(3) Jaeah Lee and James West. Mother Jones, Septmber 2014.
www.motherjones.com/environment/ ... -fracking-shale-gas
Quote:
"It's [Sichuan Basin is] not the only part of China with shale gas, but fracking requires a lot of water, and with a subtropical [!] climate and proximity to the mighty Yangtze River, Sichuan has that, too, making it the nation's first fracking frontier.
"Most of China was on holiday that week to commemorate 64 years [ie, in 2013] since Mao declared the founding of the People's Republic [when the reporters visited a CNPC fracking site [unidentified by name or location, except the quotation ater the next], accompanied by personnel of the Chinese oil company] * * * drilling here didn't go so smoothly [in part because Chinese workers there had no previous experience with fracking]
"Based on early sampling, Bloomberg New Energy Finance's [Michael] Liebreich estimates that China is currently extracting shale gas at roughly twice the cost of the United States. Analysts expect those costs to fall as China gains experience, but even at current levels, shale gas production has been up to 40 percent cheaper—and geopolitically more desirable—than importing gas.
"Chongqing's urban center is only 200 miles from the mountainside fracking fields we visited, but it might as well have been a different planet. From our hostel, we followed the neon lights until we reached Jiefangbei, a glitzy shopping district named after the tower it encircles, built in the 1940s to commemorate victory over the Japanese during World War II.
In China: "the disparity between rich and poor has grown so much that, during a meeting of China's top political advisers earlier this year, one attendee opined that the quality of life for 90 percent of peasants was no better than it was 40 years ago, in part due to burdensome medical expenses and limited access to education. In April, researchers at the University of Michigan calculated that in 2010, China's Gini coefficient—a measure of income inequality—was 0.55, compared to 0.45 in the United States. The United Nations considers anything above 0.4 a threat to a country's stability. 'You've got this "damn the torpedoes" development strategy that sets out all sorts of quotas, expectations, and productivity targets that are not constrained or balanced in any way by environmental protection or public participation to hold people to account,' says Sophie Richardson, director of Human Rights Watch's China program. Throw in corruption, she adds, and you see a toxic mix, one that has contributed to an unprecedented level of social unrest. * * * Fracking may soon join that list [as a protest target]. Protests have already stymied drilling operations in Sichuan. From 2010 to March 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported, Shell had lost 535 days of work at 19 of its shale gas wells due to villager blockades or government requests to halt operations. 'There are a lot of people in China who don't want to take political risks—they have too much at stake,' [New Yorker's former China correspondent Evan] Osnos says. 'But when it comes to something as elemental as their health, and that's what pollution really is about, then they're willing to take a risk.'"
"DESPITE BEING TOUTED AS A CLEANER alternative to dirty coal, fracking in China comes with plenty of environmental problems. The country's shale gas lies deeper underground and in more complex geologic formations than those deposits in the flatlands of Pennsylvania, North Dakota, or Texas. As a result, researchers estimated that the Chinese wells will require up to twice the amount of water used at American sites to crack open the reserves. Indeed, researcher TIAN Qinghua 田庆华 [四川省环境保护科学研究院 Sichuan Academy of Environmental Sciences 高级工程师] points out that it's hard to imagine how there will be enough water to support an American-style fracking boom in [China] where land twice the size of New York City turns to desert every year. Today more than a quarter of the country has already dried up, the equivalent of about a third of the continental United States. An engineer who formerly designed cigarette and paper factories in the 1990s, Tian * * * traces his environmental conversion back to the time he trained a group of technicians from Burma at a sugar factory in Yunnan Province. If they built a factory like this one back home, they asked him, would their river become black like the Kaiyuan River? 'I began to doubt my career,' he told us, sipping hot green tea out of a glass beer stein. 'All the factories I designed were heavy polluters.' He quit his job and began pursuing environmental research. 'I wanted to pick a career I could be proud of by the time I retire,' he said.
Note:
(a) In the report, "I" was Ms Jaeah Lee.
(b) The report does not deal with any aspect of fracking in China except for its environmental impacts. Mostly, though, the report is about China's reliance on coal, which I am not interested in (because it is a same old story).
(c) Jiefangbei CBD 重庆解放碑店
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiefangbei_CBD
* CBD = central business district
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_business_district
(d) For "damn the torpedoes," see David Farragut
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farragut
(The bay was heavily mined (tethered naval mines were then known as "torpedoes"))
(e) 云南省红河哈尼族彝族自治州 开远市. "Kaiyuan River does not exist. There is a river crossing City of Kaiyuan, but it is called Lujiang River 庐江河.
() There is no need to read the sprawling report, except the last three paragraphs (which I will not reproduce here to save space, starting with the sentence: "TOWARD THE END OF OUR TRIP, we visited a village near Luzhou, a port city on the Yangtze with a population bigger than Los Angeles."
Luzhou 泸州市
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luzhou
(Situated at the confluence of the Tuo River 沱江 and the Yangtze River, Luzhou is not only an important port on the Yangtze river, but also the largest port in both size and output in Sichuan province since Chongqing seceded from Sichuan province in 1997)
is on the southwestern border of Chongqing. |
发表于 11-5-2014 10:15:47
收藏
分享
支持
反对
楼主