Justin Mikulka at DeSmog writes—As Fracking Companies Face Bankruptcy, US Regulators Enable Firms to Duck Cleanup Costs:
[...] Federal and state regulators have been failing to require [fracking] companies to fully fund expected cleanup liabilities, which helps mask the true cost of oil and gas production. Passing environmental cleanup costs on to the taxpayer amounts to a backdoor subsidy for the oil and gas industry.
Requiring oil and gas companies to pay for shutting down and cleaning up wells would greatly increase the cost of drilling for many oil and gas wells. The fracking industry already can’t make money pumping fossil fuels out of shale in the U.S., and that's without these firms coming even close to fully funding their cleanup costs.
However, more state governments are realizing the scale of this problem and starting to look at increasing and enforcing bonding requirements for oil and gas well cleanup. However, in oil-rich places like Alberta, Canada, and Alaska, regulators are realizing that the money just isn't there.
In 2018, the natural gas driller Amaroq Resources acquired the Nicolai Creek assets in southwest Alaska from the bankrupt Aurora Gas. This transaction was delayed when the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC) announced $7 million in bonding required for the gas wells associated with the purchase. This is the point where the state government had the power to make Amaroq provide adequate bonding for well cleanup.
The AOGCC then agreed to reduce that amount to $200,000 and the deal went ahead.
Since that deal, the commission increased the minimum statewide bonding level to $400,000 per well for the first one to 10 wells. Amaroq would be required to abide by these new regulations and has appealed this decision. Company president Scott Pfoff explained that these new bonding requirements make the business “uneconomic.”
And that is the reality. If oil and gas companies were required to pay for the full end-of-life cost of their wells, much of their inventory becomes uneconomic. This is where taxpayers come in. [...]
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QUOTATION
“Santa Claus is real. However, your parents are folkloric constructs meant to protect and foritfy children against the darknesses of the real world. They are symbols representing the return of the sun and the end of winter, the sacrifice of the king and the eternal fecundity of the queen. They wear traditional vestments and are associated with certain seasonal plants, animals, and foods. After a certain age, no intelligent child continues believing in their parents, and it is embarrassing when one professes such faith after puberty. Santa Claus, however, will never fail us.”
~~Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden (2006)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds & Expats:
The provocative Nobel laureate Harold Pinter died December 24. Although his work in the theater over the course of 32 plays was broadly praised, his political views drew savage attacks, including one from fellow Brit and neo-conservative Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in 2005 that giving the Swedish award "to someone who gave up literature for politics decades ago, and whose politics are primitive and hysterically anti-American and pro-dictatorial, is part of the almost complete degradation of the Nobel racket."
Matt Schudel at The Washington Post writes:
Mr. Pinter's works, which bore the influence of the existential dramatist Samuel Beckett and the modernist poet T.S. Eliot, explored such themes as sexual frustration, jealousy, loneliness and an overriding if indistinct sense of fear. The social or mental balance of his characters -- and, by extension, society as a whole -- was often undercut by a biting, sardonic humor.
"Words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other," Peter Hall, who frequently directed Mr. Pinter's plays, once said. ...
... "I've never been able to sit down and say, 'Now I'm going to write a play,' " he said in 1976. "I just have no alternative but to wait for the thing to be released within me."
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Remember what it was like last year, exactly two days after Christmas? No? Well... The shutdown continued. Trump dropped in on Iraq and ruined it. Down in NC-09, the Gop US Attorneys were at it again. And we took another look at France's yellow vests.
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