Energy and Fracking

Last night, I went to a little bitcoin event and got into a conversation with someone who's involved in regenerative agriculture projects and obviously very keen on environmental conservation etc. Was interesting when I mentioned I work in the oil field and then went on to a conversation about energy. He seemed genuinely surprised by a few comments I made so thought I would post in case anyone interested.

1: Fracking

It is not new, we've been doing it since first half of 20th century. What's new is large scale, higher pressure staged fracking in horizontal wells. The modern form of fracking got a bad reputation due to contamination of water sources more than anything else. The second element is a lack of transparency on the chemicals being injected during the fracking process. On that second note, I agree, we should know what's being put down there. On the first point though, this contamination is caused by a breakdown of barriers. A well comprises decreasingly sized holes being drilled and then isolated from the rocks. What this means for example is one might drill a 17.5" hole to 300ft and then run a 15" steel casing tube and pump cement around the annulus. This means we have the rocks isolated by the casing and the cement. Maybe one would then drill a 12.25" hole a few thousand feet and put 9 5/8" casing and then cement that. Maybe one would then drill and 8.5" hole to the desired zone of hydrocarbons for production, run another string of casing and then use shaped charges to perforate the casing and cement in the desired zone.

In this scenario, should there be a water aquifer present at 200ft, there should be a series of barriers in place to stop any fluids from deeper in the hole contaminating the water. When casing is run, one can perform a cement bond log to verify that the cement is good and barriers are in place. This is the key component commonly not carried out by some of the less conscious companies that resulted in contamination.

My point here is that with correct techniques being applied, fracking should be a relatively low environmental risk energy source.

2: Earthquakes

A common misconception is that fracking is causing earthquakes. Whilst there is a minor seismic event evident during the fracking process, all areas (to my knowledge) seeing small but significant earthquakes taking place in hydrocarbon producing areas are actually due to injection wells. These injection wells are used to inject contaminated water into produced reservoirs. Again, this should be managed properly. If injection is causing seismic events then one should simply stop and use another porous formation in another location for disposal.

3: Desert solar

Another topic we discussed was solar. I kinda like solar energy from a distributed systems perspective and plan to be installing solar on my next property. However, this gentleman made a comment about harnessing solar energy in deserts and had never considered the phenomenal loss of output due to dust. I know of one very large scale project that lost over 50% of output in the first 6 months and became a bit of a white elephant.

Considering how much copy is given to energy related themes and all the changes desired to our energy production technology, I think it's pretty sad that people who are obviously very fascinated and interested in the topic are not able to find easy access to such simple bits of information to enable more informed ideas.