Savage face of capitalism: Film -Texas drought conflict between citizens and fracking miners on water use

According the Climate Spectator, the state is heading for a major energy crisis in the next three or four years, and that will severely affect its future living standards and economic growth. The problem for NSW is this low-cost gas supply is disappearing. The demand for gas in eastern Australia will triple in the next three years.

A diminished gas supply means prices for goods and services will go up too. Additional flow-on effects are company closures and job losses as some industries become incapable of absorbing the additional costs.

The NSW Government introduced legislation to restrict gas exploration. Exploration is now excluded over much of the Sydney Basin, the part of the state most likely to yield CSG. The government can minimise risks using the knowledge already at hand to regulate the industry, continue to monitor the process, and take a longer term approach to fully understand the environmental impacts though research funding.

It's an admission of accepting the worst case scenario of lack of energy, and spiraling population growth.

CSG and New South Wales' looming energy crisis at http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/8/12/energy-markets/csg-and-new-south-wales-looming-energy-crisis#ixzz2blCnGxsQ

Read more: at http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/8/12/energy-markets/csg-and-new-south-wales-looming-energy-crisis#ixzz2blCnGxsQ
at http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/8/12/energy-markets/csg-and-new-south-wales-looming-energy-crisis#ixzz2bjPldmcB

There is a contrary opinion that it's all a fabrication of the CSG industry.
“This is a scare campaign with no basis in fact, the public is being completely misled with a lot of postulating and huff and puff from the coal seam gas (CSG) industry, which is desperate to develop as much gas as it can and ship it out to Asia at high Asian prices,” said Matthew Wright Executive Director of energy security think-tank Zero Emissions Australia.

Matthew Wright of Beyond Zero Emissions, says “NSW never supplied its own gas, was never self-sufficient and therefore cannot run out. The supplies that are already connected and available to NSW consumers from Victoria and South Australia aren’t about to run out any time soon either. “The push for developing more gas fields is about exports, fossil gas exports at prices that are 300-500 per cent greater than historic domestic prices and with an open, unregulated market (as exists with petrol) the price will no longer be set here in Australia.” -

“The future is clean zero emissions renewable energy, that doesn’t cost the earth,” said Mr Wright.

NSW gas crisis a fabricated myth of the export CSG industry at http://ccag.org.au/csg/nsw-gas-crisis-a-fabricated-myth-of-the-export-csg-industry/#sthash.sZy84xjp.dpuf

Fracking boom sucks away precious water from beneath the ground, leaving cattle dead, farms bone-dry and people thirsty. Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry’s outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse. In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted. Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart’s case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking. Even as the drought bore down, even as the water levels declined, the oil industry continued to demand water and those with water on their land were willing to sell it. The road west of town was lined with signs advertising “fresh water”, where tankers can take on a box-car-sized load of water laced with industrial chemicals. Fracking is a powerful drain on water supplies. In adjacent Crockett county, fracking accounts for up to 25% of water use, according to the groundwater conservation district. But Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, argues fracking is not the only reason Texas is going dry – and nor is the drought. The latest shocks to the water system come after decades of overuse by ranchers, cotton farmers, and fast-growing thirsty cities. “We have large urban centres sucking water out of west Texas to put on their lands. We have a huge agricultural community, and now we have fracking which is also using water,” she said. And then there is climate change. A Texan tragedy- ample oil no water Eight of the 15 fastest-growing large U.S. cities and towns for the year ending July 1, 2012 were in Texas. Texas led all states with an increase of 427,000 people over the same period, according to census estimates released in December. Two-thirds of the increase comes from Hispanics, while the population of non-Hispanic whites — the group Texans call "Anglos" — is barely growing at all. Anglos are no longer the majority in Texas, and Hispanics are expected to outnumber Anglos within about a decade. More than half of the usable and potentially usable freshwater in Texas comes from groundwater. State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said rising temperatures, which result in greater evaporation rates, will also contribute to the depletion of water supplies statewide. Every fracking job requires 2 million to 4 million gallons of water, according to the Groundwater Protection Council. The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has estimated that the 35,000 oil and gas wells used for fracking consume between 70 billion and 140 billion gallons of water each year. Fracking is already straining US water supplies There are substitutes for oil, but not for water. We can produce food without oil, but not without water.The bottom line is that water constraints – augmented by soil erosion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, a plateauing of yields in major producing areas, and climate change – are making it more difficult to expand world food production.