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Comment by athollywood | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as an employee at one of the largest independent E&P’s, we haven’t relied on debt and equity financing in the last few years because we have had enough free cash flow. The only thing slowing us down really is things like pipeline takeaway and labor shortage.

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This might be an unpopular idea among the fossil money and investment people, but as a victim and witness to pipeline activity by an unscrupulous corporation, I would suggest that there are a mountain of unstated risks and hidden costs. This example [1] pipeline has state and local criminal and civil legal issues, spills, runoff, poisoned wells, sinkholes, inestimable property value loss, loss of use, an explosion, and all other kinds of malfeasance. This line passes literally within feet of homes and schools, and I don't think we've begun to see the true danger: the stated blast zone is 1000 feet and the "self" evacuation zone is 3 miles [2]. Someone is going to get hurt.

Perhaps the biggest hidden cost has no price tag, which is the damage to democracy in the form of bad precedent that occurs when a big corporation steamrolls local governments, gets itself declared as a public utility, and begins to eminent domain and wreck everything in sight, literally bulldozing through suburbs. These are homes and businesses a dozen feet from the line: [3,4,5,6]. This is not CNG, it's other more explosive fractions. It's a travesty of injustice.

1. https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2018/12/24/spills-s...

2. http://marinereast2.com/index.html

3. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0571635,-75.6675604,3a,75y,1...

4. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9789588,-75.5377762,3a,75y,2...

5. https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0390132,-75.6366127,3a,75y,1...

6. https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9874756,-75.5431866,3a,75y,3...

Relevant disgraced congressman quote: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/vance-mcallis...

Not disagreeing with any of what you said, however I encourage you to consider the alternatives of pipelines. Rail and trucking typically have a significantly higher spill rate.

https://www.iaee.org/en/publications/newsletterdl.aspx?id=46...

That's a great discussion to be had, as well as the costs of burning stuff in general versus alternatives.

What I wanted to emphasize was, (1) we never had that tradeoff discussion at any level of government or community; it was forced on us, (2) there was substantial undisclosed activity that investors are probably not aware of, and (3) the overall shitty behavior by the company will have many long term negative effects on how we do public works.

> The only thing slowing us down really is things like pipeline takeaway and labor shortage.

I am under the impression that this field has pretty well paid jobs. How is there a labor shortage in a mature industry with high pay?

From what I understand there are a number of reasons.

One of them is that domestic oil and gas production was on the decline until the tech for horizontal drilling and fracking started the shale boom of the last 10-12 years. Combined with demographics (big boomer generation, small generation X, big millennial generation) this means you have to find and train all these millennials who probably had other plans. And then, I'm told, the highly cyclical dynamics of the industry make any kind of long-term investment difficult, so there's high overhead for a labor market that still relies on fax machines.

If you're macro-minded and you want policies that keep that labor price high so alternative energy becomes more attractive, something like the Green New Deal is probably a good bet.

The pay is good but working conditions?

Then the pay is not good enough.

The pay is good enough but their are other constraining factors when it comes to extreme rapid growth in an area. Housing shortages are one example.

True, but that's part of the issue. Volatility affects people's lives, and they need to be paid extra to deal with it (assuming they have other options). Moving around a lot, living in the middle of nowhere, inconsistent income due to changing markets, these are all negatives that need to be compensated for in the wages.

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