Thanks!


I really don't mind a good well supported debate going on in my threads even if they get quite lengthy.

What I really don't care for is when poorly defined and or incorrectly understood meanings of specific terms or words keep being dragged on for pages at at a time by persons who think their views are so 'irrefutable' that they cant be bothered to take the time to read a dictionary or other such reference source to get their facts straight on what a word or term actually means Vs what they are convinced they think it means.

That said I will be heading back out to the fields tomorrow night so I should have some more relevant things to pass along in the next few days regarding what I do and my company does in the actual job of fracking an oil well!

 

I have no prior knowledge of fracking or some people's objections. Is it possible to cause a landslide as pictured in a video reference in post #98?

Several thousand feet down seems unlikely to cause surface changes like that, but what do I know?

 

I have no idea either but where oil comes from tends to be far far deeper than the upper layers of earth that are affected by landslides.

As I know it landslides tend to be caused by excessive rainwater/subsurface weakening the soil and as of right now I can not find one single valid link to any references to fracking having been the cause.

What I have found however is that the oil bearing shale formations they are drilling and fracking into in Colorado are around 5000 - 12,000+ feet in depth but the landslide was at most only several tens of feet in depth.

Granted it may have covered a large area and volume of material that moved but the overall event was very shallow compared to the depths that the oil fracking work was being done at.

 

I have no prior knowledge of fracking or some people's objections. Is it possible to cause a landslide as pictured in a video reference in post #98?

Several thousand feet down seems unlikely to cause surface changes like that, but what do I know?

There is always the butterfly effect.

Everything has some effect.

Fracknation didn't try to hide ill effects.

It was mentioned that earthquakes are common around large geothermal sites.
And what's greener than geo?

 

Minor earth tremors are common in nature. Here in the UK a few years ago a trial frack caused a minor tremor which shut fracking down for 3 or 4 years. Here, for anyone interested, is the detailed report https://www.gov.uk/government/uploa...5-preese-hall-shale-gas-fracturing-review.pdf

The "earthquake" was magnitude 2.3, as you will see from this - http://www.earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/ - the UK regularly has natural earthquakes of this magnitude and larger.

The upshot of all this is that, in the UK at least, fracking doesn't present an earthquake risk that is any larger than what would occur naturally. In general the effect is no worse than a large truck driving by.

 

BTW, I'm glad this thread got a new lease of life and thanks again to tcmtech for sticking with it.

 

I second that, sirch2. What we need is real unbiased fact; not the speculative rubbish and hysteria that pervades the media. Keep with it, tcmtech!

 

Thanks guys.

For some more info and rough facts about what goes on around here during a frack job as I stated earlier we use around 55,000 - 60,000 BBLs of water for a single well and each well has a rough frack zone of around 1000 feet in diameter by 10,000 feet long.

Given that figure and if assumed that it fractured in a perfectly flat plain parallel to the surface that an area of 10 million square feet getting pumped up with around 2.5 million gallons of water would in theory cause a surface rise of about 3 inches.

That said in reality a 3 inch change in volume at 10,000 feet does not create any measurable change at the surface simply due to the huge weight and pressure of the material above it. The reason being the material from the surface all the way down to the frack zone is not 100% solid incompressible rock so it has a naturally slight amount of give or sponginess to it that would easily absorb the 3 or so inch change that occurred nearly two miles down.

Now that's all assuming that the entire volume of water pumped down worked its way out into a perfect 3 inch thick plain covering the whole 10 million square feet. In reality the volume being fractured is more cylindrical and can be thought of as being more of a roughly 1000 foot diameter cylinder 10,000 feet long works out to being some 785.4 billion cubic feet of earth. When factored down to the per cubic foot level adding the 2.5 million gallons of water to it works out to each cubic foot getting about 1/10th of a drop of water.

 

I think you've got an error somewhere in your calculation of three inches. Here is what I get for 60,000 bbl of water spread out over an area of 10 million square ft:

Volume of water:

\(V \; = \; \( 60000\ bbl \) \( \frac{42\ gal}{1\ bbl} \) \( \frac{231\ in^3}{1\ gal} \) \; = \; 5.82x10^8\ in^3
\)

Thickness of this volume spread over 10 million square feet:

\(h \; = \; \frac{V}{A} \; = \; \( \frac{5.82x10^8\ in^3}{10^6\ ft^2} \) {\( \frac{1\ ft}{12\ in} \)}^2 \; = \; 0.404\ in
\)

So it's even less than you estimated.

I think you also have an error of 100 in your calculation of the volume of earth in the cylinder.

\(V_{earth} \; = \; \pi {\( 500\ ft \)}^2 \( 10000\ ft \) \; = \; 7.85x10^9\ ft^3 \; = \; 7.85\ billion\ ft^3
\)

I don't know which of the several definitions for a "drop" you used. When I was in high school we used 18 drops per cc (determined by experiment using the eye droppers we had) while pharmacies have settled on 20 drops/ml. So that is what I will use because I think it is very close to what most people will visualize.

\(V_{\frac{water}{ft^3}} \; = \; \frac{V_{water}}{V_{earth}} \; = \; \( \frac{5.82x10^8\ in^3}{7.85x10^9\ ft^3 } \) \( \frac{2.54\ cm}{1\ in} \)^3 \( \frac{20\ drops}{1\ cm^3} \) \; = \; 24\ \frac{drops}{ft^3}
\)

While that is a lot more than what you calculated, it's still just 1.2 ml per cubic foot, which works out to 1/4 of a teaspoon per cubic foot of earth.

 

Seems like without some flow the particles wouldn't go into the fracks to hold them open.

 

Seems like without some flow the particles wouldn't go into the fracks to hold them open.

What makes you think there isn't some flow? The fluid isn't distributed uniformly throughout the volume. Most of the volume gets no fluid at all. The fluid creates and flows into cracks in the rock. On the large scale you can look at it as a uniform distribution, but on the small scale it is anything but.

 

While that is a lot more than what you calculated, it's still just 1.2 ml per cubic foot, which works out to 1/4 of a teaspoon per cubic foot of earth.

Good catch! thanks.

I was doing my math off the basic computer app calculator and not my big scientific one so I didn't have a running tally on the screen of what I as doing with the numbers from one step to the other.

Still exactly as you show the actual volumes of water per unit volume of oil formation material is very small.

 

What makes you think there isn't some flow? The fluid isn't distributed uniformly throughout the volume. Most of the volume gets no fluid at all. The fluid creates and flows into cracks in the rock. On the large scale you can look at it as a uniform distribution, but on the small scale it is anything but.

Sure, but 1.2 ml is not a very big crack to fill up. To get to the next foot down would mean one crack .03 x .03 x12. Maybe...

 

As I understand it the shale formations that the oil is in is sort of like highly compressed sponge. It has some natural micro cracks and porosity that holds the oil.

Also the natural gas that is trapped in it is typically in a super critical fluid state which in itself helps push the oil out of the pores and toward any opening or weak spots it can as the static pressures change due to the oil and gas being drawn out.

Given that the actual flow rates per cubic foot of oil bearing shale is very small. it just adds up to high flow rates due to the huge volumes of formation that are seeping into the well bore through what ever cracks and fractures that are made.

Contrary to what the media and environmentalists say the United States and Canada alone have between 5 and 10 trillion bbls of crude that is recoverable given today present tech!

 

Sure, but 1.2 ml is not a very big crack to fill up. To get to the next foot down would mean one crack .03 x .03 x12. Maybe...

Think of it this way:

There are something like 250 million passenger vehicles in the United States. The area of the U.S. is something like 3.5 million square miles. So, on average, there are only 71 cars per square mile. This, in turn, equates to each car having 7 football fields all to itself.

But, from this, it would be wrong to conclude that there can't be anything like traffic congestion. But we know that this is far from the case.

Although roads permeate the country (like the fracking cracks), the roads themselves are constrained to a very small area, covering a total of something like 100 thousand square miles, or about 0.04% of the total area. Yet that is enough to put a huge fraction of the area of the U.S. within reasonable hiking distance of a road.

So think of the fracking fluid as the cars and the cracks as the roads, with the overall formation being the surface of the U.S. It's certainly not a perfect analogy, but perhaps it will help you visualize it some. The point is that the total volume that is actually fracked is very small (it's basically the volume ratio that was calculated above), but those cracks place a much larger fraction of the oil within reasonable distance of a crack so that the pressures in the ground will force it into the cracks and out to the well than would be possible without it.

 

Well to continue up with more new infor this week I figure I can share a bit about what machine does what.

From the beginning the water we are using comes from either frack tanks which are those huge box shaped truck tanks that look something like this,



On average they hold about 18,000 - 22,000 gallons each and there can be up to several dozen on a site while a frack job is being done.

The second option is a Poseidon tank which looks like a giant round swimming pool about 12 - 15 feet high and 50 or more feet in diameter and can hold around 1.5 - 2.5 million gallons of water.



If you look closely you can see a guy in the top right area of the tank looking over the edge which gives you a good reference to their average size!.

Where I am working they run a combination of a mid sized Poseidon tank and a number of frack tanks of which those are holding a combination of fresh water, production water from other wells and or brine from other jobs. The Poseidon tanks are generally used for freshwater only. (And no we cant go swimming in them either. That's an on the spot fireable offence.)

Now relating to actual water usage a typical tank truck brings in around 120 - 130 BBLs of water of which when we are running at ~45 BBLs a minute lasts about three minutes which is why we need such huge volumes of water on site before the actual frack job starts.
Without the tanks being pre filled there would be no practical way for a fleet of water trucks to get onto and off of a site fast enough to keep up with the pumps!
Tank filling usually starts a few days ahead of the job and continues on during the job. If the engineers do their calculations right and keep track of things we should end the job with only a few truckloads or less of water left on site.

 

Interesting read tcmtech, thanks

 

As drilling companies vastly improved their methods and materials, I began to favor fracking and they jobs and the economic stimulus caused by paying American land owners for an increasing fraction of the energy we use instead of paying some foreign country for the energy.

There are some parts of fracking that are not so pleasant. Surprisingly, it is far from the wells. The frack sand (propant) mining in Iowa and Wisconsin are driving some communities crazy. 4000 empty trucks inbound and 4000 full truckloads per week on rural 2-lane roads, 24 hours a day. That is 2.5 truckloads per minute at one super site in Iowa.

It is like suddenly moving from rural America to the foot of O'Hare airport. Noise, traffic, silica dust, ... Property values have supposedly dropped by 50% near roadways.

I still like what it is doing for the economy, but, if a perticular community happens to have the perfect sand (hardness, geometry and particle size distribution), the taxing authorities should take note of this and charge an extraction tax that is sufficient to financially compensate the communities or, at the very least, build the appropriate infrastructure to handle the traffic and weight of the trucks and enforce noise and dust emissions.

Not intended to argue and not looking forward to argumentative responses - just pointing out there is more to fracking than what goes down the well, there is also, where all that crap comes from to put down the well and how it gets to the well.

 

I'm still interested in the methods of the large scale operations, but less interested in the number of drops of water per cubic foot. You have already outlined most of it and it has been an education!

Thank you.

 

We have members across the U.S. ,are there more sink holes in your area since

the renewed fracking started. I see more sink holes on the news.