Hacker News Reader

Comment by flavius29663 | Hacker News Reader

If you think about it, a lot of the arabian/russian/corupt oligarchs money from oil were spent in ludicrous ways, like luxury beyond belief. The economy is getting less value from a fracked barrel, but those money are spent more wisely, returning back into the industry. This is not just sticking a pipe in the ground anymore, we are advancing our tech by using fracking. This is a new economic engine, maybe it's not as big as the free oil, but it's something.

View on HN

It's an interesting thought; I think you'd also have to look at the absolute dollar amounts of "luxury spend vs. capital/research reinvestment" to get the full picture. (Since the actual benefits accrued to society are proportional to the absolute spend on R&D).

Also, is R&D in fracking transferable? Or is it just tech that will be irrelevant in 20-30 years? (I don't have a good picture on this one; I could see a reasonable argument that we will be using natural gas for a long time, even when we're a mostly-renewable economy, since it's a convenient-to-transport form of energy as LNG).

I can't imagine fracking is too transferable unless there's some other easily flowing substance you want to get out of the ground besides water, oil, or natural gas.

EDIT: It might be useful for enabling greater storage density of CO2 in rock formations if we attempt to sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-co2-underground-curb-carbon-em...

Fracking is important in geothermal. An experimental form uses drilling to dry hot rocks and injection of water (even waste water or grey water) to produce steam.

Destructive uses of aquifers may mean we need skills in underground water table remediation. I don't think fracking directly helps (I think it hinders) but we're going to need to understand how to use it to fix things as well as extract things.

Well, too bad fracking in the US is on its way down. By the looks of it, it will last maybe 3 years before it peaks out. Then the barrels/day will crash. Not kidding though, and higher ups know... which is probably why the US is intervening in Venezuela, for example.

Source on that?

Most of it was stockpiled in US dollars.

End of the day, the dollar will inflate away in the long run. We will have created more value with oil than the shieks and Russian mob bosses yielded in dollar terms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com