Posts by Richard Grevers
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I was at a meeting on Fracking and oil exploration in Taranaki where one of the oil industry reps pointed out that the contamination depicted in Gaslands is from shallow fracking of layers near the surface. The fracking which was carried out in Taranaki was at a depth of 4000m, way below any groundwater sources, and a depth at which any water is already poisonous. (that's when I brought up earthquakes).
However, what's proposed in Canterbury does appear to be shallower, and the aquifer which is 100m deep at the coast might be 1000m down inland.
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The fracking article in the Press is a classic example of a politician attempting a scientific argument and getting it wrong. Hekia Parata said "Fracking produces a crack with little or no lateral movement, while an earthquake is movement of rock along a fault". Um, faults are formed as a result of earthquakes - stressed rock releases the stress by rupturing. And I'd say that events of the past 11 months have shown that we don't have a sufficiently thorough knowledge of what's down there in terms of faults and stress.
Furthermore, research (I had and lost a reference) has indicated that the size of the initial rupture in a large sampling of earthquakes (up to M9) is fairly consistent and remarkably small - in the order of 100 square metres - which is easily achievable via fracking. -
A couple of points about Australia's CGT (from Wikipedia, rather than experience) - CPI indexing was abandoned after 5 years - presumably the extra complexity wasn't worth it. And it applies to all assets over threshold values - so that buying art for capital gain doesn't become the next loophole.