Hey Bill Nye, 'Are You For or Against Fracking?' | Big Think.

Hey Bill Nye, "Are You For or Against Fracking?"
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So let's talk about fracking. In today's edition of #tuesdayswithbill, the Science Guy answers Susan's question about hydraulic fracturing and green energy. Fracking isn't a bad idea in theory, says Nye, but it can't be allowed to go unregulated. The Science Guy runs through a personal anecdote about fracking before noting that new technological advances have opened the door to irresponsible practices with severe environmental and public health consequences. While it would be great to replace things like fracking with renewable energy, we're, at the moment, hampered in several ways, the most notable being battery limitations. That said, it doesn't mean our potential green energy future isn't one to get excited about.
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BILL NYE, THE SCIENCE GUY:
Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life. In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle's home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live." This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®" was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle's NBC affiliate. While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children's books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye's Great Big Book of Tiny Germs." Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries" airs on the Science Channel. “The Eyes of Nye" airs on PBS stations across the country. Bill's latest project is hosting a show on Planet Green called “Stuff Happens." It's about environmentally responsible choices that consumers can make as they go about their day and their shopping. Also, you'll see Nye in his good-natured rivalry with his neighbor Ed Begley. They compete to see who can save the most energy and produce the smallest carbon footprint. Nye has 4,000 watts of solar power and a solar-boosted hot water system. There's also the low water use garden and underground watering system. It's fun for him; he's an engineer with an energy conservation hobby. Nye is currently the Executive Director of The Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest organization.BILL NYE, THE SCIENCE GUY
Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life......

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TRANSCRIPT:
Susan: Hi Bill. My name is Susan, aka primordial soup, and I have a question about fracking. Are you for it or against it and why? And on the subject of energies what’s the holdup with the green energies? Is it that there’s not enough investment money, not enough profits, not enough public interest, other, all of the above? Thank you for answering my question.

Bill Nye: Are you primal or primordial? If it’s a primordial soup I love you. So let’s talk about fracking. I left Boeing because they wanted me to work on the 767 airplane, which wasn’t going to fly for 15 years. And when you’re a young guy that just seems like a really long time. So I took a job as an engineer in a shipyard at the place where they skim oil slicks. They made, at that time, the best or the most popular oil slick skimming boat. And then that led to a job for me in the oil field. I worked in the oil patch for a while where they frack. Now my uncle, my beloved mother’s younger brother really was this guy. He was a geologist, graduated from Johns Hopkins and he got a job with — then he was in the Army during the Korean War as an engineer....

[headrockbeats]

I nearly died when he said "Soup Woman".

[someoneontheinternet]

This is how I answer questions when I'm stoned

[DidntKnowWhatToPut]

We have a "Quarry Battery" here in the UK. It pumps water uphill into a high altitude lake at night when the electricity is cheaper and there is less demand - and during periods of high demand (Usually everyone making a cup of tea during the adverts of something popular on TV) it lets the water flow back down though a hydroelectric power station. It can go from 0 to full power output in 15 seconds and can power a large city. A very efficient way of storing a large amount of energy.

[nebojsagalic]

So basically the solution is to tax the crap out of anything that pollutes and then to use it to subsidize renewable energy?

[BBand]

"I have a question"
**Asks 8 questions**
"Thank you for answering my question"

[chuckgoecke]

I was a Petroleum engineer and at the start of my career, I worked as a production engineer that designed fracking jobs. Later I was a Reservoir engineer and did computer simulations. This was back in the early 1980's. Back then, we did have directional drilling, but didn't have the very short radius direction drilling, with extremely accurate ability to steer the drill bit. We did frack jobs that were sort of like stabs in the dark, as far as where the fracking was going. In the two shale formations we fracked California, we just did huge, giant, stupidly big frack jobs, millions of lbs of sand(and millions of dollars) and row after row of huge tanks full of gelled fracking water. We didn't know the directions the fracture were growing and the heights they were growing. Hydraulic fracture grow like two "D's" enlarging away from the well bore, the "D" getting both more bulged out but also growing in height. The directions were only guesses, and have to do with the regional tectonic stress conditions in the rock at the reservoir level. Ideally, the fractures would intersect the natural fracture system, but that's not how it works. The natural fractures almost always go the same as the induced fractures.

When short radius directional drilling was developed in the late 1980's(by Arco, where I worked), this allowed steering the well bore to go perpendicular to the direction of natural fractures(and what induced fractures will grow with huge hydraulic energy flogged at the well formations). The technology to steer the well drilling got better and better in the 1990s with microprocessor technology. With a directionally short radius well, it is possible to go into an old well, mill out the casing enough to kick off a new horizontal well bore exactly in the perfect direction to intersect natural fractures, and to make one giant, stab in the dark fracture job become a surgically precise directional horizontal well, that can be fractured in many many small frack jobs that all stay right exactly where we want them. That's why fracking is so big now. The technology, the blunt, stab in the dark technology goes back to the 1960's. It didn't work all that well. The new fracking is incredibly precise and mostly, high successful and lucrative, and old dead wells can get incredible new life, plus new wells are rapidly paid out. Hence the US is now almost energy independent, and we now have a 100+ year supply of natural gas from tight shales. And the fracking is so much safer than it used to be. This is part of why many oil people don't understand the hatred. We are doing it so much better now, or rather, it used to be so nasty, dirty and uncontrolled.

[mikerr]

Every time I hear Bill say "Change the world" my faith in this world is restored.

[MyplayListsYY]

I like Bill Nye because of his objective approach to issues, he seems more concerned with what works rather then kowtowing to an underlying liberal or conservative agenda.

[vedrulh]

When he gets a bit distracted on the subject and goes off on a small tangent explaining something, i just love it. He's so nerdy and charming.
Also, "soup woman" i died laughing.

[TheSateef]

so he never actually answered the question "Are You For or Against Fracking?" but he sounded pro if it was regulated

[pikkuadi]

Way to go for using metric.
-Love from Europe

[chrisose]

The percentage of fracking that is safe is the same as the percentage of oil executives who have their homes and offices right next to a fracking operation. 0%.

[TheSaltyAdmiral]

I have always dreamed about writing a master thesis about how much energy we could generate from the millions of gym's in the world, who largely use friction or air as resistance, which just create wasted heat.
Imagine if every spinning bike in the world used a variable dynamo as resistance instead, and similar for the weight machines.

I'm not saying it would change the world, but I think it would at least make every gym on the planet net positive on the grid, basically making every gym a micro power plant. And all this with energy we are already generating, but currently wasting!

[iTractin]

0:30

I can't be the only American that went "Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!"

[DengMam]

We do have those energy storages here in Europe. We don't use a giant piston though, it's simply two giant pools filled with water and one of the pools (size of a lake) is at an higher altitude. So, during the day, we use green energy to pump up the water from the lower pool to the upper one to store kinetic energy and at night, we let the water flow back down going through the turbines to retransform it into electricity. There is some electric energy lost due to the pumps, but the whole principle is a safe and green energy storage. Plus, on rainy days (which happen often) the upper pool gets filled with completely free energy in form of rain drops we can also make flow down the turbines. So if you do the calculation, nature helps us regain some of the lost energy during the pumping process, the system is so efficient that it's profitable that it still generates money while it only sells electricity at night time prices (I don't know how about the US but here, electricity is cheaper at night due to less demand).

[ataarono]

Bill,  Bill,  Bill,  Bill,  Bill,  Bill,  Bill,  Bill,  Bill,  Bill, ...

[bruceportnoff]

Out of context quoting
"stir it up, soup woman"
- Bill Nye

[rocekth]

Question:Is fracking bad
Bill:gets into working at boeing

[FoNarnia]

It's nice to see someone so passionate about education, he realizes that the millions of educated minds could do much more than he alone could possibly ever do. I think that's a very mature thing to understand

[rich]

He makes a lot of sense. A lot of electrical inefficiencies comes from energy conversions. One way to deal with that is to convert to electricity and keep it that way until you finally convert to mechanical, but an issue with this is how poor we are right now at storing large amounts of electricity. We could very well instead store energy mechanically instead, which we have centuries of experience doing.