Certainly they aren't doing this for the environment. Stopped, idling vehicles generate more pollution in cities than moving vehicles. Sounds like a municipality that has nothing better to do with its time than to annoy some of their civilians.

In order to get a fault to become active, you must increase the pore pressure within the fault to the point where you overcome the friction pressure within the fault. This requires a vast amount of water to do. Individual hydraulic fracturing operations do not inject enough fluid to a) reach most faults, and b) to pressurize said faults enough to lubricate them. Also, propped fractures add a small amount of stress in the rock due to rock deformation, but this stress drops off drastically the further you are from the fractures, just a few feet. So between fluid volumes and rock deformation, hydraulic fractures are negligible compared to natural tectonics.

Now water disposal wells, that's different thing entirely. When you're disposing millions of barrels of waste water a day (most of which comes from natural connate water production, with a small percentage from hydraulic fracturing "flowback"), it *is* possible to lubricate faults and increase seismicity in the area. This means that disposal wells will need to be regulated more closely, spread out volumes in larger areas, furthest away from known faults, etc.

When a company has drilled a few hundred wells in a field, with all the electric log analysis, reservoir simulations, and production decline analysis, I believe that it's safe to say that the oil company has a pretty darn good idea what's happening subsurface.

Ever heard of microseismic monitoring? Oil companies want to maximize the contact of hydraulic fractures in the pay zone and minimize growth into zones directly above and below the pay zone (because the horsepower, water, and proppants end up getting wasted in non-productive zones). Microseismic monitoring has been performed on literally thousands of shale wells. There are other similar technologies, such as surface and subsurface tilt-meters that measure rock deformation (these tilt-meters are also used on some busy bridges to monitor strain on the steel beams, protecting vehicle traffic in high-population areas). Microseismic data has shown time and time again that shear events from hydraulic fracturing operations may be detected a few layers of rock, around 300-500 ft at most, above the pay zone. So a horizontal section of a well drilled at around 7,000-feet deep will not get nearly close to fracturing into an aquifer. Perhaps in a case where a drilled to 3,000 feet with an acquifer at 2,500 feet would it be possible to propagate a fracture to the aquifer, but that's not where any of the shale zones are at.

You don't drill a $7 million well and not care about how one well affects another, or whether your fractures are optimized in your pay zone.

The so-called "Halliburton loophole" was done to keep an over-reaching EPA from regulating apples and oranges cases. For decades, the EPA did not regulate hydraulic fracturing operations as "hazardous waste disposal", and rightly so. The purpose of hydraulic fracturing is to create fractures, not dispose of hazardous waste. At some point in the early 2000's, a bureaucratic at the EPA, not understanding the process, decided to treat hydraulic fracturing the same as waste disposal. These are not nearly the same things. But of course, the fact that Cheney helped reverse this error is interpreted by some people to be an act of greed.

Totally, absolutely false. Sure, there is still some uncertainty to what *exactly* goes on subsurface. But there *is* a lot of technology out there that oil companies and the oil service industry employs to understand hydraulic fracturing. 2D hydraulic fracture equations were developed in the 60's, and 3D computer simulators in the 80's. Reservoir simulation software. Petrophysical analysis (electronic well logs and core sample analysis). Production decline analysis. Hydraulic fracture treatment pressure-matching, mini-frac analysis, etc. There are a *lot* of different techniques being employed to try to understand hydraulic fracture growth in hydrocarbon-bearing formations. There is also millions of research dollars being spent in universities to advance the science. There are a multitude of conferences every year where engineers and scientists in the industry go to peer-review each other's works and advance their understanding of fracture behavior. This is not some hidden process that gets applied haphazardly.

Safe to say that if an oil company's well end up fracturing into a water zone (even a salt-water zone, which are much closer to hydrocarbon zones than freshwater acquifers), that the oil company is sure as heck not making a profit on that well. Water wells do not oil companies a profit make.

It may be difficult to achieve a perfect cement job in a High-Pressure/High-Temperature environment and in horizontal wellbores in hydrocarbon-bearing zones, but it isn't all that hard to get a good cement job in vertical boreholes at shallow depths (where our freshwater aquifers are). Many state regulatory agencies are the most strict about the "surface casing" that protects freshwater aquifers, such as requiring cement all the way back up to surface (and topped off if necessary), specific cement mechanical properties, and pressure testing the casing shoe after the cement is allowed to set prior to proceeding with drilling.

By the time the production casing is set and cemented, there are usually around 3 layers of casing lining the wellbore at the shallow depths. Deep offshore wells have many more layers than this (due to the complexity of the pore pressure and fracture pressure gradient profiles), and the hazards that results from blowouts from bad cement jobs are a hazard to the surface (crew, environment, etc.) but do not pose a danger to any rock layers behind the casing layers in previous intervals.

Exactly. If we actually protected our industries from being sent overseas, we would have plenty of things to "engineer." It's kind of hard to need engineers if you don't make anything. We make it easy to import cheap goods from countries like China, but it is almost impossible to sell our own goods to those same countries.

A good deep-cycle battery with a good cold cranking amps rating would be able to handle this just fine. But car manufacturers tend to prefer the cheapest parts possible to get a car on the road, so he was probably speaking more in economics than in possibility.

Diesel keeps getting overlooked by the hype for hybrid vehicles, but a VW Passat BlueMotion recently broke the record for mileage, getting 74.8 MPG.

"anti-gay"... oh, you mean the laws that defend the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, the laws that existed as long as this country existed (adopted from the countries that the colonists originated from)?

"anti-abortion"... oh, you mean upholding the law against murdering an innocent human? It's not a Choice, it's a Child.

It's interesting how modernists have taken basic rights and turned them around into negative terminology, and using euphemisms for things that used to be morally wrong but now are okay because you put a "pro-" in front of them and demonize the opposing view by putting an "anti-" in front of them.

It's interesting how (and I don't mean this to stereotype; there are all types of motorcyclists) some motorcyclists drive like they want to be killed.

I would argue that driving slower than the speed limit (unless you're following someone going slower than the speed limit and you can't safely overtake them) is not "sharing the road". In most states driving in a way that impedes the normal flow of traffic is against the law.

Sharing the road simply means driving in a way that allows other motorists to get out of potential conflicts. Right-of-way is an implied system, not a hard set of rules. If someone decides to give up their right-of-way to you, then you are entitled to slowly and safely proceed to accept the right-of-way from the other motorist. If two motorists get in an accident because of right-of-way issues, most officers would at the very least give the driver with the right-of-way a warning to not insist on their right-of-way (as most states laws have a clause to this effect).

Cutting in a line of traffic should be a non-issue... following (tailgating) another car so closely that it prevents a motorist in another lane going in the same direction from merging/cutting in is against the law. Every state has a law to the effect that you must keep a reasonable space in front of you taking into account your speed. Although it isn't specifically written in the law, police officers will often cite two- to four-second following distance as reasonable. This should leave at least a couple of car lengths ahead of you, and thus room for another motorist to merge into. If all motorists on the road obeyed this law, "cutting in" would be a non-issue and not a cause for a conflict.