Is this what Canada's petro-slag heap, a.k.a. Alberta, has coming?
The Tyee's fossil fuel writer and author, Andrew Nikiforuk, offers a look at the ecological price being exacted on the population of west Texas.
New radar satellite imagery shows that intense oil and gas activity has destabilized the geology of a 10,000-sq.-kilometre area in west Texas causing the ground to heave and sink dramatically.
“If we do not mitigate the possible geohazards with continuous monitoring of surface deformation,” warned researchers, “we can expect one or more possible outcomes” including damage to roads, railroads and dams, groundwater pollution, more earthquake activity and “potential threat to residents in surrounding communities.”
Geophysicists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, took a hard look at the Permian Basin where companies such as Calgary-based Encana are now furiously fracking for light oil.
The Permian is one of the continent’s oldest oil fields, with more than 30 billion barrels of oil pulled out of the ground over the last 100 years.
...
With the advent of hydraulic fracturing, west Texas has experienced “unprecedented increases” in seismic activity in the last five to six years, as have Alberta and B.C.
The study, published in Nature, also reported that the ground was sinking by two to 10 centimetres around active, abandoned and orphaned wells.
“This region of Texas has been punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s, and our findings associate that activity with ground movement,” explained Jin-Woo Kim, a research scientist at the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU.
Researchers also found that in some areas oil and gas activity had created sinkholes by introducing freshwater to salt formations which caused them to dissolve.
Similar issues have plagued oilsands development near Fort McMurray where the melting of salt formations under bitumen deposits has created sinkholes and other geohazards and cracked the cap rock.Follow the link. Read the article. I'm done.
10 comments:
After the oil crazies wreck Alberta's terrain, they can always move to BC.
Privatize the profits, socialize the cost.
One would think that places like Britannia Beach Mines would have caused lessons to be learned, but no.
The Gold Rush Mentality is buried deep into the Canadian psyche.
Yes, resource exploration and extraction is embedded in our "drawers of water, hewers of wood" psyche.
Resource extraction and exploration can be done, both environmentally, socially consiously, and modestly profitably.
In the coming decades, a lot of the First Nations Corporations are going to show us how.
http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/insight-why-canada-is-the-next-frontier-for-shale-oil
This possibly affected Christy Horgans decision on the gas exports.
TB
http://www.businessinsider.com/canadas-oil-exports-are-dead-without-us-shale-production-2016-12
Horgan needs the NE gas fields to supply Alberta tar sands with diluent!
TB
https://www.google.ca/amp/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4583370
"The Upper Nicola Band is hoping to build the largest solar farm in the province on its land in the southern Interior.
The community has partnered with Fortis BC to build a solar farm with 56,000 modules, each containing 72 solar cells, on the Quilchena reserve near Merritt, B.C. Fortis says the project will cost an estimated $30 million. "
Why Building the Trans Mountain Pipeline Will Increase Gas Prices in B.C.
https://www.desmog.ca/2018/03/28/why-building-trans-mountain-pipeline-will-increase-gas-prices-b-c
Basically, BC gas drivers will pay for the pipeline.
Things are about to be shaken up -- catastrophically.
What Toby and Owen says is true.
When the pipeline is built and fuel prices increase the voter will be persuaded to lay the blame at the feet of the NDP.
And thus the cycle continues!!
Fuck up the Province ( taxpayer) lose an election or two so that the socially conscience can fix the mess thereby making themselves unpopular and viola! the greedy bastards club are back in power!
At the next election or so; the taxpayer will remember the carbon taxes but not the gouging of the oil companies!!
TB
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