Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future by Richard Heinberg
Authors: Richard Heinberg
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down a mile or two, then turns laterally to drill outward another few thousand feet. You’ll cement special steel pipe, called casing, into place in the uppermost parts of the well. This will protect groundwater and stabilize the well for the next stages of the process.
You’re now ready to slide a device known as a “perforating gun” down to the deepest portion of the well; this sets off small explosive charges that punch holes in the horizontal steel production casing. Once that’s accomplished, it’s necessary to flush the system with diluted acid to unclog the holes.
Now comes the hydrofracturing stage. Bring in huge pumps on semitrucks, along with four to six hundred tanker loads of water and fracking fluids. With the pumps, first drive a few million gallons of water mixed with “slickening” agents down into the horizontal leg of the casing, forcing the water through the holes to make hairline cracks in the shale. Then add microscopic grains of sand to the water to prop the cracks open.
After the well is fracked, you will “pump back” water and fracking fluid for several days to open up the well bore so that oil or gas can flow out. You may recapture the fracking fluid for reuse in the next job, or you might decide to put it in an evaporation pond, or send it off to a municipal treatment facility (which is probably poorly equipped to deal with it).
If you’ve been drilling for gas, you will now cap the well until you’ve constructed a pipeline to connect it with larger transmission pipes. If it’s an oil well, you may be able to start production right away and move the product by truck and rail tanker.
Now it’s time to drill the next well on your pad; its horizontal leg will point in a different direction from the first well. Once several wells have been drilled and you’ve finished with the pad, simply break down the rented drilling rig so its owner can truck it away to the next site. Most of your work is done.
As soon as you’ve opened the tap and started production from your new oil or gas well, you will also rehabilitate, as best you can, most of the land around the drilling site, leaving (if it’s a gas well) a fenced area the size of a large living room with several pipes protruding about three feet from the ground, along with a couple of small tanks.
Figure 15. US Lower 48 States Shale Plays.
Source: Energy Information Administration, September 2011.
Along the way, you will have had to move a lot of equipment, water, and chemicals. Altogether, each well will have generated 1,800 to 2,600 18-wheel-truck trips.
Hiring personnel, renting the drilling rig, paying for the lease, hiring trucks—all of this is expensive. By the time you turn on the tap, you probably will have invested $10 to $20 million in your well pad—which, if you’ve been drilling for gas, may produce only $6 to $15 million worth of product over its lifetime at today’s prices. If it’s an oil well, you are more likely to show a profit, though there’s no guarantee.
So why does anyone bother? That’s another story—one we’ll explore in Chapter 5.
The Shale Gas Boom, Play by Play
Meanwhile, let’s continue with our history of the recent and ongoing fracking boom. That history is dotted with the names of the “plays,” or geologic formations, where fracking is common. It takes only a few moments to grasp the essential information about each one.
As already noted, the boom got its start with the Barnett formation in the 14 counties in and around Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. In the early 20th century, geologists had identified thick, black, organic-rich shale in an outcrop close to the Barnett Stream, which gave the play its name. But shale is hard and impermeable, so efforts to produce gas in commercial quantities from the formation came to little until the late 1990s. Mitchell Energy began development of the Barnett in 1999; subsequent operators have included Chesapeake, EOG Resources, Gulftex
You’re now ready to slide a device known as a “perforating gun” down to the deepest portion of the well; this sets off small explosive charges that punch holes in the horizontal steel production casing. Once that’s accomplished, it’s necessary to flush the system with diluted acid to unclog the holes.
Now comes the hydrofracturing stage. Bring in huge pumps on semitrucks, along with four to six hundred tanker loads of water and fracking fluids. With the pumps, first drive a few million gallons of water mixed with “slickening” agents down into the horizontal leg of the casing, forcing the water through the holes to make hairline cracks in the shale. Then add microscopic grains of sand to the water to prop the cracks open.
After the well is fracked, you will “pump back” water and fracking fluid for several days to open up the well bore so that oil or gas can flow out. You may recapture the fracking fluid for reuse in the next job, or you might decide to put it in an evaporation pond, or send it off to a municipal treatment facility (which is probably poorly equipped to deal with it).
If you’ve been drilling for gas, you will now cap the well until you’ve constructed a pipeline to connect it with larger transmission pipes. If it’s an oil well, you may be able to start production right away and move the product by truck and rail tanker.
Now it’s time to drill the next well on your pad; its horizontal leg will point in a different direction from the first well. Once several wells have been drilled and you’ve finished with the pad, simply break down the rented drilling rig so its owner can truck it away to the next site. Most of your work is done.
As soon as you’ve opened the tap and started production from your new oil or gas well, you will also rehabilitate, as best you can, most of the land around the drilling site, leaving (if it’s a gas well) a fenced area the size of a large living room with several pipes protruding about three feet from the ground, along with a couple of small tanks.
Figure 15. US Lower 48 States Shale Plays.
Source: Energy Information Administration, September 2011.
Along the way, you will have had to move a lot of equipment, water, and chemicals. Altogether, each well will have generated 1,800 to 2,600 18-wheel-truck trips.
Hiring personnel, renting the drilling rig, paying for the lease, hiring trucks—all of this is expensive. By the time you turn on the tap, you probably will have invested $10 to $20 million in your well pad—which, if you’ve been drilling for gas, may produce only $6 to $15 million worth of product over its lifetime at today’s prices. If it’s an oil well, you are more likely to show a profit, though there’s no guarantee.
So why does anyone bother? That’s another story—one we’ll explore in Chapter 5.
The Shale Gas Boom, Play by Play
Meanwhile, let’s continue with our history of the recent and ongoing fracking boom. That history is dotted with the names of the “plays,” or geologic formations, where fracking is common. It takes only a few moments to grasp the essential information about each one.
As already noted, the boom got its start with the Barnett formation in the 14 counties in and around Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. In the early 20th century, geologists had identified thick, black, organic-rich shale in an outcrop close to the Barnett Stream, which gave the play its name. But shale is hard and impermeable, so efforts to produce gas in commercial quantities from the formation came to little until the late 1990s. Mitchell Energy began development of the Barnett in 1999; subsequent operators have included Chesapeake, EOG Resources, Gulftex
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