Frack Southern Maryland!

Natural Gas Strata Found In Southern Maryland

A new government assessment has identified two areas covering nearly all of Southern Maryland that have the potential for hydraulic fracturing to mine natural gas.

The practice, known as fracking, has been under way for years in parts of Pennsylvania known as the Marcellus Shale, which also extends into western Maryland. Mining companies drill wells into the shale and inject chemical-laced water and sand to crack the rock and release recoverable natural gas or oil.

Using existing wells and test wells, the U.S. Geological Survey developed estimates of the amount of gas in five Mesozoic basins along the East Coast. The agency identified nine other basins that likely have supplies of gas, but did not assess the quantity because of lack of data.
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Coleman said the amounts of gas predicted in the five newly assessed basins along the East Coast have an estimated 3.9 trillion cubic feet of gas, an amount that pales in comparison with that of the Marcellus Shale, which has an estimated 84 trillion cubic feet of gas. However, he said, that does not rule out the oil and gas industry’s potential to extract the resource in Maryland.

That would be cool, maybe Southern Maryland can be become the next North Dakota, without the shitty winters.  We could become the energy giant of the state, and then some day when D.C., Baltimore and Annapolis have become dependent on it, we could shut them off.  I can dream, can't I?

In other fracking news the Gas Industry fisks the Bay Foundations Signature Fracking Video:

Energy in Depth spokesman Chris Tucker contends the CBF video is a misleading attempt to dramatize the issue, wrongly portraying the billowing plumes picked up by the infrared camera as huge releases of hydrocarbons.
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“It might have taken a couple months to compile this response, but it only took a couple seconds to figure out that what CBF was showing in that video had nothing to do with methane,” Lee Fuller, Energy in Depth's’s executive director, said in a press release.

The industry group commissioned its own expert in air monitoring technology to critique the foundation's video. Ram A. Hashmonay, with Environ, an international consulting firm, said in an interview that the plumes shown don't look the way methane would if it was leaking into the air.  The infrared images are of hot exhaust instead, he said.
Asked if some methane or other hydrocarbons might not be leaking into the air with the exhaust if the generators weren't burning fuel very efficiently, Hashmonay said it was possible, but that the FLIR cameras aren't really capable of spotting such emissions.
"I’m not saying hydrocarbons are zero (in the plumes)," Hashmonay said, "but the levels are much lower than the detection of that camera."

I was suspicious about that when I saw the video.  It's a funny thing that all the window of the buildings stand out.  I'm pretty sure the interior of the buildings was not full of methane, but they were likely hotter than the outside.