What is fracking and is it safe?

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There is a new trend in natural gas and oil well drilling.  Its called Multi-Stage Fracking (MSF) and its all the rage.  Why?  Because it allows for the collection of natural gas from sources that in the past could not be tapped or needed to be tapped with many wells and can now be tapped with just one long horizontal well. 

While I'm impressed with the technology and its rapid development, everything I have seen shows the hazards of this recclamation technique seem poorly understood (probably intentionally) and potentially very dangerous.

First what the frack is fracking? (this is the only wiki link today)

A hydraulic fracture [or frack] is formed by pumping a fracturing fluid into the well bore at a rate sufficient to increase the pressure downhole to a value in excess of the fracture gradient of the formation rock.  The pressure then causes the formation to crack which allows the fracturing fluid to enter and extend the crack further into the formation. 

In other words, a well is drilled and fluid is pumped into a rock formation with trapped water, gas or oil in it to fracture the rock and release the desired substance. Here's the rest in tech speak:

 In order to keep this fracture open after the injection stops, a solid proppant is added to the fracture fluid. The proppant, which is commonly a sieved round sand, is carried into the fracture. This sand is chosen to be higher in permeability than the surrounding formation and the propped hydraulic fracture then becomes a high permeability conduit through which the formation fluids can be produced back to the well.

Here's a great video showing how the process works.  I highly reccomend you watch it.

Fracking itself is not new, going back to at least the turn of the century but MSF in horizontally drilled wells is relatively new.

...improvements to MSF are still being made - the industry is continually getting more production, more fracs, or stages, per well. Initial fracing was done in 4 stages over 500 meters.  Now you can see 16 stages over a 1600 metre horizontal length.

The industry hasn't hit the end of what MSF can do; innovation is still happening.   And they're fracing tighter and narrower reservoirs or payzones.  One of the largest oil discoveries in North America is the Bakken play, which straddles the Dakotas and Saskatchewan (the US Geological Society estimates over billion barrels are there)  - but the zone can often be as narrow as 3 metres, or 9.5 feet.

The oil and gas industry loves fracking because its highly profitable

...a properly frac'd horizontal well greatly improves economics. A frac can create kilometers of contact area for the oil or gas to flow into the well. Even though it costs twice as much as a vertical well, production can increase 400-700% and give payback to the operator in only a few months

So what's the problem?  Well part of the problem is the fracking fluids used to make the fractures in the rock formations.  They're proprietary and the drilling companies are under little to no obligation to disclose what they're pumping into the ground.  Now, the industry claims (and there's at least fair reason to believe) that they retrieve and recycle or clean the frack fluids after using them.  But there are increasing reports that there are ground water pollution and health problems caused by the fracking.

...in sworn testimony before Congress last fall, environmental health analyst Dr. Theo Colburn - an opponent of drilling - said she was able to obtain a list of one fracking chemicals to be used in Colorado drilling. She says there were 171 substances on the list, and that 92 percent of them had health effects ranging from sinus irritation to reproductive organ damage. 

Worse the Federal Government has no power to regulate the process that the industry claims is completely safe.

Industry and environmental groups dispute whether hydraulic fracturing has a significant environmental impact, with arguments centered around the extent to which fracturing fluid could contaminate water supplies. In the United States, a 2004 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study concluded that the process was safe and didn't warrant further study, because there was "no unequivocal evidence" of health risks, and the fluids were neither necessarily hazardous nor able to travel far underground. The report did find uncertainties in knowledge of how fracturing fluid migrates through rocks, and upon its release service companies voluntarily agreed to stop using diesel fuel as a component of fracturing fluid, due to its potential as a source of benzene contamination.

Hmmm, who was running the government back in 2004....?  Oh, yeah, Bush!  How'd he do?

(dateline July, 2004) The head of the Environmental Protection Agency for two Republican presidents criticized President Bush's record on Monday, calling it a "polluter protection" policy.

Russell E. Train, who headed the EPA from September 1973 to January 1977 -- part of the Nixon and Ford administrations -- said Bush's record on the environment was so dismal that he would cast his vote for Democrat John Kerry.

"It's almost as if the motto of the administration in power today in Washington is not environmental protection, but polluter protection," Train said. "I find this deeply disturbing."

As if you didnt know that!  At least the Republicans were running congress and they must have been on the watch...

The 2005 Energy Policy Act exempted hydraulic fracturing from regulation under the Safe Water Drinking Act.

Oh, nevermind. 

On the bright side, there is a growing movement to repeal the exemption, at least so we can know what's in the fracking fluids.

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) proposed a bill last year to repeal that exemption. DeGette is now talking with Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) about either inserting her bill into pending climate legislation or reintroducing the measure on its own.

Even if Congress can pass a repeal of the exemption on regulation for hydraulic fracturing, it could take U.S. EPA some time to write new regulations, Book said, "but gas producers' mandatory disclosures of fracking fluid contents under the Safe Drinking Water Act could potentially trigger state-level regulations even before the EPA rulemaking has been finalized."

Yug is passing the ball on this one to the more politically tuned bloggers on the site...but please for this one, everyone

Stay Tuned...