The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

Exxon’s Tillerson Presents Merger Case to Congress

that was an interesting article. kind of strange that it was from a Dallas newspaper. With throw-away lines like "Exxon opposes the cap and trade system approved by the House in June, Tillerson said. But Exxon, which has funded groups that deny global warming, recognizes that industrial emissions contribute to climate change, he said." I'm guessing it's the local liberal newspaper.

back on point. I suspect that the service companies have a stake, potentially larger than the production companies, in disclosing the composition of the fluids used in hydro-frac'ing. Some of the chemicals used are proprietary. Maybe congress should ask Coca-Cola to turn over its secret recipe. I wouldn't be surprised if there are aromatic compounds in Coke, too. Articles like the posted one tend to include half-truths meant to scare people who don't understand the difference between benzene and aromatic molecules which by definition contain benzene rings.

Hydro-frac'ing is getting a lot of attention because of a variety of factors: close proximity of natural gas operations to large populations not accustomed to such things and generally biased against such companies; technical ignorance of the population combined with fear, manipulation of the fear and ignorance by politically motivated groups who already have the ear of the local populations; noise and inconvenience caused by development of the resource; subtantive unknowns regarding how and why hydrofrac'ing works and what happens to much of the injected water which exacerbate the fears of the technical illiterati, etc. Underlying, the first two of those reasons is a naive opinion held by a non-trivial part of the population that the country's energy needs can be met without hydrocarbon fuels.