The Golden Gate is 75

The golden gate is a bridge I often use as I live just north of the modern wonder.  It is perhaps the most picturesque bridge in the world.  I find it to be the most beautiful bridge every time I pass over it.  I will repeat a blog I did in October 2011 about the bridge to commemorate the birthday of my red star.

It is mid October and my favorite time of the year. The San Francisco Bay Area always has great warm weather this time of the year and for about two weeks this chilly city feels like the south of France. I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday and the temperature on the bridge was over 80 degrees compared with the normal 55 degrees. Many motorists were out and about in convertibles and throngs of tourists were walking or bicycling on the bridge taking in the marvelous view of Alcatraz, the bay and the city skyline.

The toll on the bridge is now $6 if you pay with cash and $5 if you use a FasTrak transponder. The toll is only paid in the south bound direction and northbound travel is free. I of course have a FasTrak transponder as I am a cheap skate and also I want to speed through the toll booth. This time though I stayed to the very right to pay my toll and was in a cash or FasTrak lane. I did this as I wanted to exit along the Pacific coastal road just after the toll booth. At the toll booth, I was behind a motor cycle and the guy on the cycle had to fork out $6 of cash for his toll even though he was on a motor cycle and not in a large SUV. A kind of stupid pricing policy by the bridge authority as there is no way that a motor cycle causes the same wear and tear to the bridge roadway surface as an Escalade.

I know that during rush hour periods that the bridge does give a discount to carpools with a transponder and this saves the carpoolers another $2 making the cost of the crossing at $3. If a motor cyclist has a transponder they too receive the carpool discount. It makes sense for motor cyclist to receive the carpool rate during peak traffic hours as the intent of the discount is to decrease traffic congestion. When the bridge first opened in 1937 the toll was 50 cents in each direction. Interestingly back then, an extra 5 cent charge was levied if the vehicle carried more than 3 passengers. I guess some bright spark who worked for Standard Oil came up with the idea to penalize folks for being green back then.

In 1968 the north bound ride became free and the cost of the toll to south bound motorists was still 50 cents. Just shows that back then after the 30 year bonds to build the bridge were paid off, the motorists were given a break. Now that thousands of toll collectors are collecting retirement, that the bridge has been seismically updated, and that people are always taken for the ride we pay 12 times as much to cross the bridge compared with 1968. Given the beauty of the bridge and given the view from the bridge I actually find the $5 toll using FasTrak to be a bargain. Next year will be the 75 anniversary of the opening of the bridge and I hope to be one of the million people who participate in the event. While I love the color green there is no doubt that the Golden Gate Bridge is a red beauty and would look dumb painted green.

Several readers asked me if the photo is real. Yes it is it comes from the official web site of the Golden Gate Bridge and was taken by Frank Fennema Photography,
September 12, 2009, at 4:58am. http://goldengatebridge.org/photos/current.php#beauty

The First State

As you all know us geeks who love thermodynamics play around with equations of state. I tend to also dabble in energy policy as it relates to one of the largest equations of state and that is the United States. Today I will deal with a smaller but important state in our United States. I will deal with Delaware the First State. Some friends in the first state asked me to review a permit application that Bloom Energy submitted in November of 2011 for a proposed energy center to be built on some farmland in coastal Delaware. I thought the idea of reading a permit application would be tedious and boring but as I have opined on several times in this blog, the Bloom Box is couched in mystery and probably is not capable of performing to the hyped claims that were made on the 60 Minutes episode in February 2010. Therefore I was happy to read a lengthy permit application to determine if Bloom actually did provide in this public document any clues to how their Pandora’s Box operated. For those who want to check, the application was dated November 11, 2011 and is titled the Coastal Zone Permit Application Bloomenergy Diamond State Generation Partners, LLC. Red Lion Energy Center Project.



What I did not expect was the vast treasures of information or misinformation that unfolded when I opened the Pandora Box of this 163 page long pdf file. On page 6 of the application I quote directly from Bloom

“The Red Lion Fuel Cell Installation will provide up to 47 MW of electrical power that

will be connected to the PJM electrical grid. The project will consist of 235

Bloomenergy ES-5700 Energy Server fuel cells that will utilize pipeline quality natural

gas. The project will be built in phases, the first phase consisting of 27 MW of capacity,

and the second phase an additional 20 MW.

Each fuel cell has a base load electrical output of 200 kW with a maximum natural gas

usage of 1.32 MMBtu/hr (i.e., 1,282 SCFM at 1030 Btu/SCF heating value). The fuel

cells will produce electricity at 480V which will be transformed to 138 kV before being

sent to the nearby Delmarva Power Red Lion substation.”



Well a second grader knows there are 60 minutes in an hour that SCFM is standard cubic feet per minute and that multiplying 1,282 SCFM at 1030 BTU/SCF will yield 1.32million BTU/minute. Of course at this rate of energy usage the bloom box will be less than 1% efficient so I believe the thermodynamic neophyte who submitted this application meant to state that the Box needs 1,282 standard cubic feet per hour so I will let this basic error pass for now.



After reading over a hundred pages of technoblab I found the pearl of information I was looking for on page 161 in Table 1 Offset Of Average PJM Emissions. I found that the Bloom Box emits 884 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of power generated. Viola the Green Machine finally had some official data from Bloom in a permit application whereby a sophomore level student of chemical engineering could vector in on the efficiency of the box that has been cloaked in mystery. The US EPA tells us that for each million BTUs of energy used by fueling with natural gas 117 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted. Viola dividing the 884 by 117 we get the Bloom Box needs 7,555,600 BTUs to generate one megawatt hour of electric power. The actual energy contained in one megawatt hour of electric power is 3,412,141 BTUs. Now dividing the 3,412,141 into 7,555,600 we get the real efficiency of the Box to equal 45.16%. Let’s now return to the claim of 1,282 SCF of natural gas for a moment. Bloom meant to type this quantity per hour, so one may ask is this the real gas usage? Hell no is the answer. We take the 7,555,600 BTU/hr and divide by 1,030 BTU/SCF and get 7,335.9 SCF of natural gas per hour for one megawatt (1,000 kilowatts) of capacity. So for the 200 kilowatt bloom box we will need 7,335.9 multiply by 0.2 which equals 1,467.2 SCFH per bloom box not the 1,282. Ok now we have that the whole permit application is inconsistent on the gas usage versus the actual emissions and the device is 45.16% efficient based on the higher heating value of natural gas.

In the application Bloom goes to great lengths to explain how clean the box is and how the folks in Delaware can breathe easily thanks to the 235 boxes doing their stuff. Well the 47 megawatts of Bloom boxes cost what 350 megawatts of combined cycle natural gas power generation will cost. The combined cycle plants are 53.3% efficient on higher heating value using the same fuel of natural gas and for the same investment the Red Lions are proposing can yield 8 times as much clean power for the poor folks in Delaware who are ingesting poisonous air. Wow how much better would the air be in the first state with a far greater substitution of clean power from a more efficient source of generation such as combined cycle that is 8 times as large as the proposed bloom is off the rose station?



Now the kicker because of the low efficiency of the Bloom boxes and their high capital costs the citizens of the first state will pay Bloom over $200 per megawatt hour of power delivered into their grid. In January 2012 the US Energy Information Agency reported that the levelized cost of power over 30 years generated from and advanced gas fired combined cycle power station is estimated to cost $65.5 per megawatt hour (source Table 1. Estimated Levelized Cost of New Generation Resources, 2017 EIA report January 23, 2012). So now we get what Bloom is doing to the first staters. They are charging them 3 times as much for dirtier power. This means the marginal cost of avoided carbon dioxide for the Bloom box is actually infinite. This results when a dirtier technology costs more. The Europeans went bust with a carbon cap and trade of about $20 per ton. How fast will Delaware go bust with an infinite carbon tax? I think it could be a matter of minutes not hours even with natural gas flowing at 1,467.2 standard cubic feet per hour. The sign above says welcome to Delaware the first state and small wonder. It also says home of tax free shopping. They should add another line to the sign between tax free shopping and buckle up and that should say “except for electricity”.



Of course the pdf file of the application meant to use the following meaning of pdf: Please Delaware Forget that back in 1776 you were the first state to end taxation without representation. I have no doubt that the Vice President of the United States played a role in being a cultivator or perhaps he is just blooming asleep, I have no doubt that the ex Vice President of the United States who now makes a living in a blooming nursery being a green thumb played a role in bringing you this expensive and dirty power, and I have no doubt that the civil servants in the first state had their eyes wide shut when they approved the error filled application without even batting an eyelid at how inefficient, dirty, and expensive the power from the now open Pandora box is. In Big Brother opening the Pandora Box can sometimes get the contestant into trouble. In this case I hope opening this Pandora’s Box actually gets Big Brother into trouble. That one director and major investor of Bloom has the sitting President of the United States over for dinner, that another director of Bloom is the ex Secretary of State of the United States and was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that the sitting Vice President of the United States hails from Delaware points to fact that the biggest of brothers can submit pure thermodynamic nonsense in a permit application to a coastal commission to convert farmland to a power station and gain approval for that power plant to nowhere except high prices. Yes approval was given on May 4, 2012. Citizens of the first state and the remaining forty nine states wake up and smell the roses. You are living in and paying for a reality show that makes the house of Kardasians look like fully bright scholars even with the dimmer switch turned on!!

I need Lithium

I have opined so many times that A 123 was a thermodynamic goner.  Now it is really on its last legs and has gone into the financial death spiral of borrowing money from vultures.    The interest rate is not that of a raptor but the company has to pay back 1/28^th of the principal every two weeks and the amount borrowed is $50 million.  I hope that Chu Chu has asked the Treasury Secretary of the US Mr. Tiny Tim to make sure our taxpayer loans to the company have preferential position when it comes to the cash and assets of the soon to be dead battery company.  No word from Chu Chu or Tiny Tim yet on the disaster but Al Gore is still hoping that his Fisker will save him by a whisker from this short circuit.  Actually I do hear that the State of Delaware (the intended home of the Fisker Assembly Plant) will shorten their famous half mile international speedway to only 100 yards so the Fisker Dogma can perform its final lap in short circuit and disappear like the billions of tax payer money that were wasted on A 123 and its partner Fisker.  Today the stock of A 123 closed at $1.03 so I suggest a renaming of the company to A One Zero Three.  Fisker does not have a stock that trades but it should be renamed “Not So Oldsmobile” as it will die long before its fifth birthday.

This has been a terrible week for Al and his Kleiner Perkins team.  Their bio fool wonder child Amyris is trading at $2.04 a share.  Down from a high of $30.78 a share when all Gringos except the Green Machine believed that their sugar water to diesel trick using e-coli was for real.  I knew it was a slight of hand and that there was a bug in the system so to speak.    Yeah Amyris is part of the Kleiner green portfolio that Kleiner partner Al Gore put together and then sold the department of entropy the bill of goods.  Even the President was still talking “advanced biofuels” in the 2012 state of the union address.  Bet you that word will not be mentioned in the 2013 state of the union speech.  In 2011 the President referred to plain old biofuels as our “Sputnik Moment”.    I say the whole biofuels story of the past 12 years has been our Apollo 1 moment.

Tesla still manages to defy gravity and is still playing musical chairs even though there is only one electric chair in the room.  They will launch the model S a month early and will start repaying the department of entropy our loans in December.  It will be rather funny if Chu Chu is still the secretary of entropy and actually does get a few loan dollars back and then has to ask his boss what to do with the money.  The whole thing reminds me of the joke of how to make a million dollars?  You start with ten million dollars!  I no longer wear a hat but I have ordered a ten gallon Stetson to eat when we get back the $465 million Chu Chu handed Tesla to build a few tens of thousands of very expensive cars for the rich and famous.   Of course the liquid in the 10 gallon hat will be 80-proof vodka as that is what the fermentation of carbohydrates should really yield.   Time to say cheers to the ethanol and of course cheers to state of union addresses that think we are un-advanced bio fools.

Lord Kelvin

This week was a wild and crazy week for matters green. Amyris the gangrene sugar-to-diesel company fired three executives including one of their founders and claimed they now have a strategy for growth. I doubt it will be in the area of biofuels and they will claim they can make high value cosmetics and specialty chemicals from their bio-fermentation of cane sugar without admitting total defeat in transportation fuels. Their stock is at 10% of their high just a year ago. First Solar the US based but Malaysian and German manufacturer of PV cells using cadmium telluride chemistry also hit the skids and is also below 10% of its peak stock price. First Solar is a far bigger company than Amyris so the wipe out of 90% of its market capitalization has meant an over than $10 billion loss for the shareholders.




Of Course Steven Chu has not said a word about his green darlings that are dying on the vine and the President has bigger problems in China than fighting a PV war. We have a blind human rights activist trying to flee the police state and wanting Hilary Clinton to do something for him and his family. The solution will be for the Chinese to give the poor fellow a visa to come study in the USA. I feel terribly sorry for the blind activist who can now clearly see how incompetent the Federal Government of the US is when it comes to any policy whether energy or foreign.



The sales data for new motor vehicles sold in the US in April have just been released. The Prius is doing great and their short range (10 mile) smaller battery plug in introduced only 2 months ago outsold all other plug in brands combined. I guess the design guys at Toyota read my Senate testimony that 10 miles electric only range is the economic limit for plug ins. I also opined in that testimony that even with a short range the plug in Prius still makes no sense compared with the traditional plain old hybrid Prius without plug in capability. The traditional Prius sold extremely well in April and continues to make the most sense for buyers who wish to purchase a hybrid. Also in the first quarter of 2012 more than 53% of all new cars and trucks sold in the US were equipped with a 4-cylinder engine. This is a total change from five years ago when less than a quarter of all new vehicles sold were equipped with 4-cylinder engines. I am proud of my fellow Americans who have dumped the V8.



Shell Oil has finally pulled the plug on its JV with Iogen to produce cellulosic ethanol. Iogen had this hair-brain scheme to produce ethanol from wheat-straw in Manitoba and they had Royal Dutch Shell under their spell for almost a decade. Shell has now pulled the plug on the Iogen alchemy as well as the algae to diesel nonsense that Cellana was pushing. OK so we have Shell coming back to thermodynamics but I am sure some “Occupy Oil Patch” morons will claim it is a conspiracy against bio-fuels and that big oil did not want it to happen. I have to chuckle when these thermodynamic neophytes make speeches about us needing 21st century energy technology and the oil companies are stuck in the 19th century. I wish they could only read a bit about Lord Kelvin and his statement in 1851 that “No process is possible in which the sole result is the absorption of heat from a reservoir and its complete conversion into work”. Old Kelvin was a man for all centuries and the Occupy folks need to “move on” and just get the fact that shift like entropy happens.

The Army To The Rescue

For the life of me I did not know why A 123 had an increase in its stock price over the past two or three days.  The news came out today that the US Army came to its rescue.  Of course after the Department of Energy wasted over $100 million on this Betamax junk, the Army needs to lend a helping hand.  The Army is testing a prototype more fuel efficient hybrid fighting vehicle that includes A 123 lithium ion batteries.  Yeah the army wants to be fuel efficient.  Did the army not read the news that an A 123 battery caused a massive explosion in a specially built lab of General Motors that injured a technician and blew out an 8 inch thick special purpose steel door in the lab?  Structural damage was also caused to the lab.  But the Army can safely deploy a fighting vehicle in a war zone with the same lithium batteries on the premise that we should be green when fighting the enemy. 

How dumb can military intelligence be!    The enemy in a combat situation will be able to make our military vehicles explode more viciously if they simply aim at the battery pack.  If the US Army wants to save fuel why not avoid unnecessary wars and simply use the vehicles during parades on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day?  Better still as we all like soldiers marching in perfect step why even have vehicles driving in the parade?  I have a suggestion for the Pentagon.  Why not equip electric bicycles with A 123 batteries and instead of soldiers being in an infantry division they could be the new first electric cavalry division and win the West in skirmishes where the enemy only uses bows and arrows to wage war.   Imagine a scene in the sequel to Blazing Saddles where the arrow fired by Chief Electron Volt scores a direct hit to the battery pack under the saddle of the cavalry officer named Major Mega What.  The army has the perfect solution for the deployment of the new lithium ion powered hybrid fighting vehicle.  Of course the GIs who will be assigned to use the fuel efficient fighting vehicle will wear bright green camouflage and the vehicles will only be deployed to protect a plantation of cane sugar that is the source of the ethanol fuel for the engine in the vehicle.  The army will claim carbon neutrality while fighting a war.  How can something be neutral and yet fight wars?

Brazil Needs Booze

Brazil leads the world in blending ethanol into gasoline for transportation fuel. Their large land mass and their large sugar cane crop helped support an industry that over the past twenty years became the darling of the lefties at Cal Bezerkeley. Many papers were written at that fine institution that ethanol from cane has a positive carbon footprint and that while ethanol from corn in the US may not have a positive carbon footprint we need not worry as ethanol from cane sugar will dominate the world stage for this bio fool. Fast forward and we now find out Brazil cannot supply their own needs of ethanol and they have become net importers of the fuel. From whom do they get the fuel? From the US of course and the ethanol certainly did not come from cane sugar in Hawaii, it came from corn in the Midwest. Brazil is so short of ethanol they have cut down the fraction of ethanol in gasoline blend from 25% to 20%.

Our government wants us to increase our fraction of ethanol in gasoline above 10% and the fuel fools at Bezerkeley are all love this as they dream of green while ignoring thermodynamics. Of course Brazil discovered large fossil fuel reserves and this is not 1979 in Brazil when they were impoverished and could not afford oil imports after the oil shock. Brazil needed to become self-sufficient in transportation fuels and the cane sugar ethanol did help. However what really helped was the discovery of massive fields of oil off shore of Brazil and exploitation of these fields allowed Brazil to become a major oil producer. The Brazilian economy has been propelled by the Chinese economy the Chinese need for Brazilian iron ore and Soy Beans. Over the past decade trade between Brazil and China has grown 20 fold. Over the past decade the only thing at Bezerkeley that has grown is the cost students must pay to attend university in our bankrupt state.

The equally dumb staff at the California Energy Commission in Sacramento mandated the need for low carbon transportation fuels and mistakenly they continue to think that natural gas is not a low carbon fuel. They still have this dream of electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. While Brazil actually has had massive economic growth in the last decade, we have had nearly none except for Apple, Facebook, Google and a few other social media companies. Our Silicon Valley is depleted of all silicon and perhaps one hundred thousandth of the microelectronic circuits fabricated each year on planet may actually come from Silicon Valley where it all started. Industry has been driven away and the Fabs I designed at Intel, National Semi, VLSI, Xerox PARC, and others have been dismantled and their equipment sold to China or just sits on a scrap heap.

The team at Bezerkeley can write academic papers that cane sugar ethanol is green but even the verdant and large country of Brazil has no space to increase their crop. More and more of the world’s cane sugar is now grown on irrigated land and that irrigated cane sugar actually has massive carbon and water footprints. It had to happen that Brazil could not simply propel their fleet of vehicles on cane sugar based ethanol. Even a weed that grows fast but yet relies on photosynthesis cannot propel almost a billion vehicles on the planet and 60 million vehicles in Brazil. C’mon folks over the past decade many millions of people saw their lives improve because of economic growth driven primarily from China. These people want cars not bicycles and cars need fuel not foot power so let’s all move toward the Prius or a much smaller version of the Prius that should be called the Minus. The one thing that remains constant in Brazil is excellent football. I hope that when they all drive in cars they do not lose their innate skill to kick a ball into a net. I still have dreams of being Pele, but I certainly do not have dreams of being the governator of our decaying yet once golden state. The Kelvinator maybe, as old Kelvin was top notch in thermodynamics. One can still buy a Kelvinator refrigerator in Argentina but like Maradona was not Pele, Argentina is not Brazil when it comes to economic or football miracles.

Fracking and Elkader Iowa

A really interesting week. A One Two Three continues to stumble and caused a lab explosion and injury to a lab technician with a battery they sent to General Motors for testing. I will not dwell on this company that is a thermodynamic joke. Bright Source the other heavily funded DOE DOA company decided to pull their IPO as they simply could not get the share price they needed. That says to me investors have smartened up and won’t fork out bucks like they did on AONE, KIOR, AMRS and other want to be green companies. The Chinese continue to manufacture polysilicon and sell the starting material for many solar cells at cash production costs. I guess when your government funds you it is possible to even sell your products below cash production costs. Solar Millennium who gave up on thermal solar in favor of PV have now simply given up completely on the US projects they intended to develop and the US DOE intended to fund. I guess we will have to wait till the third millennium for them to reappear. So the Green Machine was spot on and the second law of thermo arrested these fake-outs who were going to make our lives carbon neutral. I guess we all go back to natural gas that is now very affordable and the companies that are involved in this industry have seen their share prices soar rather than tank. Such companies are WPRT, CLNE, LNG, and GTLS. I am not making any stock recommendation just simply pointing out these companies are on the right side of the second law of thermodynamics.

The President signed an executive order to set up a Whitehouse based oversight committee for the streamlined oversight of fracking reserves for production of hydrocarbons. Finally in this election year the administration wants a coordinated approach to the single industry that actually created jobs, brought down costs, helped displace coal and hence lower carbon emissions, and may provide the US with a product we can actually export. Below I have copied an article from the Washington Times that reported on this landmark event. The person chairing the oversight committee is Heather Zichal. No doubt a very intelligent fairly young woman who never studied thermodynamics but let’s give her a chance as she was born in Iowa and I was educated in thermodynamics at Iowa State. Heather now is your chance to shine unlike the PV and green energy companies the department of entropy funded. It is quite amazing that a 36 year old person who came from Elkader Iowa may actually play a larger role in real energy policy than the winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Peace. I looked up Elkader and it is the county seat of Clayton County. Very interestingly back in 1846 when the town was founded it was named after an Algerian Leader of the time. Wiki lists the following: The city is named after Algerian leader Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri. When the community was platted in 1846, the founders, Timothy Davis, John Thompson, and Chester Sage decided to name it for the young Algerian who was leading his people in resisting the French colonial takeover of Algeria. Heather let’s hope you are not an Al Qadaffi when it comes to energy policy. Please God your town was not named after Al Qaeda but I have to say the pronunciation is bloody close. If I was mayor of Elkader Iowa I would think about a name change to Frackville Iowa.

By Ben Wolfgang

-

The Washington Times

Friday, April 13, 2012

In a move that immediately drew praise from across the energy industry, President Obama on Friday issued an executive order to better coordinate federal oversight of “fracking,” the popular but controversial natural gas extraction method.

The order establishes an “interagency working group” consisting of members from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, Energy Department, National Economic Council and other bodies. At least 10 federal departments or agencies are currently mulling new regulations of the gas industry, or have commissioned studies of its environmental impact.

The sheer number of potential rulemakers has caused many industry insiders to fear confusing or overlapping guidelines, which, some analysts say, could greatly hamper domestic oil and gas production. The new working group, Mr. Obama said, is designed to “ensure coordination among the appropriate federal entities.”

“By helping to power our transportation system, greater use of natural gas can also reduce our dependence on foreign oil. And with appropriate safeguards, natural gas can provide a cleaner source of energy than other fossil fuels,” the order reads in part. “It is vital that we take full advantage of our natural gas resources, while giving American families and communities confidence that natural gas and cultural resources, air and water quality, and public health and safety will not be compromised.”

Mr. Obama’s announcement comes just as the November presidential election kicks into high gear, with energy policy, and the administration’s perceived antagonism toward fossil fuels, shaping up to be a key issue in the race. It also comes as the fracking boom has produced stocks of natural gas so large that prices are now hitting record lows.

Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has lately made increased American energy production a focal point during campaign speeches, and has accused the administration of seeking to limit U.S. research and production. Many Republicans in Congress have painted the administration’s EPA as the determined enemy of natural gas, with some members accusing Mr. Obama of waging a war on the industry.

Friday’s olive branch, which could help to reduce tension between the administration and the oil and gas sector, was met with enthusiasm from industry leaders.

“We’re pleased the White House recognizes the need to coordinate the efforts of 10 federal agencies that are reviewing, studying or proposing new regulations on natural gas development and [fracking],” said Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. “We have called on the White House to rein in these uncoordinated activities to avoid unncecessary and overlapping federal regulatory efforts and are pleased to see forward progress.”

Barry Russell, president and CEO of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said in a statement that the order “has a very good intent,” and he hopes the revamped regulatory framework “provides the administration with a more comprehensive understanding of the federal government’s increasing regulatory grasp on the industry.”

The Marcellus Shale Coalition, which represents drilling firms in Pennsylvania and other areas of the Marcellus, one of the richest known gas deposits in the world, is offering to work closely with the administration in the coming months.

“We remain eager to provide real-time, on-the-ground insight in an effort to ensure that common-sense regulations are in place, which is essential to leveraging the countless benefits of America’s natural gas resources,” said coalition President Kathryn Klaber.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the move lessens the potential impact of looming federal rules. Later this year, the EPA will release a long-awaited report on the environmental safety of fracking, the use of water, sand and chemicals to crack underground rock and release vast quantities of fuel. Many industry analysts expect the report to call for sharp new restraints on drilling.