There has never been a better time to invest money in oil. The United States is experiencing a boom in shale oil and gas exploration and production. In fact, thanks to rich reserves of oil and gas held deep within fine-grained shale rock formations, the United States has gone from being a net importer of oil to the top oil producer, ahead even of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Being an oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome would have already paid off. So far, ten million barrels of oil have been extracted.
New technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made it possible to access vast stores of fossil fuels that were previously unavailable. Coaxing the black sticky stuff and the lighter gas fractions of liquid petroleum requires a different approach from drilling a conventional oil well. First, fluids are injected thousands of feet into the Earth's crust via perforations in horizontal pipelines.
A mixture of sand, water and a handful of chemicals are then injected into the well to keep the fractures open, allowing the trapped gas and oil to flow through the pipe to the surface. A single frac project can require as much as tens of millions of gallons of frac water. Multiply that by an anticipated tens of thousands of fracking projects and the volume of water is nothing short of astounding.
Simply managing the high volumes of frac water from the source to the drill site, through processing tanks and into the rock, and handling back flow and produced water has meant that new technologies have been forced to evolve rapidly. Produced water is that which is originally in the rock formation before any frac water has been injected. It comes up with the frac backflow when the fracturing phase of the job is complete.
Produced water can amount to anywhere between three and eight times or more the volume that is pumped under pressure into the ground in order to create the fractures. Some of it is recycled, some of it is transferred into rapid evaporation pits to minimize the amount that has to be transported off site. The remainder is injected, sometimes at high pressures, into wastewater disposal wells.
It is the disposal wells and the process of injecting the produced water into disposal wells, and not the water injected in the fracturing process, that has been implicated in abnormal seismic activity. Following the justifiably expressed public concerns, the US Geological Survey in California have been monitoring these associated seismic incidents, known in Oklahoma as "frackquakes."
The USGS have been able to confirm a temporal relationship between injecting produced water into the rock under pressure and the occurrence of seismic activity. Another hazard of hydraulic fracturing is the potential for public drinking water to be contaminated. Again, this is down to produced water.
Oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome and other productive shale formations have been of huge benefit to the country. The continental United States are sitting on enough fuel to comfortably supply our needs for the next 90 years. Side benefits will be the development of new frac water management and recycling technologies which will be beneficial in their own right.
New technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made it possible to access vast stores of fossil fuels that were previously unavailable. Coaxing the black sticky stuff and the lighter gas fractions of liquid petroleum requires a different approach from drilling a conventional oil well. First, fluids are injected thousands of feet into the Earth's crust via perforations in horizontal pipelines.
A mixture of sand, water and a handful of chemicals are then injected into the well to keep the fractures open, allowing the trapped gas and oil to flow through the pipe to the surface. A single frac project can require as much as tens of millions of gallons of frac water. Multiply that by an anticipated tens of thousands of fracking projects and the volume of water is nothing short of astounding.
Simply managing the high volumes of frac water from the source to the drill site, through processing tanks and into the rock, and handling back flow and produced water has meant that new technologies have been forced to evolve rapidly. Produced water is that which is originally in the rock formation before any frac water has been injected. It comes up with the frac backflow when the fracturing phase of the job is complete.
Produced water can amount to anywhere between three and eight times or more the volume that is pumped under pressure into the ground in order to create the fractures. Some of it is recycled, some of it is transferred into rapid evaporation pits to minimize the amount that has to be transported off site. The remainder is injected, sometimes at high pressures, into wastewater disposal wells.
It is the disposal wells and the process of injecting the produced water into disposal wells, and not the water injected in the fracturing process, that has been implicated in abnormal seismic activity. Following the justifiably expressed public concerns, the US Geological Survey in California have been monitoring these associated seismic incidents, known in Oklahoma as "frackquakes."
The USGS have been able to confirm a temporal relationship between injecting produced water into the rock under pressure and the occurrence of seismic activity. Another hazard of hydraulic fracturing is the potential for public drinking water to be contaminated. Again, this is down to produced water.
Oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome and other productive shale formations have been of huge benefit to the country. The continental United States are sitting on enough fuel to comfortably supply our needs for the next 90 years. Side benefits will be the development of new frac water management and recycling technologies which will be beneficial in their own right.
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