YG Frack Report invites mini-fracking, acid-fracking, sneak-fracking
Whitehorse Star January 20, 2015 [with some copy edit updates]
Many of the harms are certain, as seen in the Horn Basin/Ft. Nelson area, but ignored by the report from the Yukon’s legislative committee on fracking. Some frack impact details are hard to predict.
Honourably, the committee did not come to an agreement that fracking can be done safely. That aside, the report lacks balance, objectivity and definitions of industry standards.
The word “risk” appears 74 times, the word “harm” seven times.
And harm components that are certainty beyond risk or potential, which is the experience and finding of fracked people, regions, as well as independent science, are never once recognized by the authors and summaries.
During three years of concern in the Yukon, elsewhere the earth-shattering destructive trend has increased from around 40,000 hp diesel pumps on a given multi-well pad to what is now often around 60,000 or 70,000 hp.
How would a compounding destructiveness and widening pathway chaos for methane and deep earth toxins help a future feasibility the report hopes for?
Good things such as water protection, First Nations rights and public consultations shouldn’t be bastardized and streamlined into frack cannon fodder. Supposedly safe underground “carpet bombing” (popular frack industry internal jargon) of entire regions is a corrupting impossibility.
The Yukon government, with the scope and the leading name it had given the committee, is following the example of the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). [and the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission]
The BCOGC and AER are famous for their preposterous dogma that fracking has supposedly never once polluted water.
There is no mention of false language issues in the report, and not even a hint of problem awareness what embedding of corruption into institutions means to the well-being of an entire province.
Even though the frack committee met with the AER during its 2013 Alberta frack tour, there is not a word on the malaise of fracking democracy, which is foremost on the minds of a growing number of citizens in Alberta and B.C.
The tone of the report seems influenced by the deceptive “go slow” message and slogan of the 2014 frack report by the Council of Canadian Academies that had charmed or bribed a few critics into conformity.
It equally marginalized the evidence that led Newfoundland, New Brunswick and others to moratoriums on fracking.
The confusion of the frack committee and its report completely ignored frackonomics harms such as diminishing returns, devastation of road and other infrastructures, inviting structural unemployment and public debt.
Northern Cross’s supposedly harmless exploration mini-fracking process in reality is regular process of the fewer than 10-year-old HVSFLL (High Volume Slick Water Fracking Long Lateral) brute force fracking standard.
Petroleum engineers define mini-fracking or DFIT (Diagnostic Fracture Injection Test) specifically as part of this late-edition, high-intensity fracking development.
There is good geology and petroleum economics evidence that the mini-fracking purpose is more fund-raising PR and false language acrobatics than geological necessity; Because fracking is a scatter gun.
It plays a role in the way of sneak fracking, especially to get started when it is not legal.
A lot of misleading communication, as in Monday’s frack committee report, tends to come from adopting industry talking points.
These often are not science or industry literature and standards-based summary, but advertisement agency language without any kind of integrity.
A long small-scale oil and gas history at Eagle Plains in the past had exhausted itself.
That, DFIT and the updated geological assessment from the July 2012 Yukon Geological Survey, Petrel & Robertson study says there is no proven, recoverable oil and gas in Yukon, except by brute-force fracking.
Depleted conventional gas fields or their reservoirs don’t go back into production more than one can drink coffee from an empty cup. Petrel & Robertson are also clear on that.
EFLO's approved Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board application described fracture acidizing (or, in industry lingo, acid fracking) as a design to break up southeast Yukon shale rock or source rock starting with the locations of the only two, and now defunct, gas wells in Yukon.
