Bear. I can’t decide if this is frightening, disgusting, or just plain horrifying! Thank you for this expose and the excellent links. I hope it engenders not only support but ACTION.

Agreed, and recommended.

BearCountry, thanks for bringing this one to our attention.

Excellent diary – recommended

Thanks for your nice comments.

Dear lord, do not let them do any hydraulic fracturing near our water supplies. It’s an economic insanity, clean water is far more valuable than the natural gas they’d acquire.

This insanity is one of the reason’s I’d support a new generation of modern nuclear power plants (preferably thorium based).

Clean water doesn’t seem to be high on halliburton’s corporate wish list.

rec’d!

Thanks BearCountry, fracking is a ridiculously opaque and polluting practice. It was specifically exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act in the energy bill of 2005. As Fox points out on DN! and on NOW on PBS, this leaves just state regulators on the beat, who are much less likely and capable to hold these companies accountable.

For those who want to take action, Earthworks has been calling on Congresspeople to co-sponsor the FRAC act that would end the exemption, help them out here.

Thanks for the excellent heads-up. Recommended.

They’ve been doing this fracking here in Arkansas as well for the past few years in what’s called the Fayetteville Shale Play. Where I live, they are just beginning to mine for the fracking sand. That takes hundreds of gallons of water, but the powers that be in the local community think it’s a great idea cuz it will bring jobs…just like the prison did. Unfortunately most of the money around here comes from tourism and fishing. So when they wreck the environment…oh never mind. This is Arkansas.

Won’t flavored straws solve teh icky water problem?

The show on NOW about Gasland was just plain scary. I encourage everyone to try and watch it online if possible. Nothing like watching a guy light the water from his kitchen sink tap on fire to make you realize that water from their aquifer might not be so great for drinking after the fracking process! The exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act has to be rescinded.

Why who needs conservation and living within our means when we can exploit the earth’s resources like it was some some sort of agricultural crop waiting to be harvested? What, our generation take a cut? No! It’s our right to use all available resources before somebody else gets them first.

And besides, it’s only future generations that get to pay for our good time. Let them worry about the mess we created while we indulge ourselves.

What sordid and utterly reprehensible garbage–a terrible legacy to leave the world.

Bear, great post, and I don’t know where it was I read or where what I read was about, but fracting was discussed for all of its poisonous methods and outcomes.

Good on you, thanks for posting at FDL and sharing your info.

As bad if not worse than strip or open pit mining, as the process goes lateral for miles, and its impact goes on forever.

Strip and open pit mining can be localized, WRT the damage unless the sluicing and tailings float downstream on open waters. Then it destroys all in its path.

Thanks again!!!!

Texas is going through the fracking problems now. I’ve learned a lot at this place, Bluedaze: Drilling Reform For Texas.

Oh, and don’t forget the earthquakes caused by the drilling. Really.

This is why the notion of off shore drilling may be a best short term alternative.

Fracking is a horrible process and beyond the scarring of the land the contamination of water is well known. But because the companies are in competition they refuse to give the EPA and other government organizations the chemical formulae they use. I don’t have the link at hand but I saw it just the other day and Googling should bring it up.

I’m glad that you all have read and reacted to the post. I could hardly believe what I was hearing when I listened to the two radion programs. We have some land just outside of Cooperstown. Gasoline powered boats are in the process of being phased out on Otsego Lake to protect it. If fracking is allowed to be done in the Otsego watershed, outlawing gas powered boats will be meaningless.

Strip and open pit mining can be offset so that the effects, as you say, can be minimized. The Canadians do a much better job of that than we do. I worked for a bit company and had to travel to Canada a few times to work in the open pit mines. The mines had full time botanists on staff and the areas that were finished were better than before the mining started. Where there had been bare rock, there was now fields of grass and flowers. Fracking doesn’t lend itself to correction. I wonder if a ruined aquifer can ever be restored even years after the pollution ceases or if it is like radioactivity (and there apparently is low level radioactivity in the shale).

I thought Congressman Hinchey was working on this.

Sorry to disagree on this with fellow DFHs. This formation is faily deep, about 7-10,000 feet. A properly designed and drilled well will have very little risk of contaminating drinking water. Most water wellare drilled in the top few hundred feet of the ground, and any deep well is going to be cased down well below that.

Here’s how its done. The first 2-300 feet is driven or drilled with a large bit, maybe 24 inches or so. Then that is cased with what is called conductor pipe to isolate the future well bore from the dgound. That conductor is cemented in place and a BOP (blowout preventer) is bolted to the top flange of the conductor

Following that, the well is drilled to maybe 3-5,000 feet with a 10-12 inch hole. That section is cased and cemented top to bottom. Then, the hole is drilled to TD (Total Depth)with a 7 or 8 inch wellbore. The well is logged and if it looks promising, cased again and cemented with a production string. This string may go to the top or it may just extend to the bottom of the intermediate string.

After casing the well is perfed (perforated). A series of what are essentially shaped charges are lowered to the formation depth as determined by the well logs and exploded. These charges penetrate the casing and cement and go out maybe 5-10 feet into the producing formation.
Then you begin drawing off all the mud and water that you had to use to keep any pressure under control and start the well producing. once a flow is established, then you can move off the drilling rig nd design the surface facility.

If this is interesting, I’ll write a further post from my producers viewpoint

We can do without nukes. Renewables can do the job they just need to be decentralized.
Big energy will fight this tooth and nail and obviously have had success in convincing some that the nuclear option is a good one; Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and forever radioactive waste and fuel for H-bombs no matter. And yes fracking is horrendous and must be stopped. People have had their taps catch fire!

FRACK!!!
The end is near!!

Has anyone had had issues with collapsing or sink holes developing (maybe out west, specifically in Utah)?

When the well is put into production, a string of production tubing, may 3-4 inch tubing, is lowered to about the top of the perfs. That string is isolated from the rest of the well by a set of packers. The oil or gas runs up inside the tubing, which is inside the casing, which is cemented to the rock of the wellbore.

Directional drilling has been around a long time. The production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico may have 20 or thirty wells in a space of a few suare yards at the top for the wellheads. The holes themselves are directionally drilled out in all directions and the wells may spread out over several miles at TD. Horizontal drilling is an extreme case of this.

Fraqing is equally as proven a technique. A decent fraq can extend the productive area and lifetime of a well. In order to contaminate drinking waterfive thousand feet higher in the well, the fraq would have to be a monster and overpower the cement of the casing all the way up. considering that the fraq company charges more for a bigger fraq, the usual pattern is to try a very light one first and see what happens. The production company has no desire to ruin their well by contaminating it with your drinking water.

Generally, gas wells do not produce a lot of water that requires disposal. Gas usually lies on top of the water in a zone. If i had a gas well that was producing water, Id plug the perfs, by squeezing cement through the holes in the casing, and try a few feet higher up. Water production is a far greater problem with oil wells and is most often re-injected into th formation to maintain pressure as long a possible.

The wells they speak of in the long article refered to are not huge wells. Gas production is measured in MCF, which means a thousand cubic feet. An MCF of gas goes for 4-6 dollars. When you see production of a million cubic feet a day, that is a thousand MCF or $4,000. Gas wells probably last 3-5 years of good production before they decline past usefulness. A well that produces a billion cubic feet (BCF) over its lifetime, $4,000,000, is barely able to recover the cost of drilling and completion.

The impact on the land is primarily for access roads and pipelines. That is usually remediated when the well is plugged and abandoned (P&A’d). All of this, drilling, logging, completion, surface facilities, pipelines, P&A, is heavily regulated and monitored and inspected and overseen and permitted by the State. IF THE STATE BOYS DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING, THERE WILL BE PROBLEMS.

I swear I put paragraphs in there to make reading easier.

try a refresh of the page — if ya go in and edit it looks like it wipes out all the paragraphs but if ya refresh ya see they are there

Thank you, Suzanne. nice that somebody is awake out there.

my pleasure stratocruiser ;)

Those are just industry talking points.

Fracking stands to not only contaminate the water supply but to also empty huge aquiphores that supply cities with water. Once emptied they are not likely to recover. There is only a “gentleman’s agreement” as to chemicals used and yes they do get into ground water.

NYT has a fairly even account here.

Hello,talking stick.
I don’t do industry talking points. My purpose was to supply information about the actual process of drilling, completion and production to a community who may not know a whole lot of specific detail. If you know more than me, I’m willing to learn. Reading newspaper stories won’t impress me, though. Try reading the tower reports from a few dozen wells being drilled.

I repeat, if the regulators (the Texas Railroad Commision here) don’t do their job, mistakes will get themselves made. Here, every engineer who designs a fraq program runs a cement bond log first, top to bottom, and plans accordingly. If the casing is good and the cement is good, there will not be any contamination. I think that the most likely source of contamination is from old wells with compromised casing.

As I said, damage to aquifers is unlikely in a good well. In the area of the gas fields under discussion, the principal aquifer is the Pensylvanian. Average well depths are around 200 feet. In the Oglalla in Oklahoma, they run about the same. In the Edwards Aquifer in Texas, wells may run nearer 500 feet. In any case, there is a mile and a half of rock between the gas sands and the aquifer.

Well, yes you do do industry talking points. That’s the source of your information. It’s the source of all available public information – therefore if you are quoting a technical assertion of the process, you are indeed passing along a talking point produced by an industry with a financial interest in suppressing anything negative and painting a dishonestly rosy accentuation of the positive.

And, I’ve gotta call BS. If these things didn’t make money, they wouldn’t do them. And *if* indeed they lose money, what you are advocating is the most inefficient, wasteful and damaging process for extracting resources, I’ve ever encountered. At least when they blow the top off of a mountain they make money.

Allowing this on the East Coast is asinine.

Nuclear energy isn’t my first choice but i gotta tell ya… it’s well ahead of natural gas and hydraulic fracturing.

As for “Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and forever radioactive waste and fuel for H-bombs no matter”: Chernobyl used an insanely bad design, Western reactors are designed so that the reaction shuts down if there’s a problem. Talk of Chernobyl is just hysteria. Three mile island… didn’t kill people, up here in CT we just had a NG plant explode and kill 6 people. As for waste, yes I agree, there aren’t very good solutions. But I will say that reprocessing tech has improved and if a thorium cycle is used then you are looking at waste which degrades ten times faster than what we have now.

Meh… I prefer renewables but I don’t think we’re gonna get there quick enough on renewables alone, we’ll probably need bridging solutions. And we really do need to shutdown/replace our creaky old nuclear reactors. That’s a lot of energy generation to replace, literally hundreds of thousands of our biggest windmills worth of energy generation.

“Allowing this on the East Coast is asinine.” So, we down here on the Gulf coast have been doing your dirty work for decades. You like the product but NIMBY.

I don’t listen to industry talking points at all. I know the industry. I’m not quoting anything. Almost everything I read in the MSM about the oil patch is so simplistic as to be useless. They leave out more than they explain.

Sure a good well makes money. But a thousand MCF a day well is nothing to get excited about. I got news for you. Las Vegas isn’t the gambling capital of America, it’s Houston.

One of stratocruiser’s comments is incorrect: it takes immense amounts of water to do a frack well. Otherwise, he leaves out several important issues: Cement casings are subject to rupture. High gas pressure can cause a well to emit bursts of frack water that can overwhelm planned retaining ponds. Retaining pond integrity is vulnerable in heavy rains or flooding. There are no municipal or private facilities at present capable of decontaminating this kind of pollution. There have been several small scale incidents in PA recently where drinking and ground water has been contaminated.
In spite of these factors, I am open to fracking provided adequate safey measures are in place (including an escrow fund for damages that survives even inf the drilling company goes bankrupt).
I think the refusal to release the recipes for frack water is unacceptable. Companies complain that this would give away proprietary info. Precisely. That’s the price of admission. If the needd to protect the recipe that much they are welcome not to drill.

I’m glad that you are presenting the industry POV. You are right, TX, OK, etc. have been doing our dirty work for lo these many years. Now the ME and others are doing it.

There are a couple of problems that I see with your explanation. First, you describe accurately what happens from the wellhead down to where the capture occurs. The problem seems to me be out in front of that spot. The fracking is done to allow the gas to migrate to the capture area. The whole point of fracking is to destroy the natural container. Once that is destroyed, there is no way to limit what happens to the gas and the forced material driving the fracking.

Second, the recovery of the materials driving the fracking is not 100%. One of the problems is that it does escape underground and it cannot be contained, so it is able to migrate anywhere. Now it is not like the toxic material is floating in the air and you can determine quickly what is happening. It sometimes takes years for this to show up.

Third, if everything was so smooth and there were no threat of contamination, the fracking process would not have needed to be relieved of the environmental protection restrictions.

And, fourth, “IF THE STATE BOYS DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING, THERE WILL BE PROBLEMS.” There are problems because NY does not have the expertise to work on this problem, nor do they have enough personnel to do it in a timely manner.

We have seen halliburton do all kinds of things that did not meet the letter or the spirit of the applicable laws for whatever work the company was doing. So, when they tell you, “trust us, we know what we are doing,” do you really trust them? I DO NOT!

The problem is

You present as fact the Petroleum Industry’s claim as to potential harm. It is an opinion not all experts hold. There are many examples of damage by this essentially unregulated fracking process. and overall a difference of opinion as to potential for future harm.

I provided one link to an article that addresses it fairly evenly.

In addition to the assumption that accidents never happen, respectfully you sound like the coal people who say slurry behind a earthen dam is safe or the nuclear people saying nuclear waste locally stored is perfectly safe and T3 can’t possibly get into ground water etc.

Talk of Chernobyl is just hysteria. Three mile island… didn’t kill people

This is poppycock. Of course Chernoybl should be never forgotten as a warning. The consequences are still being experiened in the birth defects and cancer rates along the fallout path.

Three Mile Island was with in minutes of a meltdown of a greater magnitude than Chernobyl. It was more luck thank sense that prevented that catastrophe. This from testimony recently about the plan to extend the nuclearizion of us here in Georgia.

I am glad to hear more about the actual process from someone who knows the industry. So what else are they pumping down the well? What chemicals are used and why do they need exemption from EPA regulation?

It doesn’t matter what the environmental impact is from a properly-run project. This is Halliburton we’re talking about. They aren’t *going* to run it properly. They’ll cut corners to save money wherever they can and pocket the difference, without fear of prosecution.

This is the problem of corporatization. There is no longer any incentive for the richest, most powerful people and organizations to do the right thing — and, in fact, ample monetary incentive to do the WRONG thing.

Thank goodness Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand are on the job, right?

1. Halliburton started out as a well servicing company. I would not judge their expertise in that area by the clusterfucks that they were part of in Iraq. They have incentives to to the job right because no well owner wants to see his well get messed up by a bad job. Word will travel fast if Halliburton screws one up.
2. A fraq job probably takes around 200-300 barrels of fluid, 8-12,000 gallons. That’s about a medium sized swimming pool or a normal days usage of 30-40 houses.
3. The whole point of fraqing is to crack the formation without destroyng the natural container. The natural container is the impervious layers above and below the gas sand.
4. I really don’t know many outfits that use retaining ponds for recovered water. I’ve always seen tanks out on the site.
5. Recovering the water is definately a job in itself. It’s not just fraq material, there is the same problem with drilling mud. I’ve seen swab trucks working for days to recover enough water to get the well to start on its own. As long as there is water in the well. that puts pressure on the formation and inhibits free flowing production. Especially with gas wells, the gas would rather bubble up through the water than carry it to the surface(as long as it has enough pressure).
6. If you lack the strict and competant regulatory environment and the well-trained, experienced engineers and crews this stuff requires, there will absolutely be mistakes. Maybe you can find a few Texans who are willing to move north past the Red River.

Dude, this isn’t about expertise. It’s about the relative risks and rewards for not doing what’s in the best interest of America or the locals. Why would Halliburton do right by us when there are no negative consequences for screwing everything up?

It is no longer rational to give such corporations the benefit of the doubt. Quite the opposite — it makes good common sense to assume that Halliburton’s interests are served by less oversight, less regulation, less enforcement and less punishment for misdeeds. So their lobbyists push for all of the above and we’re left with a polluted water supply.

Halliburton is an ethical company that would never take short cuts or lie? Yes. Just like Wall Street traders would never do anything unethical because it would tarnish their reputation? Give us a break.

That said I do recall the days in Oklahoma when to see that gray Halliburton truck on the road was considered good luck. Those days died so long ago that only old coots like I can remember them. (I also used to love fying on those airplanes you take your name from. Good solid trustworty, had propellers.

The early days of fracking were on those dried out Okla. wells on land that had already been used up. But it is a whole different game now. I saw some figures estimating the NY operations would use up and some 10million gallons in the fist phase. I will try to find that and post the link.

Tjhey refuse to name the chemicals, claiming it is proprietary information they must keep from their competitors.