Fracking Earthquakes Here.

[Tre']

That's some good Kool Aid you been drinkin' friend!
Kidding. I have no idea about it. Sounds like it would be an interesting process to watch though.

 

[Rob Croson]

Nice explanation. Always like reading those kinds of things.

 

[acentre]

I do not know much about the science, but all things being equal, I am glad no fracking near me in NY, contaminating my groundwater.

 

[Tre']

To add a comment to mine, whenever someone says 'Impossible' it makes me cringe. Mother nature has a way of proving stuff can happen...

 

[WilliamH]

I do not know much about the science, but all things being equal, I am glad no fracking near me in NY, contaminating my groundwater.

Don't know where you are in NY, but my family used to own a small farm in Allegany County. One of my cousins owned a neighboring farm. He had to drill a new water well about 50 years ago. The water wasn't real good but he was able to tap the gas and heat his home with it. And that was before fracking. So fracking isn't what you think it is, and it isn't the sole cause of gas in the water table.

 

[Hootersnoocher]

I used to be in water conditioning in the '80s and '90s, and there was a client that had natural gas in their well. No oil wells, fracking, or what have you within 10's of miles around. We had to let the gas out of our de-ionizing tanks and carbon pre- treatment before they could be loaded onto our service vans. One could literally light the inlet ports. One of my co-workers parents had a gas well supplying their home and sold the excess to Consumers Power of Michigan. Weren't even out in the country. They lived in the north Detroit suburb of Madison Heights, where George 'The Animal' Steel (rest his soul) taught and coached Madison High School football. What I'm getting at is these pockets can happen relatively close to the surface. Being much lighter than oil, natural gas can migrate upward, from seepage through cracks and fissures. Think radon, which kind of does something similar. Try dropping the well deeper into the aquifer. I had to replace my own well some time back to upgrade my supply needs (pump was too small). Made it a 4" submersible and added 60' to my depth and it even tasted better. It's all rocket geology. Our maker, in their infinite wisdom, made oil lighter than water. I also did some leaking underground storage tank (LUST) phase one and two remediation and the primary studies were to determine the topography and comparative to where the aquifer depth was, which way it flowed, and how could we influence the migration and separation of the oil from the water, using de-watering pumps and vapor vacuum extraction. Then passing both through activated charcoal vessels. There also, can be more than one aquifer, water table is more a reference to surface fed and near surface water which can be contaminated by rain, run off or LUST sites. OUch, my own head hurts now. Dredged (pun intended) from the depths of my brain. My youngest son says I Always (!) dad up my answer. More info than he wanted.

 

[Rickb]

Geochemist's make important general statements regarding fracking based on scientific studies (seismology) that even I can understand:

If there is even a slight risk that fracking and other wastewater injection wells can and do induced earthquakes damaging property or chance that your aquifer and local drinking water supply may be tainted as a result of some wastewater injection wells why would you oppose EPA regulations and deny or question the scientific findings? Seems like a very high risk scenario.

 

[booboo]

Any ramifications and effects of fracking, IMHO, are hypothesis. Nowhere near theory or fact yet.
The earth's bread crumb crust is thin compared to the melted cheese inside. Just saying, not much crust between us and a cheesy demise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
" Depending on how well the tests match the predictions, the original hypothesis may require refinement, alteration, expansion or even rejection. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported a general theory may be developed."

 

[Kuda]

[QUOTE="booboo, post: 179614, member: 6568"Snipped:
" Depending on how well the tests match the predictions, the original hypothesis may require refinement, alteration, expansion or even rejection. If a particular hypothesis becomes very well supported a general theory may be developed."[/QUOTE]

This would apply to the Elio too, I reckon.......

 

[Marshall]

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 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. 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 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, they are almost always undetectable, and they usually subside after 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 years, rather than destroy it in a few weeks.

This reminds me of my courses while receiving my BS in Energy Resources Management at Lamar University which sits about 1/4 mile from the Lucas Gusher which ushered in the cheap energy era in 1901.

Just picking knits, traditionally, water already in the system would drive the oil toward the drill hole. Secondary recovery was the injection of water to drive more oil toward the drill hole and tertiary recovery were other types of injectables to do what water traditionally does.

Perhaps a better illustration is your drip coffee maker. You could wait for rain to filter into the coffee beans to get some weak coffee. You might then poor water over those beans to get more. But fracking actually breaks up those beans into smaller pieces and makes the coffee stronger. All the while, there is the expectation that the water will go where you want it to go and not break out of the contained area. Accidents do happen, but creating permeability through the target layer without breaking down the permeability barriers above and below is relatively safe.