One of the more striking videos I've seen on Facebook in recent weeks is this video of Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham setting the Condamine river in Queensland on fire by igniting leaking gas. He blames fracking in the area - the CSIRO aren't entirely convinced but it's a good way of bringing attention to coal seam gas extraction either way.

Alarmingly, with various forms of unconventional gas extraction on the rise, Harvard researchers published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters a few months ago where they concluded that between 2002 and 2014, US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent - accounting for 30 to 60 percent of a spike in methane in the atmosphere.

Forbes has an amusing article on opposition to fracking from Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson - Exxon CEO Profits Huge As America's Largest Natural Gas Producer-But Frack In His Own Backyard And He Sues!.

Sometimes, the hypocrisy expressed in real life is so sublimely rich that one could never hope to construct a similar scenario out of pure imagination.

Meet Rex Tillerson, the CEO of oil and gas superstar ExxonMobil Corporation—the largest natural gas producer in these United States of America—and a newly emerging giant in the world of exquisite hypocrisy.

A key and critical function of Mr. Tillerson’s day job is to do all he can to protect and nurture the process of hydraulic fracturing—aka ‘fracking’—so that his company can continue to rack in billions via the production and sale of natural gas. Indeed, so committed is Rex to the process of fracking that he has loudly lashed out at those who criticize and seek to regulate hydraulic fracturing, suggesting that such efforts are a very bad idea, indeed.

According to Tillerson, “This type of dysfunctional regulation is holding back the American economic recovery, growth, and global competitiveness.”

Thus, according to Rex Tillerson, nobody should have much of a reason to be disturbed or concerned when ExxonMobil comes knocking on your door to deliver the news that fracking is about to become a part of your daily life…unless, or course, you happen to live in Mr. Tillerson’s neighborhood.

In that case, the rules are, apparently, very, very different.

You see, while Tillerson believes that the inevitable noise pollution that accompanies the fracking process—not to mention the potential for water contamination and other dangerous side-effects even when it is done safely (and some would strenuously argue that it is not possible to frack safely)— is of no real significance when it affects someone else’s neighborhood, he surely thinks it to be a pretty big deal when someone dares to get involved in fracking in Rex Tillerson’s neighborhood.

So much is this the case that Tillerson—ExxonMobil CEO and proud proponent of fracking as a key to both America’s and his company’s great energy future—has joined a lawsuit seeking to shut down a fracking project near Mr. and Mrs. Tillerson’s Texas ranch.

Scientific American has an article on the use of fracking to develop geothermal power projects - Fracking Could Help Geothermal Become a Power Player.

Here's another use for fracking: expanding access to hot rocks deep beneath Earth’s surface for energy production. In April Ormat Technologies hooked up the first such project—known in the lingo as an enhanced geothermal system, or EGS—to the nation's electric grid near Reno, Nev.

"The big prize is EGS," enthuses Douglas Hollett, director of the Geothermal Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). "The key is learning how to do it in a reliable way, in a responsible way."

By some estimates, the U.S. could tap as much as 2,000 times the nation’s current annual energy use of roughly 100 exajoules (an exajoule equals a quintillion, or 1018 joules) via enhanced geothermal technologies. With respect to electricity, the DoE concludes at least 500 gigawatts of electric capacity could be harvested from such EGS systems. Even better, hot rocks underlie every part of the country and the rest of the world. Australia's first enhanced geothermal system, spicily named Habanero, began producing power in May, and Europe has brought three such power plants online.