Sunday, March 3, 2013

What the Frack is Going On?

     Me and Markie got to talkin' the other day and he tells me there's this big stink going on in Minnesota about something called fracking.  Like I knew what that was.  So he clues me in about it being a new way to get oil out of the ground using sand.  Seems most of the wells we'd dug in the past had been missing the boat and most of the oil.  This new sand blasting method can go down, then to the side, and then to the side of the side.  Old wells can become new again.  We can get blood from the turnip.  Suck it all up.
     The downside, yup everything has its downside, comes on two or more levels.  In Minnesota and Wisconsin we've got a whole lot of sand.  And the frackers want all of it they can lay their hands on.  That's good for the sand owners.  Unless it means a whole lot of hill removal or open pit mines.  That's not good.  And there seems to be an issue concerning destruction of aquifers where the new drilling is done.  In a drying up world, screwin' up clean water is the last thing we want do.
     The oil dudes say there's no problem whatsoever.  Environmentalists say it's one more nail in the coffin.  Markie leans toward it being destructive and having a new source of oil simply fuels an already deteriorating climate problem.
     Me, I got to mulling it over and came up with this :  Oil barons like money so they're not gonna back off 'cause some tree huggers say fracking is dangerous.  The bleeding liberal courts back the huggers and put a stop to any sand mining.  Not thwarted the barons throw a tanker full of cash at the problem and some pissant chemist in Malaysia comes up with an abrasive plastic in micro-pellet form that costs a buck a ton to make and works even better than sand.
     So here's the scoop, by 2021 fifty percent of all oil is used to make plastic pellets that are pumped into the ground to get more oil so as to make more pellets.  Profits are booming.  By 2030 most cars are running off of hydrogen fuel cells and a full ninety percent of all oil goes into pellets.  Kind of a Ponzi Scheme but so long as the oil keeps flowing, so does the money as one side of the corporation sells to the other and moves the freight with its own trucks and tankers charging exorbitant rates all the way.
     Parallel to this is the rise of full automation of the drilling and pellet making process.  No humans are needed.  Anyhow, by 2063 the planet has more or less fried from global warming and only a handful of people are left down in Antarctica farming okra.  But the oil mining and pellet manufacturing robots are still hard at it 'til they've churned every acre of dry ground into a level plain.
     Here's where I run into a brick wall.  I was gonna have the robots turn the whole planet inside out and maybe make Earth into a robot that falls in love with Venus.  Then, in an effort to get to know her better, miscalculates the necessary trajectory and falls into the sun crying, "Oh, the lack of humanity!" but that seemed a little weird, even to me.