Rystad Energy Cost Curve for Various Crude Oils Globally (1/12/2015)

From an Essay by S. Tom Bond, Lewis County, March 11, 2020

Energy is a key to production, transportation, comfort and many other things in our world. War is a profligate use of energy. Until the use of steam power and electricity, technology changed slowly. The citizens of ancient Babylon or Assyria could adapt easily to the technology of Great Brittan of George III or the Germany of Wilhelm II, at the time James Watt developed the first widely used steam engine.

Today, cheap energy is the most sought commodity on earth. It is the key to both industrial and military power. For the present, oil is the preferred source of energy, and who has petroleum reserves, and the lowest cost of getting it to market, is the winner. Looking for a comparison of the cost leads to Rystad Energy data presented in graphical form below:

NOTE: Pumping costs by nation are in green and the total costs including capital and transportation in grey:

Petroleum Production Costs ($/bbl) by Country Vary Widely

Theoretically, oil prices should be a function of supply and demand. However, geopolitics and environment are also important concerns. The combined OPEC countries produce more oil than the United States but the U. S. is the top-producing nation, as well as the top consuming nation.

The United States imported 9.10 million barrels a day in 2019, while exporting 8.57 mb/d giving net imports of 0.55 mb/d in 2019. The two principal nations importing U. S. oil are Mexico and Canada. They also export to the U. S. so in net we send 0.54 mb/d to Mexico and receive 3.41mb/d from Canada.

As of late 2019, only four nations produced fracked oil and gas, the United States, Canada, China and Argentina. Many nations have frackable reserves, but the abundant reserves of easy to get oil and the high environmental costs outweigh it for many. The money cost of fracking is substantially more, even when the law allows externalization of environmental and health costs. Externalized costs are a most contentious subject in America today, and in other nations. In places fracking has been banned because of this, and we won’t get into that further here.

As for the greater cost of fracking to drillers, that is hard to track down. Sites are larger. Rigs are larger. More pipe is needed because wells are deeper. More cement is needed, more water, a larger impoundment, plus larger, more powerful equipment is needed. Special, imported, sand is used to keep the cracks open so the product oil and gas will flow. Several times as much water is produced than product, andmust be disposed of. Endless lines of trucks are needed to supply materials and carry away wastes, and vast amounts of diesel fuel.

There is a fracking cost given in the Rystad Energy graphic above, but it may be unrealistic, “politically correct.” More reliable is the following:

Shale oil costs more than conventional oil to extract, ranging from a cost-per-barrel of production from as low as $40 to over $90 a barrel.

A final point we want to consider is geopolitics. The four nations with lowest cost production are, first, Saudi Arabia, which can kill a famous journalist living in the U. S., visiting Istanbul, and carry away his remains in a brief case (Khashoggi). He was considered less valuable than the $110 million arms sales to the Saudi’s. Then Iran, Iraq and Russia. No need to say anything to this audience about the United States geopolitical stance toward them.

Indonesia trades mostly with the Oriental countries. The U. S. is pretty openly fomenting an overthrow of the government of Venezuela which has the world’s largest known reserves of oil. Nigeria is a mess, essentially the oil companies there do as they please. Brazil is essentially a dictatorship on good terms with United States.

Control of oil and gas is one of the reasons for the United States big military, larger than the next ten nation’s militaries combined. Unsurprisingly, this huge U. S. military is also the world’s largest single user of oil. The United States was the first nation to drill for oil, and for generations exported its resources. The “easy stuff” is gone here. Now the US must resort to other methods to retain its power.

##############################

See also: Oil Price News: Saudi Arabia Aramco to Pump Record Crude in April – Bloomberg, March 10, 2020

Saudi Arabia escalated its oil price war with Russia on Tuesday, as its state-owned company pledged to supply a record 12.3 million barrels a day next month, a massive increase to flood the market.

The supply hike — more than 25% higher than last month’s production — puts Aramco above its maximum sustainable capacity, indicating that the kingdom is even tapping its strategic inventories to dump as much crude, on the market as quickly as possible.

Moscow responded within minutes, with Energy Minister Alexander Novak saying Russia had the ability to boost production by 500,000 barrels a day. That would put the country’s output potentially at 11.8 million barrels a day — also a record.

Queen Elizabeth seeks to stop spread of plastics

From an Article via Lazer Tecnologia, February 12, 2018

Queen Elizabeth has long expressed admiration for David Attenborough, an environmentalist with a track record of creating handsome, compelling movies about our planet.

Julian Kirby, campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “Blue Planet’s reach now extends to the Royal households which shows how much momentum is building behind the war on plastic pollution”. But it also explored the disastrous effects of waste on the world’s waters.

Queen Elizabeth II wants to live in a cleaner and greener environment.

After watching Attenborough’s BBC documentary “Blue Planet II” a year ago, Queen Elizabeth II spearheaded a campaign that requires the guests and organizers of royal events to not use straws and bottles. According to The Telegraph, straws will also be phased out of all public cafes inside the royal residences.

Water will be served from glass bottles in all meetings at the palaces. At all levels, there’s a strong desire to tackle this issue’.

‘Across the organisation, the Royal Household is committed to reducing its environmental impact, ‘ a Palace spokesman told the Telegraph.

Plastics and other detritus line the shore of the Thames Estuary on January 2, 2018 in Cliffe, Kent. Plastic pieces, including microplastics, also end up swallowed by fish – which then causes them to die. Prince Charles has delivered several speeches about damage to the oceans. In one recent talk, he warned of an “escalating ecological and human disaster” from refuse in the seas. Charles and Dame Ellen MacArthur teamed up to offer a million-dollar cash prize to anyone with a great idea for keeping garbage out of the ocean. Ten per cent of that ends up in the sea. There are also some predictions suggesting that plastic waste in the sea will outweigh the fishes by 2050.

The American Petroleum Institute has an "agenda"

The power of petroleum is supreme nationally and globally

Essay by S. Tom Bond, Lewis County, WV, July 3, 2017

Why does petroleum, oil and gas, have so much political power? Why are they able to buck the interests of the population as a whole, such as the advance of renewables? Why can they walk all over landowners to get what is good for the fossil fuel industries and threaten the future of the human race with global warming?

When steamships were invented, they revolutionized warfare. Being able to ignore the way the wind blows and its vagaries gave steamships a huge advantage over wind driven ships. Petroleum driven engines were smaller, lighter, more easily controlled and eliminated the horrible job of shoveling coal into the boiler. These engines were adaptable to moving war machines on land too; tanks, trucks, artillery, and so forth, too. Adequate petroleum became necessary to wage war.

Immediately, the European nations and the United Stares began to make claims overseas where there was oil. Some by staking colonies, some by adroit manipulation of favored parties in nations possessing oil, such as the Saudi Family in Arabia.

Originally, coal was labor intensive. Think how many miners there were in the days of pick and shovel mining. Labor efficiency improved fostered by the labor movement. Coal operators from the days of Matewan to Don Blankinship and Robert Murray, have been able to make remarkable concentrations of wealth with the help of their workers. Today, however, there are more florists in the U. S. than miners! We now have less than 70,000 miners, less than 16,000 of which were involved in extraction, 0.019 percent of the nations work force, according to the Washington Post.

The same story plan applies to oil and gas. Originally rigs were built by hand, engine blocks were hauled by horses and site preparation was done by pick and shovel. Also petroleum has two extra layers of workers compared to coal or gas, those who refine the raw material into salable products and the low paid filling station workers (which makes up half the industry claim as jobs it produces). The total direct oil and gas job figure is somewhat less than 2 million, according to the Center for American Progress.

Several companies are working on methods to drill wells with an operator and one or more robots, which will further reduce the need for workers. So petroleum creates great wealth, but mostly, and increasingly, for the wealthy. This translates into political power in our system, where candidates must raise money for publicity. To coin a phrase, they go where the deep pockets are. The accumulated wealth also creates goodwill with investors and banks, which increases petroleum’s power.

The United States has been described as ”an oil company with an army.” The country exported oil for many decades when oil use first began, and it quickly moved to control other nations oil, as demand increased and our reserves were exhausted. The “oil company with an army” bit refers to these manipulations and the size of our military, which is famously the largest in the world, larger than the next ten nations combined (or all the other nation’s military, depending on what your read).

Our military takes over half the disposable budget for the U. S. We can’t afford to maintain and improve the infrastructure (the locks and dams that are necessary for the export of our agriculture, one of our most reliable exports, the bridges on our highways, the water systems of our cities and towns, and such). We can’t afford top quality secondary schools (but tiny Finland can). Our Internet is not top level (South Korea’s is). We can’t afford inexpensive health care for our people. The money goes to the huge military with 10 or so aircraft carrier battle groups and 800 installations in 70 countries. For comparison, Britain, France and Russia have 30 overseas installations between them. Big military isn’t the only source of U. S. financial problems, of course. See here.

Petroleum people work very hard to make us think there is no viable alternative, that oil and gas will be the mainstay for the indefinite future. I read this morning that Tesla has a backlog of 400,000 orders for it’s Model 3 at $35,000 each, and production is just now starting this summer. People bought them on faith. Tesla is riding high on the future.

How are renewables doing? Here is a quote from Adam Vaughan, Environment Editor of the Guardian newspaper:

Last year, for the first time, renewable energy accounted for more than half of new power generation worldwide…. China is expected to build more than twice that global amount in the next five years, driven by its thirst for more electric power capacity, public anxiety over air pollution and the need to fulfil its climate change pledges.

The world is changing, and Europe is no longer the big driver of green energy growth that it once was. “In the next five years, the People’s Republic of China and India alone will account for almost half of global renewable capacity additions,” says the IEA in a new report.

…. renewables are forecast to provide just over a quarter of the world’s electricity by 2021….

The accumulated wealth of the petroleum industry is used in another way: advertising and public image. You can’t fail to be impressed by all the advertisements. Night after night on TV, in the newspapers, radio, everywhere. Ads can be slanted to what ever they want; including pipelines and the idea the petroleum is the only alternative (see illustration). This income for the media makes the individual newspapers, radio stations and TV stations avoid stories that might offend petroleum companies and thus cause them to withhold advertising revenue.

One use for petroleum is largely ignored, its use in making plastics. The world is polluted with diverse present day plastics. Eight million tons of plastics are dumped in the oceans every year. Plastic is cheap and versatile, even the world’s poor can use it. It clutters beaches. Tiny pieces in the oceans are ingested by water living creatures, poisoning both fish and the creatures that they feed on.

The petroleum produced plastics are not easily digested by microorganisms, like biological materials. It damages essential life services. There is a desperate need for plastics that decompose to prevent this problem. This will mean starting with plant based materials and some new chemistry, which the industry fears.

It is easy to conceive of renewables for electrical generation – in fact, that is a technology undergoing rapid improvement. Electrical cars are here and will grow by market forces. Even an electrical semi-truck has been announced. Nikola has announced $2.3 billion of preorders for a 2,000 HP semi-truck, 7,000 paid reservations for the $375,000, to be unveiled December 2.

However there seems to be a hard core of machines that will need petroleum. They include earthmovers, farm equipment, and significantly, war machines. They involve huge energy needs and the supporting infrastructure for electricity driven machines is not available everywhere, nor portable.

Large ships, or submarines for under sea travel, where there is no air, now can use nuclear power, perhaps more could be adapted to such power. But small ships, tanks, mobile artillery, armored personnel carriers, overland trucks and the like cannot be easily adapted to electrical power.

In 2016 the U. S. imported 10.1 million barrels of oil a day from about 70 countries. We export 5.19 million barrels, mostly refined products. The net for our use is 4.87 million barrels a day. Do you suppose if we did not need imports, and other nations did not need our exports, we could reduce the military and concentrate our nation’s wealth on infrastructure as well as treating our ill and aged citizens with greater decency? Do you suppose we could do our share to avoid the worst of global warming and have a more civil place for people to live?

>>> Tom Bond is a retired professor of chemistry and resident farmer near Jane Lew in central West Virginia.

Al Gore presents TED Talk 2016

The Case for Optimism on Climate Change (TED Talk 2016)

From the Presentation by Al Gore Chairman, Generation Investment Management and The Climate Reality Project, February 25, 2016

Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in TEDTalks 2016 where I discussed many of the challenges presented by the climate crisis. But a powerful shift has been taking place, and it is clear that we will ultimately prevail. Here’s why:

There are now only three questions we have to answer about climate change and our future.

1. MUST we change?
Each day we spew 110 million tons of heat-trapping global warming pollution into the very thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet, using it as an open sewer for the gaseous waste of our industrial civilization as it is presently organized. The massive buildup of all that man-made global warming pollution is trapping as much extra heat energy every day as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours.

That, in turn, is disrupting the hydrological cycle, evaporating much more water vapor from the oceans, leading to stronger storms, more extreme floods, deeper and longer droughts, among other climate-related problems. Fourteen of the 15 hottest years ever measured have been in this young century. The hottest of all was last year. So YES, we must change!

2. CAN we change? And the answer, fortunately, is now YES!
We’re seeing a continuing sharp, exponential decline in the cost of renewable energy, energy efficiency, batteries and storage  —  and the spread of sustainable agriculture and forestry  –  giving nations around the world a historic opportunity to embrace a sustainable future, based on a low carbon, hyper-efficient economy.

Indeed, in many parts of the world, renewable energy is already cheaper than that of fossil fuels  —  and in many developing regions of the world, renewable energy is leapfrogging fossil fuels altogether  —  the same way mobile phones leap-frogged landline phones. And these dramatic cost reductions are continuing!

3. WILL we change?
While the answer to this question is up to all of us, the fact is that we already are beginning to change dramatically!

In December, 195 nations reached a historic agreement in Paris, which exceeded the highest end of the range of expectations. And the Paris Agreement is just the most recent example of our willingness to act. Much more change is needed, of course, but one of the binding provisions of the Paris Agreement requires five-year transparent reviews of the action plans put forward by every nation, and the first will begin in less than two years, so now is the time to build the momentum for the actions needed.

Businesses and investors are already moving. And with the continuing cost-down curves for renewable energy, efficiency and energy storage, it will get easier year by year to win this historic struggle.

There are many, many more examples of powerful responses to this moral challenge. They all give me confidence that we are going to win this.

It matters a lot how quickly we win, and some still doubt that we have the will to act on climate, but please remember that the will to act is itself a renewable resource.

I hope you will take the time to watch the 20-minute video embedded above. And I hope that you will personally take action to “become the change we need to see in the world.”

4-H energy education project(s)

The Importance of Getting Control of Energy Supplies

By S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

In the long history of civilization, some written records go back ten thousand years or so. For most people it has been almost pure calamity. A few people living isolated lives in the forest had to deal with wild animals, but people living in developed areas had to deal with human predators: both bandits and the rapacious armies traveling through; taxes to support luxury-loving aristocrats; marginal food production and failed crops. And a host of other evils most people today don’t even think about.

It seems, our time line today tends to be two or three years past and only about as far into the future. Our immediate ancestors in the United States had to take care of themselves and thus thought about the future for themselves and their heirs, taking lessons from the past. Today productive resources are assiduously gathered by a few people, and the rest depend on “jobs,” if they can find one.

Few today value the virtues of the American past, saving, efficiency, hard work, planning, etc. The job seekers want to enjoy life, and those concerned with acquisition of wealth are only interested in ever higher rates of return. Neither of these rarely think about one hundred years from now, or even ten. The world is becoming highly unstable again.

Our world is faced with a number of problems that are going to be “hard to get a handle on.” Perhaps the first among them is our dependence on energy and how we get it. You can get up a good argument that atomic weapons deserve first place, or population pressure, or that soil loss and contamination deserve first, but these all trace back to the need for energy.

Energy now comes from two reactions every eighth grader can understand. C + O2 = CO2 and 4 H + O2 = 2 H2O. The problem is two fold. First, the mineral sources of hydrocarbons, which supply the carbon and hydrogen we use for energy, are getting more difficult to obtain because what is left is further underground and more tightly held. “The easy stuff is gone,” they say. More technology and risk are required, and the return from the materials used and energy spent is less – it’s still available, but the investment is greater for the same energy return.

Second is the carbon dioxide produced. The water produced drops out of the atmosphere when it gets cool enough to condense, but the carbon dioxide does not. The atmosphere is huge, but finite. Until this generation it was large enough to be considered an infinite dump, but we are now putting out so much the atmosphere is being measurably affected, and scientists who have studied it have learned it is enough to cause world-wide heating, because carbon dioxide causes the earth to retain heat energy coming from the sun, what is called “the greenhouse effect.”

According to one source, the market capitalization of all the companies in all the sectors of the petroleum business in the United States was $4.2 trillion, 18.6% of the total market capitalization of all the publically traded, non-financial companies as of May 30, 2008. Big business indeed. And the government subsidies are equally impressive. Fuel companies are very politically powerful. 

According to an organization known as The Price of Oil (which is concerned with all fossil fuels), “Over $114 million has been paid by the oil, gas and coal industries over the last decade to buy access and influence in Congress. And the 111th Congress is turning out to be the dirtiest yet. … energy companies are reaping huge returns on their investments in Congress, to the tune of billions of dollars in subsidies each year. All while they are expanding into ever more extreme areas using unsafe tactics.”

The precautionary principle has disappeared like dew when the sun comes up. In 1998 the principle was defined thus: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health
or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” Where energy is concerned that has been pushed aside in the rush for economic advantage, personal wealth, and the desire for our nation to be “King of the Mountain Top,” a game we played as children.

The leaders knew there would be danger, else no need for the exemptions in the 2005 Energy Act. The $114 million mentioned above has been spent getting subsides and protection against action by aggrieved Americans. Further billions have been spent in public relations trying to burry all the complaints and the hundreds of organizations which have arisen to represent the aggrieved. The petroleum advertisements intended to suppress opposition appear everywhere.

Newspapers are bought with advertising. Universities are bought with research funds, primarily by suppressing adverse opinion and research. I heard recently one state Extension Service is subjecting 4-H campers to a fracking indoctrination in return for financial support for the camp! Propaganda for early teenagers! Petroleum and gas companies are not alone, but may be more creative than coal playing this game.

So how to insert reality into this real-life script? Just as the heat will be turned up as the earth warms and the pollution will get worse as fracking continues, the public view is changing, slowly. We need to keep working, because it is very important that energy come under control for the good of all sooner rather than later.

The Energy Alternatives: Extreme Petroleum III

By S. Thomas Bond, Lewis County, WV

PART VII

We will consider hypothetical possibilities here, then shale drilling and finally have some concluding remarks about the overall long-range situation with regard to petroleum.

First, methane clathrates which are also called methane hydrates. Vast amounts of clathrates exist, they are both a hazard of global warming and a possible source of methane (natural gas). There are several of these “cage compounds.” They aren’t really compounds in the sense that all atoms are bound together by chemical bonds, but rather are “cages” of water molecules surrounding methane, which acts as a template. They form at low temperatures, just above freezing, and under pressure. The most common one has 4 methane molecules trapped in 23 water molecules.

They are found in nature in Arctic soil, on the sea bed and in sediments below. They are also in fresh water ponds, lakes and streams. A great worry is that warming of the Arctic could decompose a large amount of the clathrates in the environment there, and speed up the process of global warming, since methane is about 20-25 times as bad about retaining the reflected heat from the sun as carbon dioxide.

Potentially, they could be harvested by recovery from say, the sea bed. A Japanese firm is working on a technology to do that.

PART VIII

Making ethanol for fuel from corn is ridiculous. The EROEI is in the vicinity of 1:1, since removal of water from the ferment is energy intensive. Ethanol causes difficulty and rapid aging with engines, particularly in a marine environment. It has less energy content than petroleum, so it is little more than a diluent. It could better be used as food.

Using sugar cane and fermenting it to ethanol is somewhat better, with significantly higher EROEI. But again, it is competing with food; and with a growing population, that is probably the better use. Both corn and cane require fertilizer for good yield, so they compete with food in that way, too.

Burning fire wood is a natural where it is available. It is relatively cheap, it involves little input fuel except for transportation, but much hard labor. Getting the wood really dry, and use of advanced stoves improves the heat produced and reduces the pollution. EROEI is about 30:1, on the average.

PART IX

Most of the readers of this article will be familiar with natural gas from shale drilling. They know that it is investment driven; that is, the big money is made from selling investments and financing, while actual production is the poor cousin.

This results in a huge advertising effort, endless lobbying and influencing of political candidates to get favorable legislation along with a minimum of enforcement. It involves aggressive legal action against opponents, rigid company and industry organization with frequent changes of party line. Subcontractors love the generous cash flow. Ultimately the program results in tough treatment of every one they come in contact with, including labor, landowners and neighbors.

The reader knows about the shale gas economic bubble, which has attracted investment from all over the world. There are big deals, frequent changes in estimates of available gas, and low recovery of the resource — leaving 90% in the ground. He/she knows about the rapid decline of shale gas wells, where most production is in two years with the end of economic utility in seven or eight years.

This means constant drilling is necessary to maintain production. The reader knows about technological problems with the method, such things as spoiling aquifers, surface pollution, air pollution and how these are ignored by regulatory agencies, but are visible to scientists. And everyone knows about the 200 or more organizations trying to get reasonable regulation or a moratorium.

So there isn’t much the author can say that is new. Perhaps you don’t know the reported ERORI is about 30:1. But, again, maybe that is a calculation by the industry that neglects such things as road repairs, personal trips by workers and supervisors (more than a good job at home), laying pipelines and a lifetime of checking them, compressor stations and who knows what else that distinguishes the industry.

PART X

The point of this article is to point out the risks and investments and costs needed to get what could be called “the hard stuff,” a name for what’s around when the “easy stuff” is gone; sometimes it is said the “the low-hanging fruit” is collected easily.

The time has come to invest more thought in what we are doing. Basically, the extraction tracks described above are enabled by the dispersed nature of big business. Tradition, along with previous investment in materials and skills guide doing the same things again and again. These tracks involve continuation of the past, not change suitable for the future.

It is time to be working on technology for the future. It is time to get money to those who are thinking about something different. Of course there will be mistakes in the near term by choosing an innovative path. But an innovative path is the only way out of the woods.

It is absolutely clear where we are going, taking bigger and bigger risks and destroying more and more of the earth’s surface so it does not produce environmental benefits that we have taken for granted in the past. We are on a straight and wide path to disaster.

The problem is how to get this across to the general public when the short term profit comes from a head long plunge to doom.

THE END

Commentary: On Becoming an Energy Citizen?

By S. Thomas Bond, Citizen Farmer, Citizen Chemist, and Citizen Voter

There’s a lot of twisted stuff going on this election time. One of the most curious is something called Energy Citizens 2012. You get a mailer from the American Petroleum Institute which is an unembarrassed plug for burning hydrocarbons, with an oil well and a couple of the oversize pickups that characterize the workers in that business on the front.

You can’t see the “oilfield trash and proud of it” on the back windshields or smell the oil, but you know they’re there. The front of the oversize postcard also contains several very optimistic claims for the importance of hydrocarbon burning.

The back says “IT’S TIME TO CHOOSE – BUT FIRST MAKE SURE YOU CAST A VOTE FOR ENERGY. The candidates’ position on energy is important. When it comes to jobs, security and economic growth, A VOTE FOR ENERGY HOLDS THE KEY. To find out how, visit energycitizens2012.org.”

So you turn to your computer, click up “energycitizens2012.org”, and what comes up?  Information? Naa, “JOIN THE MOVEMENT – BECOME AN ENERGY CITIZEN,” is what you get.

The reader is asked to pledge to vote for: (1)  American Energy Security, (2)  Sensible Regulations on Oil and Gas,  (3)  The Keystone XL Pipeline, and (4)  U. S. Energy Jobs.

And then you are asked to sign your identifying information. No explanation of what measures you will be supporting is given, none at all. No candidates are named. No electoral races are mentioned, no information about people who will be using your name (and doubtless asking you for money) and no careful explanation of objectives. Over it all waves the American flag, suggesting blind conformity to “the movement” is a virtue.

It has been suggested this year that it might be a good idea if employers could tell employees which candidate to vote for. This is a little bit further beyond that – the candidates and parties are immaterial, you are to submit yourself to what is essentially an economic interest. The folks at the top of an industry are given the right to decide how to regulate not only themselves, but also society, ostensibly for your benefit.

For the voting individual, this is an immense leap of faith, to let leaders in a single industry decide for all. Or would it really be a leap of hopeful ignorance?

Advertising done by the “fracking” industry is ridiculous. It is everywhere: newspapers, all kinds of magazines, internet. Everywhere. The truth is, no corporation exists without legislation. Business on a small scale can be done the libertarian way, but all corporations have to have favorable legislation.

What the shale drilling industry fears the most is loss of legal privilege. The lax regulation, favorable legislation, the tax exemptions are at risk as investors and the public come to realize how they operate. They can’t deal with the details in public discussion. They have to have a supporting political force, and hence the manipulation of public opinion.

It would be very interesting to see what fraction of the shale drilling industry’s investments is in politics and public relations. It might shake some investors, too.

>>> S. Thomas Bond operates a 500 acre cattle farm near Jane Lew in Lewis County, WV. He is a retired teacher of chemistry at both the high school and college level. And, he has been active in the Guardians of the West Fork and the Monongahela Area Watersheds Compact. <<<