By MANDY SMITHBERGER
Some other key takeaways from documents unearthed by The New York Times that suggest the Energy Information Administration (EIA) is relying too heavily on industry for analysis on natural gas reserves:
- EIA researchers complained that they were being pressured by management to water down environmental and health issues that would be "'inflammatory' towards industry." "Maybe we just frac them," the researcher wrote. "I'm wondering what the eff I am really here for if they already have their own versions of the 'unbiased, objective, EIA Truth.'"
- There's a real danger in extrapolating, as industry does, that the success of a few wells will apply uniformly to others, especially since there is data suggesting that there is a wide disparity in these wells across large areas.
- At this point, we don't know how long wells will last, or how much gas it will yield.
- Determining profitability, and thus predicting future production, is challenging for the government due to a lack of public knowledge about the costs of production. What is known, however, suggests that costs are rising faster than reserves.
- Measuring inputs versus outcomes, it's misleading to think that the rise in natural gas liquid production is due to the richness of the fields—it's mostly due to an increase in shale gas drilling.
- There's also an extensive analysis of how new SEC rules changed how companies could report their reserves. While the rule change largely increased the risk of over reporting, the rule did include provisions that would limit what could be reported.
All these findings are particularly troublesome when you consider that there are also concerns about the transparency and independence of the Energy Department's advisory committee on this issue.
Mandy Smithberger is a POGO Investigator.
There should be deep concern that the DOE Subcommittee on fracking will make best practice recommendations that are already very well known but nearly never followed:
1. Because the states that do most of the regulating do a lousy job of monitoring and enforcing. If they did a better job that would take some money, probably from the energy industry and that would cut into profits, and ...well you know the rest.
2. The Subcommittee is to make recommendations to make fracking safer.
The fatal dilema is that we do not know how safe or unsafe it is now. Thus, there can be no monitoring of safety efforts if the baseline is unknown.
The Subcommittee is nearly a joke and their hollow recommendations can be well predicted in advance. Sigh, another $700,000 of taxpayer money down the fossil fuel rathole.
Stanley R Scobie, Ph.D., Binghamton, NY
Posted by: stan scobie | Jun 27, 2011 at 08:11 PM