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Fracking Earthquakes Here.

Marshall

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Must have called out the attack groups. Fracking does not cause earth quakes . Nor does it cause your hair to turn gray or global warming. It does not pollute wells either. Just a political tool exploited by some. Quoting the EPA as a source of fact , That is a long shot.
Funny how the same post show up on a bunch of sights all around the same day.

I must disagree in part with your statement. While the forces which cause the earth to move may not be caused by fracking, the resistance to that movement is lowered by fracking. Thus, more numerous smaller earthquakes which are far less destructive replace fewer earthquakes of greater magnitude and destructive effect. The net energy released is the same over time.

I'm of the opinion that reducing the buildup of stored energy through fracking is a good thing, though initially it could trigger a larger earthquake which would have come anyway to come earlier.

This is the reason you never hear of earthquakes in Houston which has just as many faults, but with soil so fluid that no energy of consequence can build up. Thus no short term destructive damage.
 

Lil4X

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I had the good fortune to work with two or three frac service companies over the years, producing training manuals and videos for the field workers. Later I worked for a company that developed practical deep horizontal drilling that would give us access to deep reservoirs that were often fracked. I certainly am no geologist, but I have worked with the engineers and geologists who developed the techniques we use today to recover hydrocarbons from thin strata that often require frac services to produce commercial quantities of oil and gas.

Contrary to popular belief, oil does not exist in giant caverns in the earth. Nor is it located only a few feet beneath the surface. The industry is partially responsible for this misconception because they often illustrate hydrocarbon deposits as free oil sitting in vast lakes a couple hundred feet under the earth. I believe the misconception comes with the scale of most cross-section illustrations of an oil or gas well - where for convenience the illustration is immensely foreshortened to get it on the page. Typically, the last casing run in the well is about 6-3/8", but the depth may be 20K' or more. Try getting that on a page without a couple of fold-outs. So the industry has done a rather poor job of describing the scale of an oil or gas well. If you shrink the illustration to 10" high, the bore will be less than a hair's breadth in diameter, if it's visible at all. So we have a serious problem with scaling a drawing for proper understanding.

Most hydrocarbons exist below what is called a "hard cap", usually a tight shale or salt formation under which oil and gas percolating up from below will tend to collect. There are very few oil deposits above 8K feet anymore, as most of the "easy" oil has been produced. The big reservoirs lie far deeper. The truth is that all but a trickle of hydrocarbons exist many thousands of feet below the surface - as a rule of thumb, below about 8K feet minimum for oil, with gas much deeper, usually over 18K feet for commercial quantities of product.

Further complicating the misconception is that hydrocarbon resources aren't found in vast lakes, but exist in pore spaces in the reservoir rock - much like the holes in a brick. The reservoir is said to have porosity where these pores exist in the formation, but that's not enough to produce much hydrocarbon. These pores have to connect to one another for the formation - having permeability, in the language of the geologists. If you drill into these strata you may or may not get commercial returns of oil - depending on whether the formation is permeable or not. Fortunes were made and lost and great swindles have taken place in a region called the "Austin Chalk", that stretches in a band roughly paralleling the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, about 100 to 180 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. For at least 75 years discovery wells have been drilled in this region that produced a brief flood of oil - and savvy owners immediately sold off their wells to greedy speculators. The problem was that within a few days or a week the oil would dry up and production fell from barrels to drops per day.

The reason for this was that most of the "Chalk" was made up of thin production zones that measure often as little as 4' thick. While they might produce for a few days, their porosity was so low that the well that once had shown great promise, would "play out", and the new owners were left with a very deep post hole for their investment. By that time the drilling company and its wildcat producers were far down the road and out of touch.

"Fracking" or more accurately, "hydraulic fracturing" has been a common practice, particularly in Western Oklahoma, South Texas, and the northern tier of North Dakota and Montana for years. The practice is to pump either saltwater or diesel oil down a deep well, usually well over 15K ft to "break" the formation, producing fine cracks that can connect those disconnected pore spaces and make a deep and expensive post hole produce economic quantities of hydrocarbon.

Using huge piston pumps at the surface, often arranged in deep arrays with as many as 40 "pumpers" ganged together, each rated at over 1200 hp each, producing flow rates of as much as 600 barrels (40 gallons ea.) per minute. That massive hydraulic force is pumped down the well's casing where it is directed thousands of feet underground to to the production zone where it breaks fine cracks into the producing formation. The operator in a special instrumentation cab watches pressures climb and can throttle each individual pump remotely. Chart recorders and computer displays will show a small but sharp pressure decrease when the formation breaks, and the pumps are accelerated to force a special "frac sand" mixed with the fluid into the well and back deep into the formation to prop open these fine cracks when the hydraulic pressure is relieved.

This "fracking", while only taking place at great depth, and always under the "hard cap" of shale or salt in the pay zone, it doesn't produce cracks upward toward underground water aquifers, so it is almost impossible to contaminate our water supply. While there may be small earthquakes at the surface for a few dozen meters in all directions, they are almost always undetectable, and they usually subside a few hours after the pumping process has ended. We're not talking massively destructive earthquakes here that split the surface with enormous cracks, but small temblors that usually pass unnoticed.

Is "fracking" safe? Without question, yes. If it were being intentionally overdone, the oil companies would not only lose their investment in the well, but the rather expensive fracking process as well. Nobody wants that. Since as a friend and old Texas wildcatter once told me, "All the cheap oil's been found", gone are the days when you could drill a few dozen or a hundred feet and produce great gouts of hydrocarbon. Now we have to work for it, and it's terribly expensive. Thousands of engineers and investors are deeply involved in bringing in wells that are not only profitable, but do not break up the reservoir by over-aggressive recovery techniques. The trick is to produce a field for a number of years, rather than destroy it in a few weeks.
 
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