Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Shale concerns

By Dave Anderson:



The Marcellus Shales are a rock formation that lies about a mile underneath central and northern Appalachia. These rocks contain a significant supply of natural gas that previously was uneconomical to mine but due to the combination of better bits and horizontal drilling, the price to drill for the gas has gone down significantly.



The Shales are important politically because Pennsylvania is depending on new revenue to balance the budget. The new revenue will come from a combination of extraction taxes and the lease of state land for drilling and exploration. Other local government entities, including the Allegheny County Airport Authority, have attempted to make money off of the Marcellus Shales through leasing and extraction agreements as well.



Not a bad idea, although with the current collapse in natural gas prices, projections that were developped in 2007 and 2008 are probably a bit optimistic. Not a surprise, but not a fatal flaw. However, Pro-publica is raising some questions about the long term profitability of the shales as waste products are coming up and out much nastier than anticipated in New York State.



As New York gears up for a massive expansion of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, state officials have made a potentially troubling discovery about the wastewater created by the process: It's radioactive. And they have yet to say how they'll deal with it.


The information comes from New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, which analyzed 13 samples of wastewater brought thousands of feet to the surface from drilling and found that they contain levels of radium-226, a derivative of uranium, as high as 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for people to drink.

The radium and radon levels discussed in the article are mainly found in the waste water that is generated from fracking (fracturing) the rocks to release the natural gas. If the waste water is treated or reinjected, the danger is minimized . However Pennsylvania has had problems with fracking water in Marcellus Shales exploration and exploitation. Forbes has more from earlier ths fall:


Last week the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection shut down some operations of natural gas driller Cabot Oil & Gas after 8,000 gallons of toxic chemicals were spilled on the ground and into a creek in Susquehanna County....


And in the Marcellus basin, a shale rock formation that stretches across Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and West Virginia, usage is more like 100%. Without the high flow rates created by the frack, the gas wouldn't be economical to go after. With the fracks, geologists figure the Marcellus has more than 50 trillion cubic feet of gas, enough to meet all of U.S. needs for two years.


But can hydraulic fracturing be trusted? This wasn't Cabot's first fracking fracas. Pennsylvania's DEP cited the company last February for contaminating wells used for drinking near drill sites....



Wastewater treatment and releases have become a problem in the Mon Valley and Greene County portions of SW Pennsylvania. Will the Marcellus Shales natural gas produce a short term cash flow bump for the state but long term revenue drains as remediation for waste water and radiation gets shifted onto the state instead of the companies that potentially could externalize their pollutants.

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