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How to Explain Fracking to a Biden Bozo: Fracking Facts from Jack

In last night’s “debate” Joe Biden threatened to destroy the fossil fuel industry in the United States starting with fracking. But, you say, Vas is diz fracking und how iz it done?

 

American Digest reader Jack responds with these enlightening facts.

Well fracking is a well completion process that is done correctly 99.99999% of the time and its only effect is to enhance the recovery of hydrocarbons from a potentially productive formation thousands of feet beneath the surface but when fools like Biden stand in front of a mic and talk about fracking as if the process is some kind of environment wrecking operation I have an irresistible urge to calmly get out of my chair and bitch slap that idiot into a deeper unconsciousness. Not a single moderator has asked that butt wipe to explain the environmental danger of fracking and he prattles on about it like a damned fool.

When a well is drilled, the drill bit cuts through multiple layers of hard rock from the surface to its total depth (TD) and at that point the wellbore is logged, a term which means that it is, for lack of a better explanation, surveyed with a series of tools that can determine the permeability (the ability of sand grains under high pressure to transmit fluids) and porosity (a measure of space between those grains of highly compressed sand) of each layer of rock and the presence of various waters and of hydrocarbons within each layer of rock due to their ability to permit an electric current to flow through them.

Water is not resistive to electric current but hydrocarbons are resistive and scientists by studying these logs, which portions of a sand thickness have water (fresh or salt), which contain high concentrations of hydrocarbons and whether the formation will yield those hydrocarbons without much stimulation or, if porosity and perm and low, if the formation will require stimulation, i.e. a frack job to split those rocks and open them so that oil or gas, along with the frack material, to be recovered, separated and marketed.

When a frac has been performed on a well bore, the frac fluids and usually the sand mixed with it, often return to the surface, through the drill pipe, where the water and fluid is separated into tanks. Very often frac fluids and material are trucked away from the are reused on other wells. Along with these frac fluids, the well usually produces high volumes of water which is usually mixed with hydrocarbons. That mixture is also sent through separators and the water, which has to go somewhere, is directed to holding tanks. Any hydrocarbons recovered while the well is cleaning up are also directed to surface tanks or to a gas sweetener for marketing.

Eventually the well will deliver all or most of the formation water and when that occurs it goes on stream for marketing, the location is cleaned up and the well is then supervised by field crews that are employed by the Operator.

The water obtained from that well bore has to go somewhere and it is customary for an Operator to dispose of the water through what are known as salt water disposal wells or, simply, disposal wells. Water is trucked from the original well’s location and it is sometimes used in secondary or tertiary recovery operations on older fields by injecting that water into well bores on the flanks of an old productive field where once injected, the water moves from the injection site…a point of high pressure…through the formation and over time…to a recovery well that is still capable of producing hydrocarbons through that water flooding program. When the recovery well begins producing the injected water, it is usually plugged and abandoned and dies its natural death.

Now, the problems that are being experienced that we are all hearing about fall into two categories. The first is pollution of ground water sources. This event very seldom occurs and when it does, it indicates that when the well was initially drilled and the surface casing pipe was cemented to protect fresh H20 formations, that the cement job failed or that perhaps there exists a fissure in the surface casing that permits the communication of water or drilling fluid, etc., into the fresh water source. However, this problem very seldom exists and even with my 40 plus years in the exploration side of the oil and gas industry, I can only recall one or two times that the problem has occurred. There are others, no doubt, but it’s a 1,000,000.00 waiting on a penny kind of problem and it is usually repaired within a very short time upon discovery.

The other event is a big deal. That is, the disposal of salt water into deep injection wells. When the water from any well, regardless of whether it was fracked or not, is injected into deep injection wells, that water moves from a level of high pressure to an area of low pressure, very slowly and over time, through rocks that are thousands of feet beneath the surface. As the water migrates it will enter the facies and fissures of rocks and it will ‘lubricate’ existing faults in the area of the injection well. That fault lubrication, if the fault is under pressure, will cause the fault to slip and the result will be an earthquake of some magnitude.

Oklahoma particularly has had to deal with that problem and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission has required highly in-depth and expensive studies on this problem and it has, in many instances, prohibited further injection. When that occurred, the quakes began to lessen and now they are rare.

The oil and gas industry is working on methods to treat salt water so that it can be neutralized, used and no longer injected and in short order, if that has not already become practice, it will be.

What I’ve provided is a snap shot of oil field practice and the changes that occur in an attempt to disarm people regarding Biden’s and the entire environmental movements’ fascination and condemnation of fracking as an environmental hazard.

Do not think, even for a second, that knowledgable land owners, various environmental agencies and the EPA are inflamed about fracking.

Nope, it’s only a bunch of GD Leftists and stupid bastards who will believe anything some emotional, uninformed and agenda minded POS tells them, who desire to mutilate an absolutely positive industry and destroy millions of jobs and the support industries that assist it.

Someone needs to call these clowns, Biden, Pelosi, Harris and others on this matter in a public forum and have them explain just what it is about expensive and highly complicated well completion practices that frightens them so. I’d love to hear their replies.
practices

In other words, as a much less understanding person such as myself might say to a Biden Bozo: 

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Stargazer October 23, 2020, 12:34 PM

    It is always and everywhere about grabbing power. Fracking just happens to be one of the venues they have chosen. The activists churn up the noise and the useful idiots just do their bidding. They don’t want to learn!

  • Anonymous October 23, 2020, 12:36 PM

    Excellent summary. I too would like to hear a public-forum response to their perceptions of the dangers of fracking, but I suspect the answer will be “because the science” or “because Greta said so.”

  • Casey Klahn October 23, 2020, 1:41 PM

    Come on! C’maaawwwwn, man! Psshhhhhhhhttt commmmmeeee awwwwnnnn, Mahhhhhhn.

    Liberal response.

  • waitingForTheStorm October 23, 2020, 1:58 PM

    This does not talk about directional drilling which has been used recently. In this scheme a single platform drills many wells and the well bore is directed horizontally for some pretty good distance in a pattern radiating out from the platform.

    Many of these wells are drilled in formations with relatively low volumes of fluids (gas/oil/water). The static fluid pressures are relatively low. The fracking fluids are used to generate a shock wave in the well bore and fracture the formations near the well bore. This yields a large volume of “empty space” adjoining the well bore. The fluids move into the voids and into the well bore. As long as the pressure above the column is less than the pressure in the formation, the the fluids will flow. I have seen natural gas reinjected into the upper well bore to decrease the pressure on the higher regions of the bore.

    All wells (in the companies I worked) produce a mix if oil, natural gas, and water. There can be a real difficulty in measuring the volumes of each fluid in the mix. This is critically important for taxing and royalty assignment. At least one company I was at developed two full pages of extremely complex math that was strictly to predict the volumes based on two discrete well tests.

    I am not a well engineer, but spent 24 years working closely with petroleum engineers, petrochemical engineers, physicists, and mathematicians. This is an extremely complex industry and the innovations over the last 40 years have been tremendous. The sheer ingenuity of American scientists and engineers are why we are energy independent now. It would be a shame to lose all of those jobs and all of that expertise and innovation.

  • ghostsniper October 23, 2020, 5:32 PM

    Thanks you guys, Jack and Waiting, for some info that seems factual and in a format easily understood.
    Up til now all I knew were the rumors everyone else has heard with no support. I don’t know either of you in person but neither do I know the skwalking heads (SH) on the toob. But I have read Jacks words many times so in a sense I know him more than the SH’s and he is more trustworthy. I’ve heard the SH’s lie many times and in many ways and I can’t say that about Jack.

  • ghostsniper October 23, 2020, 5:35 PM

    And Casey, you’re right. I watched that whole thing and bidens schtick was old the first time he said it. Amcoms (american communists) go out of their way to make people normal hate them.

  • John the River October 23, 2020, 5:47 PM

    Price of gasoline in the Northeast today, $1.94 a gallon.
    Price of gasoline here during the Obama administration, >$5.00 a gallon.
    Price likely for a gallon of gasoline if China Joe Biden is elected, >$6.00 a gallon.

  • Snakepit Kansas October 23, 2020, 6:26 PM

    The Biden’s are crooked as broke dick dogs. Hunter got kicked out of the US Military for testing positive for cocaine. Then next thing you know he is on the board of Amtrak. Then Barisma, raking in millions. Obviously benefiting from his family name for fame and fortune that nobody reading here could ever equate. If Trump’s family had done anything similar it would be front page news and he would have been crucified appropriately. Plugs and his crew got a complete pass from MSM. Keep your powder dry.

  • ghostsniper October 23, 2020, 7:16 PM

    Snake sed: “Hunter got kicked out of the US Military for testing positive for cocaine.”
    ======
    Don’t forget, that happened after being in less than a month. Now I ask you, how in the world does someone get ahold of an illegal drug within a month of being in the military? I remember that month very well. It was worse than being in prison. It was not physically possible to even get a legal cig let alone anything illegal. Yeah, those bidens have been criminals for a loooong time.

  • Nori October 23, 2020, 8:14 PM

    That was an excellent snapshot of fracking;informative and interesting,thanks Jack and wftStorm.
    American ingenuity is abhorred by leftists. It’s a stronghold of pale men,which is what frightens them so. What they cannot understand,they seek to destroy.

  • Cynyr October 23, 2020, 11:31 PM

    To see the world that Biden sees
    just stick your head between your knees.
    Once you’ve got the hang of that,
    use your pecker as a hat.

  • Jack October 24, 2020, 10:32 AM

    My comments above were brief, just as WaitingForThe Storm, pointed out.

    I should have described the general process for fracking. When the well engineers determine what sands they want to frack the tops and bottoms of those formations are sealed off down hole so that the formation is isolated and that fluids from that target zone cannot communicate with others below or above that zone. The drill pipe in the section of the formation to be fracked, is perforated by any number of different techniques and holes are blown into that section of the pipe by a perf gun. After perforation, frack fluids and its components are pumped down the hole to the target zone and it is then put under tremendous pressure by multiple compression trucks or engines on the surface.

    That pressure from the surface units moves down the drill pike, through the perforations in the target zone and into the rocks surrounding the perforated drill pipe and it breaks and splits, or fracks, those adjacent rocks. Right off the top of my head I cannot say, and there is still some speculation about just how far away from the drill pipe those fracks might extend and that’s a question for a geologist or geophysicist, but you don’t get just one split from the operation. That pressure fractures the rock like it was smashed with a hammer with dozens of splits, breaks, fractures and fissures created.

    The spaces created by those fractures will immediately fill with formation water and any hydrocarbons and at that point in time, the Operator cease the pressuring operation and initiate its recovery operation to remove frack material and whatever else is in the formation, bring it to the surface and into holding tanks. I don’t have any stats on it but they are available but these formations contain a tremendous amount of water that is recovered before the well ‘cleans up’ and hydrocarbons become the primary recovery from the well. This water return is disposed of, as previously mentioned, into disposal wells.

    The nice thing about a frack job is that the entire operation, from start to completion, is a closed operation and within that context, the drilling and frack fluids, small pieces of the rocks, the formation water and the hydrocarbon return does not escape or migrate anywhere except from that area of high pressure in the wellborn, to the surface facilities that are designed to control and contain it.

    Wells have been drilled through these tight formations for decades and scientists have always known they existed and that they were loaded with hydrocarbons but one reason those wells, back in the older days, weren’t fracked very often is because a sand might only be a few feet thick and fracks are expensive. So people never really heard much about a frack job.

    Back in the very early 90’s, and this is just a SWAG, technology began to be developed and engineers began to drill wells directionally, that is, they would drill a vertical well bore and log the formation. Then they would segregate the deeper formations and, using what I’ll just call ‘downhole motors’, they were able to direct, literally steer, their drill bits laterally through a particular formation and run the pipe several hundred feet through the entire formation. Then they would frack a couple of hundred feet of that zone instead of the smaller vertical section.

    The equipment and tech changed and now an Operator can now laterally drill, test, frack and complete multiple wells from a single surface location with laterals that can run several thousand feet and in different directions. And because of that capability larger drilling and spacing units have been created so that mineral owners, who may own minerals and royalty can receive production revenue from those multiple wells.

    I haven’t checked but there are probably multiple vids on YT that will illustrate the entire procedure and people who are interested should investigate the process. It is absolutely stunning to discover the evolution of oil and gas exploration techniques and if these left wing nut jobs, like Biden, actually knew what the hell he was talking about, he would have no narrative on the matter at all.

  • SteveS October 24, 2020, 11:43 AM

    The next part is to illustrate to these clowns that all of this is occurring at depths measured in thousands of feet. Eagle Ford is 8,000-12,000 feet, Bakken is 20,000 feet. Take a thread, call it your drill pipe and scale it at 1″ = 100′. To represent a 10,000 foot well would take 100 inches of thread: almost 7-1/2 feet. Tape that up on the wall, draw a couple blue lines at 1″-3″ from the top (the water wells) and point out how the remaining 7-feet is solid rock — rock that separates the well completion activities from the surface. You might even tack a couple inches on the top to show the rig height.

  • ghostsniper October 24, 2020, 11:55 AM

    I know nothing about it, but I’m sorta fascinated by the idea, that they can now “steer” stuff underground. I first encountered this about 30 years ago when a company was running an underground electrical conduit on the property line at the rear of our land. The pipe was on a machine that held the pipe at a shallow angle and the pipe had a solid steel tip on it. The machine forced the pipe into the ground while a dood with a large handheld device walked along the property line where they were wanting the pipe to go. The handheld device had a small keyboard and monitor on it and the operator would make adjustments as the pipe was fed down the hole. About 20 minutes later that pipe emerged on the other side of the property about 80′ away. The operator couldn’t explain how that machine did what it did, he just knew how to operate it, not the science behind it.

    A couple days ago I saw a company doing the same thing but this time they were along a county road and were running the conduit much farther, maybe a quarter mile, and, it was going under a creek. whoa I wanted to stop and watch and maybe ask a few Q’s but the road was weerd there and no place to park.

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    VaporGun can accommodate a variety of market-leading charge designs, including GEODynamics charges. VaporGun delivers true entry hole performance with the highest levels of precision. GEODynamics can provide VaporGun fully loaded, or ready to load, and with or without an addressable switch.

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  • Minta Marie Morze October 24, 2020, 11:56 AM

    Both the post and further info in the comments are fascinating!! I’ve printed the whole thing to show people in the neighborhood, after I first establish that they will at least listen. I’ve found if you read it together, and are excited about it, people sometimes will go through the whole thing with you. Technological problems and creative solutions can be really interesting even to people not normally interested, especially if you are exhilarated by it yourself. Now I want to look up lateral drilling right away. How cool!!!

    You’re not trying to convert people you talk to to a belief, you’re sharing a glimpse into the world behind a term. Most people don’t know the first thing about what “fracking” even superficially means. (I had only the barest knowledge of it before I read this post and comments.)

    Thanks everyone, and especially Gerard for posting this kind of information. I loved it!!

  • Dennis October 25, 2020, 5:11 AM

    I’m 76 years old and somewhere in the cloudy past I learned or at least heard of a procedure used to extend the life of the old Texas and Oklahoma oil fields. I seem to recall that this was largely a con similar to “salting” a gold mine wherein a container of nitroglycerin was lowered down the well (carefully) to a point just above the bottom and then dropped. The sudden drop would cause the nitro to explode and would shatter the geologic formation around it releasing whatever oil might still be locked therein. If successful the well would again produce oil, typically for a short time–long enough for the field to be sold. Ostensibly, one company that specialized in this was the Zero Hour Bomb Company. When the market for the procedure died out, this company went to making or at least marketing inexpensive fishing reels, renaming themselves Zebco after the original business. I can’t vouch for the veracity of that story but it’s too good not to relate.

  • Gordon Scott October 25, 2020, 7:37 AM

    I worked in the oilfields in New Mexico and northwestern Colorado for a time in the late 1970s. I saw a well fracked back then. They didn’t use sand, they had these little plastic balls that were considered incompressible. There were seven compression trucks lined up nose to tail, connected in series, to build up the pressure needed for the operation.

    The other option, back then, was dumping acid at the bottom of the well, in hopes of the acid eating enough rock to open up the formation. It was out of style and considered much less reliable than fracking.

    I was driving to a different well one day and found an explosive charge lying beside the road. It was dynamite inside a plastic casing, and was threaded to screw onto the end of a joint of pipe. It no doubt fell off someone’s truck. I drove around with it for a couple of weeks before I remembered it and dropped it at the local sheriff’s office.

    Fortunately, I recognized fairly quickly that working around wells was dangerous, and I had too much of a tendency to daydream, and that was a recipe for missing fingers or limbs. There were worse fates, too. I got out while I had all my parts.