Titans of Industry category archive

No doubt the Florida state government will attempt to ban the ban, because frack you.

Spill it again, harder! Harder!

The company that owns the pipeline involved in Tuesday’s major oil spill in Santa Barbara has had 175 “spill incidents” nationwide since 2006, including 11 in California, according to a Center for Biological Diversity analysis of federal documents.

The legacy of Buccaneer Petroleum continues to expand.

In a new study, a team of scientists says there’s a definite link between the massive BP oil spill in 2010 and a record number of dolphin deaths along the northern Gulf of Mexico.

The scientists said large numbers of dead bottlenose dolphins found stranded along shores since the spill suffered from lung and adrenal lesions caused by swimming in oil-contaminated seas.

Via Job’s Anger.

It’s happened again.

A train that derailed and caught fire early Wednesday in rural North Dakota was hauling crude from the state’s oil patch, raising questions about whether new state standards intended to reduce the volatility of such shipments are sufficient.

The six tank cars that exploded into flames were a model slated to be phased out or retrofitted by 2020 under a federal rule announced last week.

Click for a larger image.

Wayne Curtis argues that to be engulfed is the destiny of New Orleans, unless something is done soon.

And yet, the Gulf is getting closer every day. The wetlands are steadily eroding and being subsumed by rising water; by the time kids born today graduate from college and get jobs, there’s a chance the Gulf will be lapping at the city’s levees. Louisiana has lost more than a million acres of coastland since the 1930s, and looks on track to lose a million more.

This is arguably the largest, slowest, manmade disaster in human history. It takes real enterprise to erase a million acres. Three hundred years of building levees to contain the river starved the marshes of floodwaters and silt. Global warming caused the Gulf to rise. And rampant oil and gas exploration carved out a chessboard of canals for drilling and navigation, which has led to saltwater intrusion destroying freshwater marshes.

That something seems unlikely to be done. Follow the link to read of the complicity of the Louisiana state government and the petroleum industry in the slow drowning of a city.

Fracking rocks your world.

In 84 days from November 2013 to January 2014, the area around Azle, Texas, shook with 27 magnitude 2 or greater earthquakes, while scientists at Southern Methodist University and the U.S. Geological Survey monitored the shaking. It’s an area that had no recorded quakes for 150 years on faults that “have been inactive for hundreds of millions of years,” said SMU geophysicist Matthew Hornbach.

When the volume of injections decreased significantly, so did the shaking.

The scientists concluded that removing saltwater from the wells in the gas production process and then injecting that wastewater back underground “represent the most likely cause” for the swarm of quakes, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Buccaneer Petroleum continues to plunder.

In Williston, North Dakota, the fracking “boom” has bust (as anyone other than the local Babbits knew it would).

Heh.

Via Naked Capitalism, which summarizes his main points as

• The US is a much smaller player, in global terms, than the cheerleading would have you believe
• The EIA (which if anything has a bullish bias) projects that US oil production will peak in 2016
• Shale gas production is falling for all US plays except Marcellus, and that is estimated to peak in 2020
• LNG export is a bad idea; the US can’t compete with Russian prices.

Buccaneer Petroleum still sales soils the seas.

While you watch your television, your television may be watching you.

The potential for TVs to eavesdrop is revealed in Samsung’s smart TV privacy policy available on its website.

“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition,” the policy said.

The story goes on to say that Samsung claims this is to improve television performance and that it takes privacy very seriously (takes it right away from you and keeps it for itself, that is).

Do read the rest, then get a dumb TV. If do you get a smart TV, remember, no canoodling on the couch in the TV Room; some Samsung tech might be canoodling right along with you.