Fracking Foes Cringe as Unions Back Drilling Boom

[Nuclear Unicorn]

Fracking Foes Cringe as Unions Back Drilling Boom

PITTSBURGH April 20, 2014 (AP)

By KEVIN BEGOS Associated Press

After early complaints that out-of-state firms got the most jobs, some local construction trade workers and union members in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia say they're now benefiting in a big way from the Marcellus and Utica Shale oil and gas boom.

That vocal support from blue-collar workers complicates efforts by environmentalists to limit the drilling process known as fracking.

"The shale became a lifesaver and a lifeline for a lot of working families," said Dennis Martire, the mid-Atlantic regional manager for the Laborers' International Union, or LIUNA, which represents workers in numerous construction trades.

Martire said that as huge quantities of natural gas were extracted from the vast shale reserves over the last five years, union work on large pipeline jobs in Pennsylvania and West Virginia has increased significantly. In 2008, LIUNA members worked about 400,000 hours on such jobs; by 2012, that had risen to 5.7 million hours.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fracking-foes-cringe-unions-back-drilling-boom-23399494

The article is beyond a little lop-sided. It spends nearly a dozen and a half paragraphs talking about increased worker hours and wages and even speaks to greater job satisfaction ("satis-frack-tion"?) but only when it gets to the very end of the article does it offer 2 weak-sauce paragraphs about concerns from an environmental advocate. In fact, the advocate seems portrayed as pouty, sour-grapey and impotent; a hapless bystander watching as others stroll ahead towards prosperity and happiness.

Call me suspicious but I think the new PR front in favor of fracking will move away from "energy independence" and migrate towards workers earning higher pay. It's clever, you have to give it that much, and it could create a schism between labor and environmental groups. After all, pay is immediate while environmental concerns are future abstractions.

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. Energy independence isn't happening, anyway

shale oil production tends to peak very rapidly and decline, here is the decline curve for wells in the Bakken shale, for instance:



Conventional oil production probably peaked in 2005:

Production of crude oil increased along with demand from 1988 to 2005. But then something changed. Production has been roughly constant for the past seven years, despite an increase in price of around 15% per year (at Brent crude (London) prices) from about US$15 per barrel in 1998 to more than $140 per barrel in 2008 (see ‘Oil production hits a ceiling’). The price still reflects demand: it declined to about $35 per barrel in 2009 thanks to the 2008–09 recession, and recovered along with the upturn in the global economy to $120 per barrel before declining to its value today of $111. But the supply chain has been unable to keep pace with rising demand and prices.

(snip)

Production at existing oil fields around the world is declining at rates of about 4.5% (ref. 4) to 6.7% per year5. Only by adding in production from new wells is overall global production holding steady. In 2005, global production of regular crude oil reached about 72 million barrels per day. From then on, production capacity seems to have hit a ceiling at 75 million barrels per day. A plot of prices against production from 1998 to today2 shows this dramatic transition, from a time when supply could respond elastically to rising prices caused by increased demand, to when it could not (see ‘Phase shift’). As a result, prices swing wildly in response to small changes in demand.

We are not running out of oil, but we are running out of oil that can be produced easily and cheaply. The US Energy Information Administration optimistically projects a 30% increase in oil production between now and 2030 (ref. 2). All of that increase is in the form of unidentified projects — in other words, oil yet to be discovered. Even if production at existing fields miraculously stopped declining, such an increase would require 22 million barrels per day of new oil production by 2030.
If realistic declines of 5% per year continue, we would need new fields yielding more than 64 million barrels per day — roughly equivalent to today’s total production. In our view, this is very unlikely to happen.

Non-conventional oil won’t make up the difference. Production of oil derived from Canada’s tar sands — sometimes called the
‘oil junkie’s last fix’ — is expected to reach just 4.7 million barrels per day by 2035 (ref. 6). Production from Venezuela’s tar sands is currently less than 2 million barrels per day7, with little prospect of a dramatic increase.

http://www.washington.edu/research/.SITEPARTS/.documents/.or/Nature_Comment_01_26_2012.pdf

Some estimates I've seen indicate that we could see the crossover point when unconventional production from shale and tar sands is no longer sufficient to make up the decline in conventional production as soon as next year.

[Arkana]

2. Why is this a shock?

Unions and the environmental lobby rarely see eye-to-eye on this. Unions see jobs, regardless of environmental impact. It's self-serving, yes, but I can at least understand where they're coming from, even if I'm with the environmental lobby on this.

[madville]

3. I would want my union leadership removed

If they didn't advocate for the union's best interests, which happen to be construction/pipeline/drilling jobs in this case.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

4. The shocking part is now we have proof of the other side's awareness of the split and

proof they are working to drive a wedge through 2 bedrock Democratic constituencies.

[theboss]

5. This tension has always existed

I grew up in West Virginia. When the unions had power in WV, PA, and OH, they crushed the environmentalists. The best Democratic politicians knew how to keep some balance between the two groups, while recognizing that the votes and money were on Labor's side.

Unions are in decline in all three states and those old-time politicians are mostly dead. So, you have the power balance being completely different and no one really to keep the peace.

Union members are always going to go for jobs over everything else. Because, without jobs, there is no union.