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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 are the bedrock of fracking.
In 1949, Haliburton performed the first frack job ever. In 1865, E.A. Roberts received a patent for loading a torpedo with nitroglycerin and dropping it into shallow Pennsylvania wells.
Fracking is science, but not a dark one. To date, there have been about 2,000,000 frack jobs in the U.S. My company alone has done thousands of them without incident. Yet, the public has been slow to catch on, or is suspicious, or distrusting. That is mostly a byproduct of the culture wars and the rich deceiving the poor, but more on that below.
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By process, rock mechanics determine the pressure needed to fracture an oil and gas formation. Completions engineers use that data to calculate fracture pressure and propagation, the amount of frac slurry required, and at what rate it should be pumped. A frack company then mobilizes on-site alongside a wireline company. Wireliners isolate the wellbore a few hundred feet at a time into “stages,” shooting twenty or thirty holes through the casing and then pull off. The frac fleet starts in with a mix of water, sand and chemicals that they pump down the vertical section of the wellbore, a mile or two deep, and then out into the horizontal section for another two, three, or four miles. Most shales are pumped at 3,800 gallons per minute against surface pressures of 10,000+/- psi.
Pumping continues for a few hours, creating a web of permeability that will allow oil and gas to flow back to the wellbore. The process is repeated, often more than 50 times for a single well. Why it works so well is that even though the oil and gas formation may be only fifty feet thick vertically, turning the bit horizontally exposes the same formation for two, three, or four miles. That’s a multiple of 210 to 420, an astonishing difference. Furthermore, it was a revolutionary one that is credited to a Houston wildcatter named George Mitchel, the son of Greek immigrants, who spent his own millions proving you could couple horizontal well drilling with high-rate fracking to unlock hydrocarbons in the source rock — shales (where oil and gas are formed) — instead of from the sandstones and carbonate trap rocks where oil and gas accumulate.
By the job’s end, millions of pounds of silica sand are pumped, which no one much cares about, but the millions of gallons of water pumped are a flashpoint. It might sound like an unquantifiable number, that is, until you compare it to golf. The watering of U.S. golf courses uses more water than all of North America’s fracking, and little of it is recycled. Consider too, that golf produces no energy. Nor does it save the planet, though that’s debatable.
Another flashpoint is the chemicals used in a frac job. Polyacrylamides reduce friction and are toxic in large concentrations, but are also used in cosmetics, moisturizers, shampoo and sunscreens, where they are also toxic in large concentrations. Guar, another commonly used friction reducer and viscosifier, is made from edible bean extract. Clay stabilizers like choline chlorides are cheap and not toxic in the quantities run. The biocides run are similar to household bleach and the chlorine used in pool water. Acid is used in small quantities that become benign with activation. The truth is that there just isn’t much toxicity left to frac chemicals anymore. If you think otherwise, watch Chris Wright drink a glass of frac fluid. Chris is the current U.S. Energy Secretary and remains alive to this day.
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Fracking does not “destabilize” the earth, as I recently heard, nor will it contaminate the earth’s fresh water supply. I’ve never seen an intrusion into an aquifer. Ever. The wastewater scare is also fading away as other companies, like my own, recycle their wastewater into frac water. Electric frack fleets are displacing diesel fleets in an effort to combat emissions. Frackers and their customers were self-starters on all of this. No legislation mandated it.
Irrationally, though, fracking remains a maligned and misunderstood business. Ridiculously politicized, yet fracking is the apex building block of U.S. energy. Three-quarters of all U.S. production is from fracked wells. That’s nine plus million barrels out of thirteen. If you cancelled the nine, as is the wish of the Park Foundation (which funded misleading anti-frack documentaries), The Heinz Endowments, and the Schmidt Family Foundation, we’d be living in a dog-eat-dog world of energy competition. Their goals would be an absolutely suicidal concept, killing one thing that works — always — is cheap, and is not changing the planet in any meaningful way, in favor of something that works intermittently, cannot be scaled to meet the need, is expensive and has its own climate issues.
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Per climate scientist Bjorn Lomborg, to go entirely electric, three months of battery backup would be needed. Currently, the U.S. has the equivalent of ten minutes! The cost to get to three months would be roughly one-third of the U.S. GDP ($10 trillion yearly). The environmental result would be a hellscape of smelting, acid rain and deforestation. But surely these wealthy foundations and their enthroned trustees and beneficiaries thought through this, didn’t they?
Then suddenly we have AI with its power-hungry data centers, and Silicon Valley’s turn to natural gas. Therein lies a little break for fracking. The realization that it is essential to life on earth.