During tonight’s national coverage fracking was a topic brought up on multiple occasions. Can someone explain what it is and the pros and cons of it? Need it because a google search did not help :/
In: Biology
I’m no expert but this is a lot of what we do for natural gas drilling in Northern Canada.
You drill a normal natural gas well, usually a few kilometres down vertical and then another few kilometres horizontal into the gas bearing rock formation. Then after perforating the well, they pump millions of gallons of high pressure water and chemicals to fracture “frack” the rock. Sand is also sent down to keep those cracks open.
It produces a shitload more gas from the same well, and lots of our well sites have 10-20 of these wells on one so your can target an entire formation from one site, instead of having a ton of smaller sites. So overall less roads, surface disturbance, disturbance of wildlife habitat, etc.
The problems are the process needs millions of gallons of fresh water. Not a huge problem in northern Canada because we have so much but it’s a big issue in water scarce areas. They also sometimes claim that all of the water they use is pumped back to surface, treated, and returned. But the problem is most of that water is so polluted by the chemicals they add nothing can treat it, and they only recover usually less than 30% of what they use. The polluted water is then usually disposed of in deep disposal wells, forever removing those millions of gallons from our renewable water cycle. Now scale that up to 10-20 wells per pad, and there may be 20+ pads in a producing field. And obviously thousands across the country, the water use is shocking.
Then there’s evidence that this underground fracturing is causing earthquakes, and if they screw up you can introduce gas into freshwater aquifers, which is where you see videos of people being able to light their drinking water on fire if their water well has been fracked into.
Lots of pros and cons and it’s very controversial. But there’s lots of smart people trying to improve it. I’m no oil and gas advocate but lots of the bad press has been from shitty drilling and energy companies cutting corners.
Up here in Canada all of our oil and gas was formed when this part of the world was covered in an inland sea millions of years ago. So when we drill we often get a lot of ancient salt water that comes up with the oil and gas. This “produced” water is basically brine and not good for much, and is usually disposed of in those deep disposal wells. A big things now is they’re trying to see if they can use this produced water as the frack water because it was a waste product anyways. But one downside is we’d need to build salt water pipelines to move this stuff to the drilling fields and if there was a pipeline spill that brine would have terrible environmental impacts as well.
That’s just off the top of my head. I’m not too familiar with US practices, but like I said, complex issue and very political. Doesn’t help that it’s become a political buzzword when most people probably don’t even know what they’re fracking for.
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