Nuclear
Hydroelectric
Wood
Biofuels
Wind
Waste
Solar
Geothermal
The word “imagine” is a subtle command which makes people more willing to listen.
It turns to conversation around and goes on the offensive.
Renewables sound great in theory, but people would not like life without oil and natural gas.
Oil and gas are no longer unnecessary in their minds. They matter to them now.
• Oil Production fell dramatically from the high in the 1960’s and 1970’s. What do you think happened after 2008?
?
• Natural gas production fell by 25 percent from 2007 to 2013 in non-shale wells. • But how will we have the energy we need if we are running out of oil and natural
gas?
• Hydraulic fracturing has made the United States the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world.
• Oil production has grown by 80 percent, nearly doubling since 2008.
Hydraulic Fracturing
We produce more natural gas now than ever before.
56 percent of our total natural gas production comes from fracking and this will only expand over time.
Hydraulic Fracturing
Fracking is done by injecting water, sand, and chemical additives into shale rocks at high pressures to produce oil and natural gas.
We inject this mixture into the rock because the oil and gas is trapped in little pockets, or pores, in the rock, and the rocks must be cracked open for them to escape to the surface.
When people ask what fracking is, they are really asking this simple question:
Is it safe?
Porous Permeable
Unconventional Reservoir(Shale)
Conventional Reservoir(Sandstone)
Conventional reservoirs were pretty easy to extract oil from.
• Water• 2-4 million
gallons• Sand
• 4,100 to 5,000 tons of sand per well.
• Chemical Additives• Less than 1% of
HF fluids.
• Empire State Building is 1,454 feet.
• The average fractured well in the Marcellus Shale is 7,500 feet deep.
• About the equivalent of 5.25 Empire State Buildings.
• Some wells are even deeper.
• WATER CONTAMINATION • CHEMICALS• EARTHQUAKES • OH, MY!
• Yes! Everything has an impact. Even tourism can spread invasive species.
• Nothing is black and white, must weigh costs vs the benefits. No free lunches etc.
• Are the environmental risks manageable?
• Engineers, geologists, hydrologists, environmental quality consultants are good at their jobs.
• State regulators have oversight to enforce environmental protection.
• States are often more effective regulators due to extensive knowledge of local geology.
• Wind and solar systems kill birds.
• Well was drilled into a coal bed, a natural source of methane gas.
• We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. –U.S. EPA
• Anti-fracking activists show this, but this doesn’t happen.
• Hydraulic fracturing process does not contaminate groundwater.
• Rapid upward migration of HF fluids is not physically plausible (Flewelling and Sharma 2014).
• Well casings and cement can leak, this happens rarely. Actual numbers are a matter of debate. Some estimates say approximately .33 percent of wells leak, others say as high as 5 percent.
• No HF chemicals found in water.
• Several states have bolstered well casing requirements to increase environmental protections.
• No HF chemicals have been detected.
• Methane contamination is the most common kind of pollution.
• Noble gas tracers can detect what formation methane is from. Biogenic vs. thermogenic etc.
• At .33 percent, 50,000 wells would still mean 165 wells would fail.
• Disclosure of chemicals on Fracfocus.org in many states and on Bureau of Land Management land.
• Baker Hughes discloses their chemicals.
• The “surfactant” chemicals found in samples of fracking fluid collected in five states were no more toxic than substances commonly found in homes, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder.
• Chemicals found in the fluid samples were also commonly found in everyday products, from toothpaste to laxatives to detergent to ice cream.
• The authors caution that their results may not be applicable to all wells. Individual well operators use unique fracking fluid mixtures that may be modified depending on the underlying geology.
• “We have concluded that hydraulic fracturing is not a significant mechanism for inducing felt earthquakes. It is extremely unlikely that any of us will ever be able to feel an earthquake caused by fracking.”- Richard Davies Ph.D. Durham Earth Sciences.
• Wastewater disposal from the fracking process can cause minor tremors in certain circumstances.
• No injuries or property damage, but an issue that requires more study. Oklahoma Geological Survey. However, foundations and windows have been damaged in Texas.
• Estimates an average water use of 4 million gallons of water per well for oil and 5.1 million gallons per gas well.
• Shale gas reservoirs are often hydraulically fractured using slick water, a fluid type that requires a lot of water.
• Tight oil formations like the Bakken often use gel-based hydraulic fracturing treatment fluids, which generally contain lower amounts of water.
• 135 billion gallons of water for hydraulic fracturing activities in 2011- Shale gas-EID
• Total withdrawals in 2010 were 355,000 million gallons per day (355 billion gallons per day). –USGS
•Thermoelectric power, irrigation, and public supply account for 90 percent of the total withdrawals.
• Small impact per unit of energy recovered.
Historically, it could take up to 32 wells to extract the resources we extract with fracking.
• Burning natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of burning coal.
• Fracking has provided the U.S. with so much natural gas, that is has begun to replace coal for electricity generation because it is more affordable.
• U.S. has reduced it’s CO2 emissions more than any other country in the world.• Burning more natural gas, made possible by fracking, played a large role. • Low natural gas prices have incentivized some power plants to switch from
coal to natural gas.
Fracking makes us safer. It put’s Americans to work so we don’t
outsource our energy production.Low energy prices help the middle and
lower class the most.
•Average family saved about $675 on gasoline in 2015.
•Low natural gas prices have saved families anywhere from $181 to $432 per person,depending on geographic area.
•Imagine a single mother with two children living in Detroit. She will save $777 on natural gas alone, incorporating her savings at the pump, she could potentially save up to $1452 this year.
•Equivalent of working 225 hours at the Federal Minimum wage.
In case you’re having a big conference and want to pay big bucks for me to be the keynote speaker, you can reach me at:
Donate to Heartland! https://giving.heartland.org/
