5/7/15

Methane bubble: Black Hills Corp. adds more rigs, fracking near Chaco


Significant amounts of natural gas on federal lands are being wasted, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year and adding to harmful greenhouse gas emissions, a congressional investigation has found. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office also said the Bureau of Land Management failed to conduct production inspections for hundreds of high-priority oil and gas wells — roughly 1 out of 5 — to ensure full payment of royalties to the U.S. [Santa Fe New Mexican]
While groups are suing the Bureau of Land Management to prevent oil and gas encroachment on the Chaco Culture National Historic Park, Black Hills Corp. is raping again.
The Rapid City, SD-based firm now has three wells producing in the Mancos and expects to have as many as 10 online by the end of this year, with long-range reserve projections of about 10 Bcf/well, CEO David Emery said on an earnings conference call. Three horizontal natural gas wells were placed on production early in the first quarter with what Emery characterized as "strong production results to date that have exceeded our expectations." He called it "truly a win-win situation." The company continues to talk with regulators and stakeholders in seven states and evaluate prospects for reserves, including the Mancos shale properties. [some earth hater rag]
Win-win my sore pink glutei.

Even as prices plummet, Rapid City-based Black Hills Corp. remains focused on its substantial oil and natural gas holdings in the Mancos Shale within the San Juan and Piceance basins. The firm is bankrolling water diversions, too.

Black Hills Energy was named a top polluter in the region.
'With all the ground-based and airborne resources that the different groups are bringing to the region, we have the unique chance to unequivocally solve the Four Corners mystery,' said Christian Frankenberg, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, who is heading NASA's part of the effort. [Daily Mail]
After cutting NASA's budget John Thune and the GOP leadership are postulating that Earth science being conducted by the agency is not real science.
U.S. geoscientists are accustomed to being used as a punching bag by climate change skeptics in Congress, who challenge the science of global warming. But some influential Republican legislators are now going a step further, by denigrating the discipline itself. The idea that the geosciences aren’t hard science comes as a shock to Margaret Leinen, president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a former head of the National Science Foundation’s geosciences directorate. Senator Bill Nelson (D–FL), the top Democrat on the full commerce committee and the only current member of Congress to have flown in space, took a more gentlemanly tack. “Let me point out that budgets are not always as clear as what we think they are,” he said, noting that several other NASA accounts also support exploration activities. “Earth science relates directly to everything we are doing in space exploration,” Nelson asserted. [Jeffrey Mervis]
Seriously?

NASA turns satellites not only to study pollution in South Dakota but also to learn how a force like the Anthropocene affects a planet.
Methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than carbon dioxide (CO2), but CH4 is more efficient at trapping radiation than CO2. Pound for pound, the comparative impact of CH4 on climate change is 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period. [US Environmental Protection Agency]
After a century of exploitation Black Hills Corporation has announced a $70 million dollar cathedral to capitalism in occupied Rapid City.

Several utilities are based in South Dakota because of the state's regressive tax structure. Meanwhile, the state just raised taxes on those least pay to pay them...again.

South Dakota's earth hater governor has installed in his Reichstag a member of the Emery dynasty as an apparatchik tribal liaison to persuade some unwitting tribal nation trapped in the state to host a radioactive dump for fracking's waste.

BKH stock has been sliding.


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