Former Mobil VP Louis Allstadt Comes Down Hard on Hydraulic Fracturing by Michael Teague, April 24, 2014, Equities.com
Until his retirement in 2000, and shortly before the bacchanal of supermajor couplings that opened the new millenium, Louis Allstadt was the Vice President of Mobil Oil. Before the merger with Exxon created the world’s single-largest and most complex publicly traded oil and gas company, ExxonMobil (XOM) , Allstadt had been with the company for some 31 years and, aside from being in charge of Mobil’s Japanese marketing and refining operations, he also oversaw the company’s being grafted on to Lee Raymond’s Exxon juggernaut.
Now, over a decade after his retirement, he has become better-known as a vocal opponent of the very technology that is currently driving the US “shale boom,” namely hydraulic fracturing. … On Tuesday, Allstadt appeared at a press conference in Albany called by Elected Officials to Protect New York, where, among other things, he said “Making fracking safe is simply not possible, not with the current technology, or with the inadequate regulations being proposed…”
… Allstadt pointed out at the conference that a fracked well can use 50 to 100 times more toxic chemicals than traditionally drilled wells, and, among other things, challenged the notion that the technology has “been around a long time,” saying that the modern advances in fracking technology make it far more dangerous than in its previous iterations.
He also touched on leakage of methane at the new wells, from which he says the harmful fumes are leaking at “far greater rates than were previously estimated.”
… Tuesday’s press conference follows a curious incident dating back to mid-February, when news got out that ExxonMobil’s current CEO Rex Tillerson had himself been involved in an anti-fracking lawsuit due to a well that was to be drilled near his home. Allstadt penned an open letter to Tillerson at the time in which he explained to the CEO that he no longer owned any of the company’s stock, nor the stock of any fossil fuel company that is not contributing significantly to any efforts to develop renewable energy sources. [Emphasis added]
[Refer also to:
2014: Exxon CEO drops out of fracking water tower lawsuit
2013: Former Mobil VP Lou Allstadt Warns of Fracking
Louis W. Allstadt, former executive vice president, Mobil Oil Corporation, Cooperstown, NY, said: “The current unconventional oil and gas drilling process using High Volume Horizontal Hydro-Fracturing is a much more intensive industrial activity than conventional drilling, which was the norm until about 10 years ago. It requires far greater volumes of water and chemicals, as well as disposal of much larger volumes of toxic flow-back fluids. We need to fully study and understand the health effects of the significantly greater volumes of toxic materials that must be handled and disposed of with this process.”
2011: WATCH Lou Allstadt Drilling the DEC 14:35 Min.
