Abstract As concern grows over the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, implementing policy that protects people and their environment from these potential dangers becomes an essential piece of the renewable energy picture.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the technique of extracting oil and natural gas trapped under ground by injecting a mixture of water, sand, and chemicals into the earth with enough pressure to fracture the rock-bed, and allow the oil and gas to be collected. Natural gas is the cleanest burning hydrocarbon and will play an integral role in the future as we transition to renewable energy sources . Despite its benefits, it has been reported that fracking damages air quality, contaminates drinking water, harms, livestock, and causes adverse health effects. There is little research done on the impact of fracking on the environment due to pressure from industry and government, and current regulation does not require companies to release a full list of ingredients used in their fracking fluid - making it difficult to link fracking to suspected cases of contamination.
The hydraulic fracturing industry has seen a huge boom in the last 20 years and it is estimated that fracking sites will increase significantly throughout the US in the next few years. Government regulation must be put in place to ensure the process of hydraulic fracturing, and its possible dangers, are transparent and practiced in a way that minimizes harm to surrounding communities.Introduction Natural gas comes from both conventional (easy to produce) and unconventional (more difficult to produce) geological rock formations. Conventional gas has been the focus of the gas industry since it started over 100 years ago. Most of the recent growth in natural gas however, has come from unconventional rock formations.
New technologies such as Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have now made the production of unconventional gas economically viable. Hydraulic fracturing is the process by which large amounts of water, sand, and chemicals are injected into hard rock formations, containing trapped oil and gas, to create fractures within the rock. These fractures then become conduits for the trapped oil and gas to migrate to the surface and be collected.The direct economical benefits from hydraulic fracturing are an increase in energy production, which may lesson or eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, and an increase in the number of available jobs. The number of people currently employed directly in production and delivery activities was estimated at 198,400 in December 2012, and the total number of jobs supported by the hydraulic fracturing industry reached 600,000.
The supply of natural gas that can be recovered economically - now available due to an increase in fracking technology - could satisfy the country’s demand for natural gas (at current levels) for more than a hundred years. It seems as though hydraulic fracturing is here to stay: natural gas extracted from fracking sitesaccounted for ten percent of US gas production in 2007, and rose to 30 percent of production by 2010. There is little indication that this trend will reverse in the near future. Despite the potential benefits that fracking brings, the process used to extract the gas poses significant environmental risk. There is concern that inadvertent emissions of fracking fluid and trapped gas can damage air quality, contaminate local water sources, harm livestock, and cause adverse health effects like asthma, cancer, and chronic pain. There are no measures to derail these side effects.
The gas industry is grossly under regulated; the few regulations that are in place pertaining to fracking actually create loopholes that exempt fracking from environmental protection laws.The purpose of this paper is to call for hydraulic fracturing reform that would set standards to ensure fracking is done in a safe manner. If hydraulic fracturing is here to stay, as it appears it will be, policy must be put in place to ensure the potential damage to local communities is minimized. Furthermore, regulation should enforce fracking companies to be more transparent and forthcoming about their practices.In this discussion, we will first describe the process of fracking. This description focuses on the initial fracturing stage, the life span of a fracked well, and the process of abandoning a fractured well that is no longer producing.
Next we discuss the rise of fracking. We present here a history of its development, which starts in the 19th century. The most important aspect of its development has been the last decade, which has seen an exponential growth of the fracking industry. We then discuss the why behind its boom.
The main reason being that the industry is extremely profitable, coupled with the governments push for domestic energy production, which would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We also describe the dangers behind hydraulic fracturing, and the controversy that surrounds it. We conclude with a solution to mitigate the dangers posed by hydraulic fracturing.The Fracking Process Hydraulic fracturing is a process that produces fractures in rock formations that create conduits for natural gas or oil to migrate and be collected.
Fractures are created by injecting copious amounts of hydraulic fracturing fluid, under high pressure, down a wellbore and into the rock formation. The fracking fluid usually consists of water, proppant, and chemical additives that help open and enlarge fracture. The proppants are made up of sand, ceramic bits, or other small particles that help open the fractures and prevent them from healing. Fractures created in this manner can extend several hundred feet or more into the rock formation. Once the fractures are created and the injection process is complete, internal pressure within the rock formation causes the fluid to return to the surface through the wellbore. This fluid is referred to as “flowback” or “produced water” and may contain the added chemicals plus other inadvertently recovered materials such as heavy metals, radionuclides, and hydrocarbons.
Flowback is typically stored on site in tanks or open pits before being treated, disposed, or recycled of. The life cycle of a well varies depending on the production rate and the amount of gas present, but on average, a natural gas well can be active for 20 to 30 years. When a well no longer produces, regulations mandate that wells be cemented closed, equipment and structures removed, and the site be reclaimed to blend back into its surroundings. The process of hydraulic fracturing is mostly the same throughout the industry, with only slight variations in the mixture of fluid.
In what follows, we will discuss how the hydraulic fracturing industry has seen a significant boom in the last decade.The Rise of Fracking The process of fracturing rock in oil wells dates back to the 1860’s. In 1930, it was discovered that using acid in the process would help keep the fractures open and increase productivity. What we now refer to as hydraulic fracturing began in the 1940’s when a relationship was found between well performance and treatment pressures. Since then, millions of wells have been stimulated using this process. An important part of fracking’s development came in the 1970‘s, when traditional gas wells began to decline in production potentia.
This aroused government to invest in research and development that would realize the extraction of unconventional gas deposits, which was previously thought economically unattainable. Shale rock formations have been known to contain vast amounts of natural gas, but the low permeability of shale has made extraction difficult using traditional fracking methods.Perhaps the most significant development in hydraulic fracturing came in the last decade or so. Two new technologies have combined to make the extraction of unconventional shale gas economical: slick-water hydraulic fracturing, where a high volume of water and additives is used; and horizontal drilling, which can follow the contour of a shale rock formation for nearly two miles. The development of this approach came at a time when US gas production was on a decline (circa early 2000’s) and importing mass amounts of liquid natural gas (LPG) was in the discussion. Subsequent to its application on shale gas deposits, the new technology brought a rapid growth to the shale gas industry that reversed the current decline in production.
Shale gas wells in the United States produced 1.6 percent of all US gas production in 1996. This figure tripled to 5.9 percent in 2006 and rose to 23 percent in 2010. This growth is predicted to continue with shale accounting for 49 percent of US gas production by 2035.
With government pushing to develop hydraulic fracturing technology, and a dramatic increase in production over the last decade, it seems as though there is an incentive to increase domestic gas production, and indeed there is. The following will focus on the importance of natural gas, the role it plays in the United States, and why it has grown so considerably in recent years.The Push for Domestic Production Natural gas has multiple applications across all sectors. It is a major source of electricity generation, provides domestic cooking and heating fuel, offers a clean alternative to automobile fuels, plays an important role in the production of fertilizer, and is used extensively in the production of chemicals. Its is essential to our every day lives. A suitable replacement would not be easy to implement.
It’s what we have, what we use, and were sticking to it for the foreseeable future. In fact, natural gas will play an increasingly important role in meeting energy demand in the US.Natural gas is seen as an essential stepping stone on the way to eliminating our dependence on foreign oil. The United States produces about half the amount of oil we consume. We import 50 to 60 percent of our oil from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and the Middle East. There are many valid reasons why we would want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, the two main reasons being that it compromises national security, and is believed to fund terrorism around the world.
But this is the topic of a different discussion. The point here is that there is a strong push in government to minimize this dependency. It is estimated that about 24 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would be needed to replace the amount of oil we import per year. Our current production of natural gas falls just under this amount.
An effective doubling of natural gas consumption calls for a massive expansion of infrastructure and advances in extraction techniques. As we have seen, this is already taking place.But reducing the amount of oil we import doesn’t fully account for the natural gas demand. The term “Peak Oil” refers to the point at which world oil production will reach its maximum point, and then begin to gradually decline. It is projected that the world will reach peak oil in the next decade.
While the production of oil might decline, our energy demand will not. The US dependence on foreign oil, paired with the peak oil timetable, has put increased pressure on government officials to increase the domestic production of natural gas.
