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.
Remember how we were taught about how oil comes from the decayed remains of ancient organisms?
And we learned about different types of rocks? Sedimentary rock is made from layers of dirt and sand, compressed into rock. Sedimentary rock tends to be very porous, meaning it can absorb liquid like a sponge.
Well, millions of years ago, much of the US was underwater. This ancient seafloor contained lots of dirt and sand, which was compressed into sedimentary rock. It also contained lots of ancient algae and plant life, which decayed into oil. The porous sedimentary rock absorbed that oil.
Fracking is using high pressure liquid to break apart rocks, with the intent of extracting the oil inside those rocks.
Some people say that fracking is good. Fracking increases our supply of oil. This can cause oil prices to go down.
Some people say that fracking is bad. Drilling destroys the environment. Using oil as a fuel releases carbon into the air.
Fracking specifically also has a risk of the high pressure drilling liquid, or the displaced oil, getting into the groundwater, contaminating wells, and polluting ecosystems.
You know when you add a little water to a soap bottle and shake it around to get a little more soap out. Sort of like that.
Fracking is pumping water and chemicals into the ground to squeeze out oil and natural gas.
There are different types of rocks underground. Some types of rocks are basically a solid mass of rock. These don’t have oil in them. Other rocks are really tiny rock particles mooshed together. An example is sandstone.
Depending on how closely mooshed the (let’s say) sandstone is, it might be possible for liquid to seep through it. For example, stalactites form in caves because water seeps through. Or, if your bathroom isn’t properly sealed, water seeps through the wall and bubbles the paint in the next room.
If liquids seep through sandstones underground, you don’t need fracking. You just stick a pipe in, and the extremely high pressure pushes all the oil up the pipe.
Some sandstones are mooshed much more closely together. So closely that there’s still space to store oil, but it can’t move anywhere. If you stick a pipe in, you might get a tiny bit of oil, but that’s it. That’s where fracking might be useful.
To do fracking, you pump some high-pressure liquid *down* the pipe, and hammer the rock until it starts to crack (“fracture”). Once it has cracked, the liquid in it can flow freely, and the high pressure of being underground pushes the oil up the pipe.
Some environmental concerns:
* The chemicals used in fracking might pollute the environment.
* It’s hard to accurately predict how much the rock is going to crack. It’s not good if oil that was previously stuck in the rock can suddenly leak into underground water sources.
* All criticisms of fossil fuels generally also apply to fracking.
It’s been known for a long time that much of the oil in the country was blind up in a type of rocky deposit called shale. You can’t pump shale.
Eventually someone figured it if you spousal the shale with a ton of water you can get the oil out of it. So they pump in water then pump out oil.
That’s fracking.
It can move stuff around down there and cause eathqiakes close to the surface. And it can ruin the natural water tables – to the point where people’s well water is flammable.
Fracking is a little like adding a bit of water to the ketchup bottle to get the last drops out when you already made the hot dog before you realized you ran out. Sometimes there is like a whole hotdog worth of ketchup stuck to the sides of the bottle.
But it uses high pressure water to get oil out instead of ketchup.
Fracking is a process of getting oil or natural gas of rocks, mostly shale, that tend to be very deep in the earth. It involves drilling to where the shale is located, then pumping in a mixture of fluid and sand at very high pressure to break up the rock. This releases the oil from the rock and allows it to be pumped out for use in different petroleum products, like gasoline. Much of the US oil is deposited in shale. Pros of fracking are that it can be done in the US, so it reduces dependence on foreign oil, provides a lot of jobs, and contributes to the economy both in terms of oil and gas sales and the industries that use oil and gas products. The cons are that it is more expensive than traditional oil drilling, uses chemicals, produces more greenhouse gasses, and can cause air and water pollution.
Will try to keep this simple.
Fracking is using high pressure water and chemicals to break rock to extract oil and LP gas, this can destabilize the bedrock, and poison aquifers.
the wastewater from fracking is also some of the most vile pollutants you can imagine, many wells this wastewater is so chemically volatile that it is able to ignite and explode, but due to radioactive elements that are naturally in the earth’s crust many cases that same wastewater is also spicy, as in radioactive.
no matter how you cut it, it’s a massive health and pollution concern.
ElI5. Fracking is getting oil out of shale deposits by injecting water into the earth.
It came up during the debate because at one point VP Harris was against it, because it was not as efficient as getting oil by other means. Dana Bash at CNN tried to have a media moment saying that VP Harris had “reversed” her position on fracking.
In reality she realized that we need a transition plan to go from fossil fuels to other forms of energy.
The reason why it was a debate point is that the GOP ran ads based on the Bashed interview to try to paint the democratic nominee into a corner.
So bottom line it was media created non issue.
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