I read the article, Tainted EPA Report on Fracking Blasted by Gas Co., and just had to confirm the details. Could the EPA have been this incompetent? Here is an excerpt from the Encana web site discussing the EPA report. I thought Encana’s discussion of the two deep monitoring wells the EPA drilled to be particularly funny.

Numerous discrepancies exist in the EPA’s approach, data and analysis. A few of these discrepancies are:

• The EPA report ignores well-known historical realities with respect to the Pavillion field’s unique geology and hydrology. (See BACKGROUNDER below)
• The EPA drilled two deep monitoring wells (depth range: 783 – 981 feet) into a natural gas reservoir and found components of natural gas, which is an entirely expected result. The results in the EPA deep wells are radically different than those in the domestic water wells (typically less than 300 feet deep), thereby showing no connection. Natural gas developers didn’t put the natural gas at the bottom of the EPA’s deep monitoring wells, nature did.
• There is unacceptable inconsistency between EPA labs’ analysis for numerous organic compounds reported to have been found in the EPA deep monitoring wells. Data is not repeatable and the sample sets used to develop these preliminary opinions are inadequate.
• Several of the man-made chemicals detected in the EPA deep wells have never been detected in any of the other wells sampled. They were, however, detected in many of the quality control (blank) samples – which are ultra purified water samples commonly used in testing to ensure no contamination from field sampling procedures. These two observations suggest a more likely connection to what it found is due to the problems associated with EPA methodology in the drilling and sampling of these two wells.
• The EPA’s reported results of all four phases of its domestic water well tests do not exceed federal or state drinking water quality standards for any constituent related to oil and gas development.

Encana – 2011 News Releases – Why Encana refutes U.S. EPA Pavillion groundwater report

I just finished installing some green technology that pays for itself. Yes, I installed insulation in the ceiling of our house. In my case half of our electrical usage occurs in the months of December, January, and February so adding insulation should have an immediate impact on our electrical bill. In my case I could easily improve the existing insulation(R-15) in the ceiling by laying with a larger insulation blanket(R-30) on top of it. This would get us pretty close to the recommended value for this area of R-49. Installing insulation is a low risk, low reward project that almost any home owner can do. What I mean by low reward is that you will see a slightly lower annual electrical bill. The good news is that you will see these benefits for many years.  As an example I plotted our energy usage using data off of our bills and heating degree days from http://www.degreedays.net/. I included the degree day data so that I could identify significant differences in weather from one year to the next. From a heating and cooling view, 2010 and 2011 are very similar. Although I am missing my bills from early 2010 and the December bill will not be available for another 30 days we can see the impact of the insulation I installed last spring on my electrical consumption where it dropped between 150 to 300 KW-Hours. This amounts to only a $14 to $29 drop in the monthly electrical bill. Its not much but every little bit counts.

Let the election year scandals begin!

 

A top congressional investigator said on Tuesday that he believes more companies that benefitted from the stimulus bill’s renewable energy loan guarantee program will go bankrupt before all allotted funds are spent.

 

Congressional Investigator: More Solar Bankruptcies to Come
Lachlan Markay
Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:49:16 GMT

My boss and I are engineers and share a passion for the technical side of green technology. This is a good resource page for basic solar and wind calculations.

This is a simplified, "lay persons’" overview of how solar energy systems calculations are made. The solar estimates provided via our solar estimators are much more complex and complete. This simplified overview is meant only to provide the reader with a very basic understanding of some solar energy system calculation methods.

http://www.solar-estimate.org/?page=solar-calculations

Last Monday I saw a show on ethanol, KET: Kentucky Tonight ”“ Ethanol, and learned several things. It was a round table and the participants were all closely aligned to agriculture and corn.

• Todd Barlow, executive director of the Kentucky Corn Growers Association
• Mark Haney, a Pulaski County fruit and cattle farmer and first vice president of the Kentucky Farm Bureau
• Stephen Bartlett, coordinator of Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville and a member of the Jefferson County chapter of the Community Farm Alliance
• Norman Harned, a lawyer, a Nelson County cattle farmer, and a member of the Kentucky Cattlemen’s Association

This is not the normal group of pundits you find on big media and their viewpoints were interesting. Some of the things I learned were:

1. 20% of the corn production is going to ethanol plants. This is the excess production that might have gone overseas or could have been used to maintain low corn prices for cattle fattening.
2. There are two products from the ethanol plants, ethanol and animal feed. The animal feed portion of the ethanol product mix is rarely mentioned by big media since it is a new market. This animal feed might reduce some of the price pressure in the chicken and hog feed markets.
3. The production of ethanol is probably reducing the prices we pay for gasoline prices by 10%. It is my guess that ethanol is a more cost effective octane enhancer than those base on crude oil. I am not sure what petroleum based chemical ethanol competes with since I think benzene and MTBE have been removed from the market due to carcinogenic issues.
4. No one was surprised that the price of corn and the other grains exploded. It seems that everyone there had been through previous booms and busts of the agriculture business. They had seen the symptoms of a boom before. The dramatic increase in corn prices affected most grains. The cost increases are related to the combined effects of ethanol, crude oil increases, inventories, and the weather. Everyone expects that there will be wide swings in prices until these price pressures sort themselves out.
5. Everyone was curious how the ethanol market will fare without government subsidies.
6. Everyone viewed corn as a transitional feedstock for ethanol production. There was a lot of speculation about new ethanol feedstocks and everyone thought that if the market lasted long enough it would sort out the winners from the losers. There was a lot of hope in celloustic ethanol using corn stalks, corn cobs, and other low value byproducts of farming. The primary ethanol feedstock source will probably vary by agricultural region. As an example sugar cane stalks would be a likely ethanol source in sugar growing regions.
7. Everyone was curious how we could lower fuel costs in ethanol production. Most of the questions on whether ethanol results in a positive or negative energy balance to society hinged on the cost of fuel used to harvest and transport ethanol feedstocks.This problem remains even if corn is not used as the primary feedstock.