The search for cleaner fracking

The search for cleaner fracking

Justin Gerdes

August 25, 2011

With federal regulation looming, US energy firms are rolling out technologies to reduce the environmental impact of shale-gas drilling. Justin Gerdes looks at one of the key challenges: wastewater.

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“The rest of oil and gas exploration is an extremely well-established art, but the people who invented fracturing for natural gas are doing it right now. To be quite honest, you have a lot of people who have made this up as they’ve gone along.”
Fracking now so dominates the energy debate in the United States it’s easy to forget that, until five years ago, not only was the word itself virtually unknown, but just a handful of shale-gas deposits had actually been fracked.
In Pennsylvania alone, 2,700 natural-gas wells were drilled between 2006 and March of this year. It’s not a benign abundance: fracking – full name hydraulic fracturing – entails sending as much as 19 million litres of water, sand and chemicals down a bore hole under intense pressure. At depths of up to three kilometres, the fracking fluid fractures shale formations, loosening deposits of oil or natural gas. (For a broad introduction to the fracking boom and the debate it has stirred in the United States, see chinadialogue’s March article “Gas fracking’s burning debate”.)
Each year in the United States, nearly a million oil and gas wells generate some 21 billion barrels of produced water, a mixture containing hydrocarbons and other chemicals, naturally occurring water and, in the case of fracked wells, remnant fracking fluid that comes back up to the surface with the gas. Concerns over sourcing so much fresh water, and treating such large volumes of wastewater, threaten to derail America’s fracking boom. And the industry is reacting: searching for and rolling out new technologies to make the process cleaner.Visit  http://www.vofnews.com to read full article

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