Horizontal Drilling and Fracking for Activist Dummies

Monterey Shale outcrop

There's only one greater source of misinformation on the internet than the freelancers who grub for money at content farms, and that's blogs. Bloggers, bless their pointy little heads, have even fewer checks on truth and accuracy than content farmers. Take for instance a Californian by the name of Jim Taylor, who's vehemently opposed to "fracking" in that state. In a post he called "What Do You Want In Your Water?"¹ Jim went off track when he conflated fracking with horizontal drilling, and he missed the mark by a mile as he "explained" the reasons for going sideways:

"'Fracking' is short for Hydraulic Fracturing which is when an oil company drills a well not into an underground lake of oil but into a geologic formation like the Monterey Shale which underlies much of California and which is said to contain over 13 billion barrels of oil. But the oil in the shale isn't just lying around waiting to be pumped- out. It's called bitumen, tar as thick as peanut butter and spread-thin in porous rock formations without jelly."

That group of run-on statements is absolutely replete with dumbassery. Here's a (partial) list of Jim's errors we plucked out of just that one paragraph:

1. Is this guy so ignorant he actually thinks there are "underground lake[s] of oil"? Scientists have tried for decades to explain pores, pore spaces, and petroleum reservoirs to dimwits like Jim. It just never seems to stick.
2. That 13 billion barrels? kinda out of date: the current estimate of recoverable reserves from the Monterey is about 600 million...
3. Jim conflates the gooey, low-gravity oil characteristic of the Monterey Shale with the Alberta Tar Sands, which do produce mainly low-quality bitumen.
4. Cute metaphor, that peanut butter bull, but clearly Mr. Taylor is still convinced that oil is found in "layers"? We can't figure that hyperbole out, anyway...

Taylor's anti-fracking screed is full of other broad statements and bold warnings, a classic exercise of his First Amendment rights. We at the Antisocial Network support that, oh, yes, we do! The problem with Jim's blog – with way too many self-appointed "citizen journalists" in the blogosphere – is that you can never be sure which part of what he says is true, which part is pure bull, and which part is misinformation. For someone who wants to sway opinion, Mr Taylor sure makes a lot of mistakes and, if he gets this part wrong, how can we be sure what he says about other topics is correct? Poor research and misinformation, all to serve a political viewpoint. No wonder no one with a brain trusts the garbage written in the average, citizen-generated blog. A dumbass: a Dumbass of the Day

¹ The post has been deleted, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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