Titans of Industry category archive

Facing South reports:

While natural gas development generally increases the value of nearby properties through leasing potential, worries about groundwater pollution from drilling cancels out those gains for homes that rely on drinking-water wells — and may even lead to a net drop in home prices. The findings hold for properties as far as a mile away from gas drilling sites.

“By itself, concern about groundwater contamination reduces property values by up to 24 percent,” the authors found.

Details at the link.

It will shake you to the core.

Entitled to threaten your job for your vote:

Mike White, the chairman and owner of Rite-Hite, a major Milwaukee manufacturer of industrial equipment, told employees in an email this week that all employees “should understand the personal consequences to them of having our tax rates increase dramatically if President Obama is re-elected, forcing taxpayers to fund President Obama’s future deficits and social programs (including Obamacare), which require bigger government.”

The email stunned some employees. One employee said he felt threatened by the email. “It’s a good company, but for this to come out, it’s absurd,” the employee said.

Our Galtian overlords are not nice people.

You wonder why the frackers want to keep their formulae secret?

Because they are dirty little frackers.

An environmental watchdog has discovered that natural gas drillers are continuing to use diesel fuels in fracking operations despite known health hazards — and in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The West Virginia-based group SkyTruth analyzed a database of voluntary industry disclosures and found that diesel fuels were used in fracking on 448 separate occasions in 12 states between January 2011 and August 2012. Fracking involves injecting water and chemicals underground at high pressure to release natural gas from rock formations and has been linked to groundwater contamination.

Of the 170 people sickened in the outbreak, all but one have a rare fungal form of meningitis after receiving suspect steroid shots for back pain, the CDC said. The other case is an ankle infection discovered in Michigan; steroid shots also can be given to treat aching knees, shoulders or other joints.

Fungus has been found in at least 50 vials of an injectable steroid medication made at a specialty compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts, investigators said. Health authorities haven’t yet said how they think the medication was contaminated, but they have ruled out other suspects – other products used in administering the shots – and the focus continues to be on that pharmacy, the New England Compounding Center.

No doubt reducing those nasty guvmint regulations that hamstring industry will prevent this from happening in the future.

Also, pigs, wings.

In related news, the Diane Rehm show recently explored the meningitis outbreak. You can listen or read a transcript at the link.

Never gonna go away.

A fresh oil sheen spotted recently in the Gulf of Mexico matches crude spilled during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

Engineers with Deepwater Horizon rig operator BP reported the sheen on September 16, after spotting it on satellite photos. The Coast Guard said that tests conducted by the Marine Safety Laboratory confirmed that the oil “correlates” to the Deepwater Horizon spill.

It adds the spice of danger to life:

The U.S. Geological Survey released two reports this week confirming that fracking for natural gas has led to groundwater contamination — a fact that has been contested by the industry.

The USGS results are consistent with earlier findings by the Environmental Protection Agency that contamination from fracking had seeped into monitoring wells near gas drilling operations in Pavillion, Wyo., a rural community within the Wind River Indian Reservation. The contaminants detected include methane, ethane, diesel compounds and phenol, a known neurotoxin.

It’s on an Indian Reservation, so if probably doesn’t count.

Whaddya want anyway? CH4 in your beer?

Q. Is nothing sacred?

A. Not if it can be destroyed for money.

This should work out well.

Somewhere in West Texas is a 7-inch radioactive cylinder that Halliburton would like to find. Anyone who comes across it is advised to keep their distance.

The oil field services company lost track of the device, which is used to assess potential sites for hydraulic fracturing, last Tuesday while trying to transport it from Pecos to a well site near Odessa 130 miles away. A special unit of the Texas National Guard has now stepped in to aid Halliburton in a search for the cylinder, according to Bloomberg.

Via Dick Destiny.

Heh.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Coca-Cola is one of several mega-corporations trying to kill off an effort in California to identify foods that have been genetically modified on their package labels, The New York Times is reporting.

Heh, indeed.

Gross negligence:

Buccaneer Petroleum’s legacy persists:

Residents of Gulf states are being warned to stay on alert for the presence of BP oil in the wake of Hurricane Isaac and to report sightings of any oil pollution that washes ashore.

Large quantities of crude oil from BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster remain below the northern Gulf of Mexico, which is being churned by the storm. As a result, substantial quantities of oil pollution are expected to wash ashore in the form of tar balls, mats and strings from the marshes of Louisiana east to the Florida Panhandle.

Steve Wiegand explains why his familty decided to ditch their cable telly vision.

These differences centered on Comcast insisting that in return for more money every month, it would provide us with less product. For approximately $100 a month, we had a choice of entertainment venues that included a “travel” channel in which various people travel around for no apparent reason other than to eat fried insects; a food channel in which people who look suspiciously like the people on the travel channel share recipes for fried insects; and 135 channels imploring us to buy sequined luggage sets or faux topaz bowling balls.

Follow the link to find out how it went.

What you don’t know can’t hurt them: peeping through the screen of smoke.

Seeking to quell environmental concerns about the chemicals it shoots underground to extract oil and natural gas, Apache Corp. (APA) told shareholders in April that it disclosed information about “all the company’s U.S. hydraulic fracturing jobs” on a website last year.

Actually, Apache’s transparency was shot through with cracks. In Texas and Oklahoma, the company reported chemicals it used on only about half its fracked wells via FracFocus.org, a voluntary website that oil and gas companies helped design amid calls for mandatory disclosure.

Energy companies failed to list more than two out of every five fracked wells in eight U.S. states from April 11, 2011, when FracFocus began operating, through the end of last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Failed to list two out of five wells–If you get a hit every two out five at bats in the Bigs, you end up in the Hall of Fame.

In a piece right out of Inverse Universe, a story at Tampabay dot com states that Buccaneer Petroleum and Transamerica, the Deepwater Horizon wild well folks, were so focused on safety that they were unable to focus on safety.

Among the blurry areas:

• BP and Transocean’s “bridging document,” designed to align safety procedures between the companies, was generic and addressed only six safety issues, but none of them dealt with major issues.
• The companies didn’t have key process limits or controls for safe drilling.
• There were no written instructions for how to conduct a crucial test at the end of the cementing process, one that ultimately was misinterpreted by the crew after it was conducted several times, each time differently.
• Similar concerns about too narrow a focus on personal safety were raised after an explosion in 2005 at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 people, but few of the panel’s recommendations were implemented on the offshore rig.

As near as I can decipher it, the reasoning seems to be that the two titans of industry were so wrapped up in rules to prevent personal injuries (broken legs, back sprains, and hangnails) to employees (and, no doubt, attendant liability for workers’ comp), that they didn’t pay attention to minor distractions such as exploding wells; spewing oil; burning, sinking oil rigs; and drowning employees.

Nice suits do not correlate with competence.

When you see one of those commercials set against an industrial background and showing a Master of the Universe in a suit with an ill-fitting hard hat talking to some schmuck in work clothes, remind yourself of just who in that scene actually knows what he is doing and does real work.

Hint: It’s not the suit.

What you don’t know can’t hurt them. Facing South reports:

Most of the states where fracking is taking place that do not require any public disclosure of the chemicals used in in the controversial drilling process are in the South, and Southern states are also among those with weak disclosure laws.

Details at the link.