testing

  Yes, I have been gone off into life for some time now, but I am comming back soon. 

   At this time I am testing some new blogging software to use in my Linux O/S/.

Our World Is Going Up In Flames

  By Jen Hayden on Sat Aug 03, 2013

Seriously. It's literally going up in flames:

Oil producers are allowing nearly a third of the natural gas they drill in North Dakota's Bakken shale fields to burn off into the air, with a value of more than $100 million per month, according to a study to be released Monday.

Remote well locations, combined with historically low natural gas prices and the extensive time needed to develop pipeline networks, have fueled the controversial practice, commonly known as flaring. While oil can be stored in tanks indefinitely after drilling, natural gas must be immediately piped to a processing facility.

Flaring has tripled in the past three years, according to the report from Ceres, a nonprofit group that tracks environmental records of public companies.

The sheer amount of wasted energy is alarming:

Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day.

The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal-fired power plant would emit, alarming some environmentalists.

Two million tons of carbon dioxide every year? Is it any wonder this happened last week?

attribution: North Pole Observatory, meme from Forecast the Facts

Special thanks to Forecast the Facts for the meme and the North Pole Observatory for the photo.

Originally posted to Scout Finch on Mon Jul 29, 2013

Technorati Tags: North Pole Observatory,Climate Change,North Dakota,Flaring