Fracking

Tag Archives: Fracking

Back to Fracking

Posted on November 12, 2017 by Bill Leave a comment

I wrote about fracking before, but it seems to be the time to revisit the controversy. The oil and gas business is paying for a media blitz saying fracking is a good thing: lower energy prices.

The opposition seems to believe fracking has concentrated all the evil in the world into a bunch of holes in the ground. What is the reality here? Both sides have strong arguments, but they are operating from separate assumptions.

Pro fracking advocates use the arguments that lower energy prices and tax revenue benefit us all. Anti fracking advocates point to many accidents at drilling sites and groundwater contamination, along with drilling steadily encroaching on urban ares as a dangerous activity.

What about the benefits of fracking? It’s true fracking has lowered energy costs and the conversion of coal fired power plants to has has lowered air pollution. True on both counts. But, fossil fuel is still being burned and greenhouse gasses are still going into the atmosphere. It’s very possible fracking and increased low cost gas production is impeding the process of converting to alternative energy sources.

What about fracking itself? It is not new technology. My Fruita paper route doubled during the 1950’s energy boom in Western Colorado and Eastern Utah. Fracking was part of the story then. The real change is to horizontal drilling combined with fracking.

A deep vertical hole is drilled and then the bore hole is turned ninety degrees over the distance of a quarter mile. The long horizontal bore is is perforated, explosive charges are detonated, fracturing rock usually fairly impervious to oil and gas flow. The openings are then injected with water and sand, cracking more rock with the cracks held open by the sand. Oil and gas can then flow into the bore hole and to the surface, then to your furnace and gas tank.

The fracking process uses a lot of water, from one to five million gallons. About half or less of the water returns to the surface and is most often injected into another well (cheaper than treatment). The water use can have a significant impact in arid regions. Return water can be treated, but is expensive.

Probably the biggest objection to fracking is groundwater contamination. Near Parachute CO, it was possible to light tap water on fire, there was so much gas in the water. Most often the contamination comes from leaks in the vertical bore hole. Proper casing and concrete injection readily prevents leaks, but as the work is done deep underground, it is easy to cheat, causing leaks.

My take on the issue? Increased production from fracking lowers oil and gas prices and decreases our reliance on imported oil. Coal fired power plants are being converted to gas, resulting in less greenhouse gas pollution from them. Done properly, the technology is safe, but cheating seems to be the norm in the oil and gas business. If we want to use fossil fuel, well regulated fracking is the way to go. i think some of the opposition is because of the word fracking. It seems to have an obscene connotation.

The big downside stems from the fact reduced fossil fuel costs are delaying the transition to alternative energy sources. One estimate points out that cheap natural gas makes gas fired power plant power cheaper than wind or solar power. The transition to alternative power may be slowed by twenty years or more. In the short run, cheap gas is good. In the long run, cheap gas may do more harm than good. The planet can’t sequester enough carbon and the planet gets warmer. Of course in the long run, we’re all dead.

The debate becomes political, and the oil business has the dollars to influence the decision. Result, more gas gets burned and the long run comes earlier. We will probably render our species extinct.

Posted in Climate Change, Coal, Environment, Fracking, Oil and Gas Policy, Politics, Stories

There’s Hurricanes in Florida and Texas Had Rain

Posted on September 19, 2017 by Bill Leave a comment

Colorado Desert

I am a child of the desert, and the guy sitting next to me in the coffee shop is from Saudi Arabia. Those of us from dry country usually don’t understand why people would choose to live in wet, low country with hurricanes. Yes, there is the ocean, but we can always go to Lake Powell or Lake McCounaughy. We do have a few tornados and hailstorms, and one of the canyons floods every 15 years or so.

On the gulf or Florida coast they get a hurricane at roughly the same intervals, but the damage is widespread and many more people are affected. For some reason, most of the people in the world live close to a seacoast. Yes, trade is easier and things tend to grow there (not like our Great American Desert).

Too low, too many people, too wet. And yes, the oceans are headed inland. It will be even wetter. It is somewhat harder to make a living here in mid-continent and the seasons can be more harsh, but grand catastrophes are rarer. I must confess a warm ocean is good for visits, but I did not like the mid-Atlantic, but maybe it was because I was on a troopship.

Another problem with seacoasts is many of them have a tendency to shake. The tectonic plates collide on the coasts, thus mountains and earthquakes. I prefer the ground under me to hold still. When we visited Carol’s daughter in Menlo Park CA, I was a bit nervous being halfway between the San Andreas and Hayward faults in a flood plain. The real irony is that the U.S. Geological Survey regional office is there.

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

Here in Denver, there were big earthquakes once when the Rockies were rising, but it has been a while. We had a flurry of small ones when they were pumping hazardous waste down a drill hole at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. When they stopped pumping, the earthquakes stopped. That lesson was ignored in the Oklahoma oil fields where they pump fracking water back down drill holes instead of treating it. Most of the state is shaking.

“Do it cheaply, don’t bother with doing what is right.” It seems to be standard procedure in the extractive industries such as oil and gas and mining. The solution is regulation, but the oil business owns the government in Oklahoma and Texas. They are close to owning the U. S. Government.

I seem to have drifted into a rant. Weren’t we discussing living on the coast? The coasts stand to reason from a short term economic standpoint. The rivers are there, shipping is cheap, it is fairly flat, and the climate tends to be moderated by the ocean. Except when it is not. Hurricanes, nor’easters, increasingly wetter monsoons, and sea level rise is scary.

Tidal Flood in Florida

How would you like having sea water pouring out of the storm drains in your street at high tide? What about having your crops inundated by incessant rain? Do you want the roof ripped off your house and be without power for many days? Then there are tsunamis. Take a look at the Japan tsunami on YouTube. If none of this stuff bothers you, live on the coast.

Posted in Climate Change, Desert, Earthquakes, Environment, Floods, Hurricanes, Politics, Stories, Weather

King Coal’s Crown is Slipping

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Idle Coal Car

Recently I have done a couple of road trips where I paralleled abandoned or seldom used railroads. On one trip I came down the Arkansas from Salida to Pueblo, years ago the main line of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. The other route was from Alamosa to Walsenburg, the route of the Rio Grande to the San Luis Valley and on to Gunnison over Marshall Pass.

On both trips the lower portion of the railroad grade had literally miles of parked gondolas, or coal cars. The gondolas on the Arkansas were the old-fashioned steel cars. Those cars are replaced by mostly aluminum cars which are significantly lighter. The railroads make more money hauling coal instead of heavy steel cars. Dropping down to Walsenburg were miles of the more modern aluminum cars holding air rather than coal.

The railroads have lost a huge amount of coal hauling business. All over the country, coal mines are shutting down, the coal replaced by cheaper natural gas. Not all the coal trains are gone, I saw one yesterday on its way south through Denver.

Colorado Springs Power Plant With Idle Coal Cars

Colorado Springs has a socialist Utilities Department, generating power and delivering natural gas along with the traditional water and wastewater systems. The big power plant south of the city used to burn so much coal the city bought its own coal train. All those cars are idle, sitting at the power plant. Now, it is natural gas powering the generators.

Colorado has a colorful coal mining history. The Colorado Fuel and Iron steel mill in Pueblo got its coal from mines just west of Trinidad. That region had lots of mines accompanied by lots of labor trouble around the turn of the twentieth century. There were mines in Colorado Springs, west of Denver, a big industry around Louisville and Lafayette. The mines at Somerset, just north of Paonia are in the process of shutting down. Craig and Hayden are in trouble, and the mines in the Grand Junction region are long gone.

“Clean Coal”, a big lie if there ever was one, is on its way out. Peabody Energy is bankrupt, along with many other mine operators. We will have coal’s legacy for a long time. Climate change, fouled rivers and air, areas mutilated by strip mining, and huge piles of mine waste are our children’s inheritance.

Alternative energy, including solar power and wind generation are part of the equation, but cheap and more clean burning natural gas is the main reason for the change. Gas is cleaner than coal, but it still puts huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is just another fossil fuel. The fossil fuels sequestered huge amounts of carbon that otherwise would contribute to global warming. Now we are burning all that carbon and heating up the planet.

Gas is better, but still bad. All that cheap cleaner burning gas may even slow the transition to renewable energy sources. On balance, however, we are better off with gas than coal.

Where is all that cheap gas coming from? There has been a major technological advance in the oil and gas industry. The advance is horizontal drilling. In past years, one hole went into the ground and the oil and gas was extracted froze around that single hole. The amount recovered was highly dependent on the porosity of the rock formation holding the oil and gas.

Hydraulic fracturing (fracking), developed in the 1950’s expanded the amount removed from less porous strata, but not on a huge scale. To get more out of any field with tight rock required lots of expensive drill holes.

The big change was the development of horizontal drilling. The process took years of development, but now slant drilling is cost effective and allows hydraulic fracturing over a much wider area compared to down hole drilling. Fracking the slanted holes allows gas and oil to be extracted from oil and gas bearing shales formerly not economically feasible.

There is much opposition to fracking because the technology allows drilling in new areas where the population is not used to a dirty industry in their back yards. Traditionally, the industry did not pay much attention to leaking wells. There was little regulation, and all that stuff went into the atmosphere. The oil fields in the Four Corners region are the source of the highest atmospheric methane readings in the country.

Leaks are common because it costs money to prevent them, lowering profits. The leaks can be prevented, it just takes more work and money. The big blowout in the Gulf shows that oil companies tend to cheat when the dangerous practices are taking place where no one can see them. On-site regulation can stop the cheating and oil and gas production from horizontal drilling and fracking can continue safely.

The downside is the clear need to eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, not increase the amount. Until more alternative sources come on line, natural gas is preferable to coal, and King Coal can be deposed. The current difficulty in making the transition is political, with the extractive industries resisting the change at every step. They are spending money to delay the changes that could be used to make change, not enrich politicians and the advertising industry.

Residential Solar Power

We have solar panels on our house and garage. Out utility bill this month will be less than twenty dollars. Xcel Energy is attempting to eliminate the incentives for home solar power so they can continue to produce power using natural gas. It’s political, folks.

Posted in Coal, Energy Policy, Environment, Oil and Gas Policy, Stories

Nuking Western Colorado

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Project Plowshare, a U.S. government program was created to develop peaceful uses for nuclear detonations. The program led to three trials in rural Western Colorado designed to release natural gas from tight geologic formations that contained large amounts of natural gas. The gas was there, but was difficult to recover because it would not readily flow to wells. Nuclear fracking, in other words.

The idea was to fracture large amounts of rock releasing the gas for use. Fracking was in use in that era, but the area fractured around a well hole was fairly small, limiting the amount of gas freed. This would remain the case until horizontal well drilling was developed, resulting in a boom in natural gas production.

The use of atomic explosions somewhat larger than the one that destroyed Hiroshima would fracture a large amount of rock, liberating huge amounts of gas. There were three experiments. All three were somewhat successful, yielding gas in recoverable amounts. Big surprise, the gas was radioactive and remains so. A study indicated that the level of radioactivity released in a California home, when blended with gas from other sources, would be well below the dose we receive from background radiation. People would have none of it. No one wanted radioactive natural gas coming into their home at any level.

Western Colorado, source of much of the uranium used in nuclear bombs, had three detonations in a doomed experiment. The most casual of examinations of the proposal to liberate gas from tight strata would raise the radioactivity question. It took millions of dollars to prove the obvious: radioactive natural gas.

Some shots were done at the Nevada test site to explore using bombs to excavate. Huge amounts of radionuclides were released, affecting generations of downwinders, especially in St. George, Utah. Our nuclear tragedy started in New Mexico with the first Trinity detonation that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It continues today, with all the radioactive spots around the planet and the people sickened and killed by fallout.

Most historians assert that President Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki ultimately saved lives. What they did do was trigger the nuclear arms race with its terrible consequences. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have shown that nuclear power is risky as well.

My first literary effort was a story I wrote while a student at Mesa College in Grand Junction, Colorado in 1966. Project Rulison was in the works, and my story depicted an even greater failure. The blast sent radioactive oil into a previously unknown aquifer that opened into the irrigation canals that provide water to Grand Valley farms. Radioactive oil in Palisade, Grand Junction, Fruita, and the rest of the valley, rendering it uninhabitable. Pure fiction, but a fun story.

Come up to today, and fracking is still controversial. I think the legacy of Project Rulison is stalking the oil and gas industry to this day. Somehow the industry did not get it that bad practices will catch up with them, despite the API’s slick commercials.

Posted in Colorado History, Energy Policy, Environment, Geology, Memoirs, My Story, Oil and Gas Policy, Stories

Three Unjustified Political Causes

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Gas Rig in Western Colorado

There are three causes, fracking, GMO’s, and the XL pipeline that to me are spurious. There is a lot of hysteria around the issues with little critical examination taking place. People seem to be taken in by bad science, bad reporting, and demagoguery.

Fracking is an old technology that expanded when horizontal drilling along with fracking opened up huge amounts of territory to oil and gas extraction. The oil and gas was there all along, geologists knew about it, but it was trapped in what the industry calls tight strata, mostly shale.

Traditionally, oil and gas has come from fairly porous rock that allows the oil and gas to migrate to the wells. Tight strata is not porous, and the oil and gas tends to stay in place. hydraulic fracturing breaks the rock, allowing the oil and gas to move to the well. Fracking is not new technology. It was being used around my home town in the 1950’s. The big change came with horizontal drilling, hugely expanding the amount of rock that can be fractured from one drill hole.

If there is impervious rock above the area being fractured, the only route for the oil and gas to escape is up the drill hole. Done right, the oil and gas go into a pipeline or a tank with no surface contamination. The problem is that it is often not done right.

BP Spill

It’s been clear for a long time, reinforced by the big BP spill in the gulf, that drilling so often not done right. Oil companies are infamous for lying, cheating, and stealing. They get away with it in part because nobody knows what they are doing. Meters are bypassed, mineral rights owners, including the Government, are underpaid, horizontal wells go outside their boundaries, and proper drilling methods are bypassed.

The big BP spill in the gulf happened because a defective blowout preventer was put in service. No one is going to know, right? It is a mile under water. We all know and BP is going to owe billions.

The problems we are seeing with fracking, groundwater contamination, flaming water faucets, polluted water dumped into streams, all come from cheating. With fracking, drillers cheat by not properly lining the drill holes. The correct method is to pump concrete between the side of the hole and the smaller steel casing that carries the oil and gas to the surface. It requires high pressure pumps and a lot of concrete. Done right, it works just fine. But, it is a long way down that hole and you cannot stand beside the wellhead and tell what was done. What can be done is to sample ground water and air. If there is contamination, it was not done right. Incidentally, our old friend Halliburton is the big oil well service company that does much of the well lining.

Until alternate energy is much bigger than it now is, we need oil and gas, and domestic production is preferable to foreign imports. Otherwise, turn off your air conditioning, junk the furnace, and sell the car. So, let’s regulate. We need monitoring for contaminants and on-site inspectors. All that is done in construction, but the oil and gas industry has avoided most oversight.

Fear is the reason for the opposition to fracking. People don’t understand the technology, big oil rigs along subdivisions and water trucks on the highway are imposing. They see news reports that show flaming faucets

Flaming Faucet

without explaining the cause other than blaming fracking. Flaming railroad oil train wrecks. Pipeline leaks in California. The oil and gas industry has a public relations problem.

The biggest fracking failure was 45 years ago in Western Colorado. The government detonated a 40 kiloton nuclear bomb down a drill hole near Parachute, Colorado. Lots of natural gas was liberated, but it is radioactive. People just will not accept radioactive gas coming into their homes. I think this long ago event is what started fracking fear.

Unless you get around on horseback or bicycle, stay off the power grid and light, heat, and cool your house with renewable energy, you need oil and gas. With regulation, it can be safe. We can then put more time and energy into developing clean energy.

Parts two and three will examine GMO food and the XL Pipeline. Stay tuned.

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment, Fear

More on Fracking and Clean Coal

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Bill Leave a comment

Some good news and bad news in the energy business.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper promulgated new regulations that should go a long ways toward ending pollution from oil and gas wells. Each well will have monitoring equipment that can detect any emissions from the well Here is a link.

The bad news, Duke Energy has a lot of coal ash ponds in the southeast, and one collapsed into the river. Duke is a powerful lobbyist, and has successfully avoided any strict regulation or penalties up to this point. This event may change that.

i am struck by the corporate attitude to these harmful and costly events. Lobbyists are paid, campaigns are funded, lots of false rhetoric is expended fighting regulatory oversight of mining, drilling, and processing operations. “Regulations and government intrusion kills jobs.” So little regulation goes into place until a hugely expensive disaster occurs, with cleanup costs far exceeding the costs to do the job right.

i think fighting regulation is due to the constant corporate pressure to have a good quarterly profit. Expenses that cut into short-term profit are avoided by managers who avoid or never see reports from the field warning of potential environmental problems.

In my experience, weak managers who lack foresight and the ability to sell needed projects to the higher-ups tend to focus on cost cutting. Tanks leak, ash retention ponds fail, and faulty blowout preventers fail, all in the name of quarterly profits.

Last quarter’s numbers look good, but the overall profit picture is not so good for Freedom Industries, Duke Energy, or BP Petroleum.

My favorite case in point is when Freon was banned due to ozone layer damage. The refrigeration industry fought the change until they realized that they were the ones to do the work replacing Freon.

Rather than killing jobs, environmental regulation created jobs and benefited everyone, and the consumer paid the cost, fair enough for having a cool house and car.

Coal Ash Spill

Posted in Energy Policy, Environment

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Bill 2 comments

The United States is experiencing an energy boom. Oil and gas production is steadily growing, mostly due to new technology in use in older oil fields that were once regarded as exhausted, and development of new areas like the Williston Basin in North Dakota and the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. Here in Colorado, the boom-bust economy of the Western Slope experienced a major boom. In the Denver Basin, mostly in Weld county, drilling has increased dramatically.

Why this oil and gas boom when just a few years ago, oil and gas production had been declining for years. Fracking, where a well is driven down into petroleum-bearing strata once regarded as unproductive because the rock was not porous enough to allow the petroleum to flow into the well, can now become productive when the rock is hydraulic fractured by pumping water under tremendous pressure into the rock layers. The rock breaks, and the sand and chemicals hold the fractures open enough to allow the oil and gas to migrate into the drill hole.

Fracking is not new. I am from Western Colorado, and in the 1950’s the region experienced a double boom. The government needed uranium to build bombs, and oil and gas were in great demand. My paper route doubled with all the new people moving in for good-paying jobs. Fracking was in use then, but had limitations as the amount of rock broken around a vertical drill hole was limited. Today, however, that has changed because of horizontal drilling, where a well is drilled into the desired rock layer then the drill makes a 90-degree turn and drills horizontally, increasing the amount of rock in that layer that can be fractured.

The result of this technology is that the U.S. is moving toward energy independence. Our dependence on the Middle East for oil is almost gone. New jobs are being created, oil prices have stabilized, and a new energy era has dawned.

All good, right? No. There is always a cost. Fracking requires water. Millions of gallons of water are injected into the earth. Some comes back up, but it is dirty stuff that sometimes is cleaned up, sometimes not. Here in Colorado water is a scarce resource, and most of the water used in fracking is lost.

The oil rigs need roads and solid pads for the equipment. Well-developed oil fields are a maze of roads and pads that have no other use. I became aware of the damage flying over the overthrust belt in southern Wyoming. The land in that arid region will be scarred, and wildlife habitat reduced, for centuries.

The cost most people are concerned about is the pollution around the wells. Lighting the gas coming out of the water tap in the kitchen sink is the most publicized problem. Odors, toxic fluids coming out of the wells, air pollution, and an increase of respiratory illness near the wells are all of concern. The result is there is a great deal of opposition to fracking. In northern Colorado, several cities have banned fracking, with the oil and gas industry engaged in a major political battle.

All this opposition is the oil companies’ fault. There is a huge amount of money to be made from the oil and gas produced by fracking, and the drillers are working as fast as they can to make that money. In the process, they cheat. There are proven means to prevent any unwanted gasses and fluids from migrating to the surface around a well. Good well casing practices, assuring there is an impervious layer of rock above the fracture zone, and well-placed concrete between the well casing and the surrounding rock. All this casing and concrete is expensive, and in a mile-deep hole in the ground. So, cheat. Use rotten casing, less cement, and loose strata above the production layer; all lead to environmental damage at the surface when the well leaks. The damage does not have to happen.

Just as fracking technology is well-developed, the means of protecting the area around the wellhead are available. The key is requiring the drillers to use those means. It is not enough to pass laws saying don’t do it. It takes monitoring with enough inspectors on site to assure proper practices are followed. The monitoring can be funded by a tax on production. (The producers cheat at production figures as well). The result can be more jobs and safe oil and gas production.

Here in Colorado, with a Governor familiar with the oil and gas industry and a good political climate, solid regulation can happen. In Texas, however, the oil industry has controlled the state government for many years. Lots of folks stand to get sick there, and massive amounts of greenhouse gas are entering the atmosphere. With widespread public outcry about the environmental damage, the political climate may change enough to allow good governmental regulation.

The real solution to our global warming and climate change problem is to end the use of hydrocarbons we dig out of the earth. Coal, oil, and natural gas have to go. This is not going to happen soon. We can, however reduce the impact by moving from coal to natural gas as fuel in power plants. This has happened in Colorado, but huge amounts of coal still go to power plants in the south and east. More natural gas production can reduce coal consumption. The plants will still pollute, but at a lower amount. Fracking is the means. The next step is to accelerate our transition to renewal energy sources.

Fracking, if done properly with a good regulatory structure, can reduce our dependence on the Middle East for oil, and can reduce domestic coal use. There will be less environmental damage, and the economy will benefit. All we need is less hysteria and good regulation.

Here is a letter to the editor from The Denver Post 2-21-14 on fracking.

Posted in Environment, Geology