Over the last several days, a handful of news outlets have reported scuffles that resulted on a small stretch of Olympia railroad tracks. Early Wednesday, Olympia’s finest cleared a week-old encampment of protestors off their makeshift home.
Headlines call attention to the friction. They draw attention to the protestors’ purpose. They don’t focus on a major issue of the Olympia protestor’s sit-in: these guys were “protesting” in the wrong place.
Whether you realize it or not, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has been benefitting your everyday life for the past seventy years. As fracking has grown in prominence, it has drawn controversy every step of the way.
If you listen to the handful of people who plant themselves outside otherwise productive fracking sites throughout the United States, you might believe that hydraulic fracturing is the worst thing to happen to planet Earth since the last Ice Age. For all their dogged protesting and legal battling, anti-fracking protestors have been unable to provide substantial numbers on quite the same scale as the oil and gas industry.
Now that the price of oil is once again climbing, there are some among the oil and gas industry who worry that the industry won’t be able to find enough qualified employees to fill the gaps in the field. After several thousand job losses between 2015 and 2016, the prospective pool of oil and gas employees is smaller than ever. However, there is room for hope, because two significant factors are working in favor of oil and gas companies throughout the world.
In November, the voters of Broomfield, Colorado will be confronted with another initiative designed to stymie production of future oil and gas projects in the area. Ballot Question 301 is a controversial amendment to Broomfield’s home rule charter that would place unprecedented control of oil and gas development in the hands of the Broomfield city council.
Question 301 asserts that oil and gas development in Broomfield should “only occur in a manner that does not adversely impact the health, safety and welfare of Broomfield’s residents in their workplaces, their homes, their schools, and public parks.” Though it sounds innocuous enough, Question 301 has troubling implications for the people and the economy of Broomfield.
Following a vote for independence on September 25, the region of Iraqi Kurdistan has erupted in a fresh wave of violence. In addition to the inevitable destruction and loss of life that will result, violence in and around the city of Kirkuk could have a huge impact on the world’s economy, most notably in the oil and gas industry.
The conflict may be a world away, but the discord in the Kurdish region of Iraq is going to show up at an oil pump near you.