Hutson is the founder and chief executive officer of one of the strangest companies ever to hit the American oil patch and the reason for our four-day visit to the Appalachian region. While other oilmen focus on drilling the next gusher, Hutson buys used wells that generate just a trickle or nothing at all. Over the past four years his Diversified Energy Co. has amassed about 69,000 wells, eclipsing Exxon Mobil Corp. to become the largest well owner in the country. Investors love him. Since listing shares in 2017, Hutson’s company has outperformed almost every other U.S. oil and gas stock, swelling his personal stake to more than $30 million.
But Diversified’s breakneck growth has alarmed some regulators, landowner groups, and industry insiders, not to mention environmental advocates. State laws require that every well be plugged with cement after it runs dry, an expensive and complicated chore. At the rate Diversified is paying dividends to shareholders, some worry there will be nothing left when the bills come due. If a company can’t meet its plugging obligations, that burden falls to the state, which means Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia could be stuck with a billion-dollar mess. “The model seems like it’s built on abandoning those assets,” says Ted Boettner, who’s studied abandoned wells at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a regional research organization. “It looks like a liability bomb that’s destined to explode.”
[…] By not requiring drillers to post cleanup costs upfront, state laws incentivize companies to delay plugging as long as they can. Marginal well owners also collect a federal tax credit, meant to support jobs in the oil and gas industry when prices fall below a certain level. Last year, Diversified reported an $80 million benefit from the subsidy, or about one-fifth of what it got from selling oil and gas. In West Virginia there’s an additional benefit. Last year the legislature cut the severance tax on the lowest-producing wells in half. Diversified, by far the biggest beneficiary of the cut, told investors it “engaged with state regulators in West Virginia to help craft” the bill, which also directs revenue toward plugging orphaned wells.
[…] Hutson says there’s no cause for worry. He claims to be able to squeeze more gas out of old wells than other companies can and keep them going longer. On average, he figures his wells have an additional 50 years in them, which means there’s no hurry to start socking away money to plug them. It also means they could be spouting pollution long past 2050, the target date set by President Joe Biden for zeroing out emissions across the economy.
State regulators say Diversified hasn’t broken any rules by building an empire of dying wells. Nor has it violated any restrictions on methane emissions, because none apply. Indeed, state and federal policies—from plugging regulations to tax subsidies—encourage companies to do exactly what Diversified is doing: Keep almost dead assets on life support as long as possible, no matter how much they may damage the planet.
[…] We found methane leaks at most of the places we visited. Some sites showed signs of maintenance in recent months, but others looked more or less abandoned. […] At 59% of the sites we visited, emissions were significant enough to cause our detector to sound a safety alarm, indicating that the concentration of methane near the instrument’s sensor exceeded 5,000 parts per million. Normal air contains about 2 parts.
[…] Advocates for natural gas call it a cleaner fossil fuel because it releases about half the carbon dioxide as coal when burned. But there’s a catch: Left unburned, natural gas consists mostly of methane, which is much better at trapping heat. Released into the air, a ton of methane will cause at least 80 times more warming over the next 20 years than a ton of carbon dioxide. That’s one reason controlling methane is among the cheapest and quickest ways to slow climate change and limit the wildfires, heat waves, rising seas, and droughts it’s unleashing. According to one recent estimate, putting a lid on human-caused methane emissions could prevent as much as one-third of the warming expected in the next few decades.
[…] Only about 3% of gas needs to escape on its journey from wellhead to power plant to make it worse for the planet than coal. […] Two other peer-reviewed studies, using different measurement techniques and examining gas wells in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, found loss rates of 9% and 18% […] Taken together, the research suggests that gas from old wells in Appalachia is one of the dirtiest components of the U.S. energy system.The damage doesn’t end when these wells stop producing. Some continue to leak methane for years if they’re not properly plugged.
if you see one of these things take one for the team and light it on fire
oh god. in a very serious way that makes them much harder to fight. previous quadrofracts could be dealt with by use of a hammer to the mid-section. im assuming a well placed .45 round might do the trick now, but that means not getting noticed by fidobot. lets hope it has bad eyesight.
This is always where these damn thing were going and when we said it people would always say we were being killjoys and why couldn’t we “just enjoy the dancing Robots?” I guarantee these things will be deployed for “riot suppression” in only a few years.
THIS THING SHOOTS 6.5mm CREEDMOOR WHAT THE FUCK. FOR REFERENCE, THIS IS WHAT THAT ROUND LOOKS LIKE COMPARED TO A 9mm
GOOD TIME TO SHARE THE BATTERY INFO AGAIN SO YOU CAN SHUT THESE DUDES DONE
[image: first tweet in a thread by Dr. Sarah Taber, who is quote-tweeting The Verge’s tweet that reads “They’re putting guns on robot dogs now” and depicts the said robot dog. Dr. Taber’s full thread is quoted below:]
PSA for anyone who might be dealing with robot gun dogs, from a farm robot specialist who wasn’t really looking at robot wrangling from the public safety standpoint but here we are.
I haven’t worked w police/military robotics so I can’t speak to exactly how these are built.
But I can tell you, IME roboticists can be really naive about environmental conditions: making robots sturdy enough to handle rain, dirt, & other outdoor realities.
For example! I’ve worked w a couple startups that do fruit picking robots. They build the thing, *then* call me in to figure out how to clean it.
And half the time you can’t. Bc the picking arm has all these delicate cameras & servos that can’t get wet.
Folks who build robots at this time tend to be focused on making it do cool things like see, jump, run, & somersault. So they can release teaser videos that make everybody go “wow what a fancy robot”
They tend to be less focused on actual service performance: DURABILITY.
What’s this mean?
The joints, motors, cameras, & other sensors are more exposed than they should be.
It’s easy for water, road salt, grit, etc to get in there and cripple the robot.
I mean look at this thing. That housing’s got more nooks & crannies than a dang English muffin. You think that’s watertight?
For robots that work outside, not even watertight is good enough.
Farms add surfactants (like dish soap) to sprays. They make the sprays stick to leaves & get into all the nooks & crannies of the plant.
So farm robots need surfactant-proof seals. Not just waterproof.
Otherwise after a few hours in the field, you have a mix of dew, mud, soil & grit, and whatever surfactants you put in your last pesticide
mixing together & working their way into all the robot’s delicate parts. Scratching up the cameras. Jamming up the joints & motor.
If there’s any salt or acid in the mix, it’s even worse!
Some soils have a lil salt in them, or an acidic pH. It’s actually pretty common!
The salts or H+ ions work their way into the machine & corrode the shit out of EVERYTHING.
Bye-bye expensive farm robot!
Now let’s apply this to street settings.
Water. Dirt & grit. Road salt.
Just a little salt destroys metal! Even faster if it’s mixed with water, acids, surfactants, &/or grit.
And again, dirt & grit destroy joints.
They scratch up camera lenses & otherwise interfere with sensors.
They also scratch up any corrosion-proof coatings the engineers may have put on there, & expose the metals to water, salt, & acid.
These robots look super-vulnerable to normal wear & tear.
They look even more vulnerable to a super-soaker filled with common household items like salt, vinegar, & just a lil dish soap. Maybe with a lil diatomaceous earth to bump up the scrubbing power.
If they don’t go belly-up from short circuits immediately, they’re still looking at either an expensive tear-town, clean, & rebuild (takes the robot off the street for a few days)
or it’ll go belly-up within a week or two.
Both options are REALLY expensive & frustrating for own
Especially if they get hit with water/salt/acid/grit/soaps ASAP the moment they hit the street again.
Then the robots wind up spending more time in the shop on life support than actually doing their job.
That’s actually a pretty common outcome for automation!
Everyone gets excited about this fancy new machine that’s going to replace people. Then in real life it turns out to be broken all the time, can’t do shit, it’s a giant money pit, & eventually the sponsors give up.
idk just some thoughts on outdoor automation from someone who buries the corpses of failed robots for a living
it’s just really funny to me that these are supposed to be scary but probably can’t stand up to a water balloon full of pickle juice
uh… if you like “agricultural technology & the public good” you will love my book, for which there is a fundraiser with just a few days left [as of 2021 October 17] & it’s really close to the goal already 🍻
Serbia’s most fertile land can be found in the beautiful Jadar Valley. Small family farmers grow raspberries and plums, engage in beekeeping and sheep and goat herding. The valley borders mountains, is surrounded by water and home to thousands of sustainable multi-generational farms.
But instead of protecting it, the Serbian government has approved a project with multinational mining corporation Rio Tinto, for the exploitation of “Jadarite”, a lithium ore in the valley. [1] The government and the company have ignored scientists and mining experts who advise vehemently against the mine and are threatening to cause irreparable damage to the water, land, air and its people. Local citizens, who do not want to give up their sustainable agricultural land which has been in their families for generations, are being ignored. [2]
We refuse to let the Government destroy the Jadar Valley on our behalf. We reject the poisoning of water sources.
The process of separating chemically stable lithium from jadarite ore involves the use of concentrated sulfuric acid. The process would take place 20 km from the Drina River and use 300 cubic meters of water every hour, while the chemically treated water would be returned to the Jadar River.
The outpouring of inevitably polluted water, as well as underground waters which contain arsenic, mercury and lead, would contaminate entire river basins and continue their journey across the Jadar to the Drina and Sava, polluting not only Serbia but other countries’ water sources as well.
We reject the pollution of the air. Treatment with the above mentioned (and additional) aggressive acids produces toxic gases that can spread within a radius of over ten kilometers and which will corrode the skin and lungs of humans and animals.
We reject the endangerment of the population around the Jadar Valley in the interests of a multinational corporate profit. Rio Tinto has promised 700 new jobs, but forgot to mention that 19,000 people are set to be displaced or severely effected.
Rio Tinto in 2020, destroyed a 45,000 year old sacred Australian Aboriginal cave. [3] The company and its representatives have been repeatedly convicted of fraud and paid billions of dollars in damages [4] and fines for illegal destruction of land, but continue to ravage and destroy natural environment around the world. The company is accused of participating in war crimes in Papua New Guinea [5], where a ten-year civil war broke out due to the presence of their mine.
This petition is just one of the first steps in the fight against this mine, in which we stand behind the Serbian Constitution and the inhabitants of the Jadar Valley, as well as all the citizens of the Republic of Serbia who stand to suffer the catastrophic consequences of this ecologically disastrous project. To this day, we have not seen a public interest analysis for this venture, an analysis which is a legislative mandate in the actualization of such a project.
The citizens of Serbia have the right to clean air, clean water and healthy living conditions. Stop Rio Tinto’s dirty lithium mine and protect the people, our heritage, our environment and the rivers of the Jadar Valley. United we can save our environment.
References:
[1] The mine’s spatial plan covers 2,030 hectares, including 22 villages around Loznica and Krupanj, and was adopted without any long-term lithium exploitation plan, and without confirmation of reserves, on the basis of which the real impact of the mine on life and environment could be determined. Many agreements between the government and Rio Tinto have not been made public, even after they have been legally sought by citizens, indicating a serious lack of transparency and potential corruption on the government’s behalf.
the cia owns the international dope trade that’s how they finance themselves so the senate can’t control them with budget cuts. pretty sure they took over italy’s heroin market right after ww2 and then just kept things going but its been a while since i dug into the research material
I recommend Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance. He’s the first (I think) journalist to expose the CIA-Contra link to American public and he died a gruesome death in return! (RIP)
Yes, perhaps there are better book about this out there but I haven’t read them yet.
yeah, RIP to Gary Webb who “comitted suicide” by shooting himself in the back of the head twice 💔😔
Huh. So this streamer buys a gas station that costs $4million but only has to pay $1million upfront but by taking out a massive loan to pay for the $1million and then using our terrible tax law “loopholes” based off of depreciating the speculative value of the property she received a $1,100,000 tax deduction, getting a net gain of $100,000. It’s a great (intentional) example of why wealth inequality is easily widened and purposefully upheld. No poor person could possibly get those loans.
