In 1643, Evangelista Torricelli used a tube of mercury to first measure pressure. In 1897, German mechanical engineer Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine with financial help from the Krupp family, financiers of the Third Reich. Four thousand years ago the Egyptians invented the pump. Collectively, the above forms the basis for fracking.
In 1949, Haliburton performed the first ever fracking job. In 1865, E. A. Roberts received a patent for loading a torpedo with nitroglycerin and dropping it into shallow wells in Pennsylvania.
Fracking is science, but not dark science. To date, there have been approximately 2,000,000 fracking jobs in the US. My company alone has performed thousands without incident. Yet the public is slow to realize it, or is suspicious or distrustful. That’s largely a byproduct of the culture wars and the rich’s deception of the poor, but more on that below.
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Through processes, rock mechanics determine the pressure required to fracture an oil and gas formation. Completion engineers use that data to calculate fracture pressure and propagation, the amount of frac slurry needed and the rate at which it should be pumped. A fracking company then mobilizes on site together with a telephone company. Wireliners isolate the wellbore in ‘phases’ a few hundred meters at a time, shooting twenty or thirty holes through the casing and then pulling away. The frac fleet starts with a mix of water, sand and chemicals that they pump through the vertical portion of the wellbore, a mile or two deep, and then down to the horizontal portion for another two, three or four miles. Most shales are pumped at a rate of 3,800 gallons per minute against a surface pressure of 10,000 +/- psi.
The pumping continues for a few hours, creating a web of permeability that allows oil and gas to flow back to the wellbore. The process is repeated, often more than 50 times for a single well. The reason it works so well is that even though the oil and gas formation may only be fifty feet thick vertically, rotating the drill horizontally exposes the same formation for two, three or four miles. That’s a multiple of 210 to 420, an astonishing difference. Moreover, it was a revolutionary initiative credited to George Mitchel, a Houston wildcatter, the son of Greek immigrants, who spent his own millions proving that you can couple horizontal well drilling with high-speed fracking to unlock hydrocarbons from the source rock—shale (where oil and gas are formed)—rather than from the sandstones and carbonate trap rocks where oil and gas accumulate.
By the end of the job, millions of pounds of quartz sand have been pumped, which no one really cares about, but the millions of gallons of water pumped create a flashpoint. It may sound like an unquantifiable number until you compare it to golf. Spraying American golf courses uses more water than all the fracking in North America, and little is recycled. Also remember that golf does not produce energy. It doesn’t save the planet either, although that’s debatable.
Another flashpoint is the chemicals used in a fracking job. Polyacrylamides reduce friction and are toxic in large concentrations, but are also used in cosmetics, moisturizers, shampoos and sunscreens, where they are also toxic in large concentrations. Guar, another commonly used friction reducer and viscosity increaser, is made from edible bean extract. Clay stabilizers such as choline chlorides are inexpensive and nontoxic in the amounts used. The biocides used are similar to household bleach and the chlorine used in swimming pool water. Acid is used in small amounts that become benign when activated. The truth is, there isn’t much toxicity left for fracking chemicals. If you think otherwise, watch Chris Wright drink a glass of frac fluid. Chris is the current United States Secretary of Energy and is alive to this day.
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Fracking doesn’t “destabilize” the Earth, as I recently learned, nor will it contaminate the Earth’s freshwater supply. I’ve never seen an aquifer intrusion. Ever. The fear of wastewater is also disappearing as other companies, like mine, recycle their wastewater into frac water. Electric fracking fleets are replacing diesel fleets in an effort to reduce emissions. Frackers and their customers were self-starters in all of this. No law required this.
However, it is irrational that fracking remains a maligned and misunderstood issue. Ridiculously politicized, yet fracking is the top building block of American energy. Three-quarters of all U.S. production comes from fracked wells. That’s nine plus million barrels out of thirteen. If you were to cancel the nine, as is the wish of the Park Foundation (which funded misleading anti-fracking documentaries), The Heinz Endowments and the Schmidt Family Foundation, we would live in a world of energy competition. Their goals would be an absolutely suicidal concept: killing one thing that works – all the time – is cheap and doesn’t change the planet in any meaningful way, in favor of something that works intermittently, can’t scale to meet the need, is expensive and has its own climate problems.
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According to climate scientist Bjorn Lomborg, three months of battery backup would be needed to drive fully electric. Currently the US has the equivalent of ten minutes! The cost of obtaining three months would be roughly one-third of US GDP ($10 trillion per year). The ecological result would be a hell of meltwater, acid rain and deforestation. But surely these wealthy foundations and their enthroned trustees and beneficiaries have thought this through, right?
Then suddenly we have AI with its energy-hungry data centers, and Silicon Valley’s switch to natural gas. Therein lies a small pause for fracking. The realization that it is essential for life on earth.
