The answers are so all over the place it's impossible to answer. To give you an example, the last well I fraced, I used 50 sacks of sand, 500 gallons of a 15% HCL solution, flushed with about 100 barrels (4,200 gallons) of salt water. Al Gore makes a bigger carbon footprint before breakfast than my typical frac job
...the future of Earth if GOP climate-change deniers keep sucking the life out of it.
"...young Mars was inundated by rivers, lakes and maybe even an ocean a few billion years ago..."
"A few billion years?" Republicans don't give a shit about the future as long as they can make a shitload of money NOW by exploiting Mother Earth. They are for God and Country, but the Earth...meh, not so much.
-- Modified on 9/28/2015 2:36:00 PM
I'm sure righties will find plenty of 'objective' scientists to dispute NASA's tree-hugging lefty scientists.
-- Modified on 9/28/2015 6:38:37 PM
... any scientists in this crowd got a real answer free from partisan political posturing?
-- Modified on 9/28/2015 10:46:02 PM
...partisan political posturing, unless you consider NASA to be partisan:
"Scientists had long suspected that humans were taxing the world’s underground water supply, but the NASA data was the first detailed assessment to demonstrate that major aquifers were indeed struggling to keep pace with demands from agriculture, growing populations, and industries such as mining."
Do you know how much water it takes to frack a frickin' well? The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation estimates each well, per frack, requires 2.4 to 7.8 million gallons of water. Do we really need to do that to extract another polluting fossil fuel when every hour the sun beams onto Earth more than enough energy to satisfy global energy needs for an entire year? The sun is a giant nuclear fusion reactor that we're basically just using to get suntans.
The answers are so all over the place it's impossible to answer. To give you an example, the last well I fraced, I used 50 sacks of sand, 500 gallons of a 15% HCL solution, flushed with about 100 barrels (4,200 gallons) of salt water. Al Gore makes a bigger carbon footprint before breakfast than my typical frac job
You can use a combination of butane and propane. Of course, using flammable substances to frack seems to me the worst idea in the world but apparently it can be done safely and it does solve the water problem. An even better idea is to use CO2 to do it; GE is developing this technology but it is years away from being practical as far as I know. And, of course, rogue wildcatters use diesel to supplement and reduce their water needs. It’s illegal without a ton of permits, and you won’t see this on Frac Focus, but it does happen.
With oil heading to a 30 handle, frackers are an endangered species, however, and they have no incentive to experiment with replacing water with chemical solutions. You can buy a used Saltys frac tank for pennies on the dollar but they only work with water.
So while there isn’t going to be that much fracking going on in the foreseeable future, I think we are stuck with the water problem, particularly in states like Texas where you can effectively legally pump out the water underlying your neighbor’s land. I wish the regulators would require the use of brackish water for fracking but that isn’t going to happen.
And to add insult to injury, we now have a TV show glorifying frackers, with Don Johnson no less. Let’s hope they follow the “who shot JR story line.
Diesel sells for around $2.50 a gallon, salt water for about a buck for a 42 gallon barrel.
Just because you read something on the internet doesn't make it true.
Would someone PLEASE sentence Mari to five years without internet access.
My God, and here I thought the SPOTY's were all wrapped up for the year.