Fracking continues to change America, generally for the good. The Wall Street Journal1 reported that 49% of domestic petroleum production in March 2015 was product derived from fracked shale rock formations. Furthermore, 54% of domestic natural gas production is due to fracking.
America is now the world’s leading source of petroleum and natural gas. I attribute this to a combination of American and financial incentives that support rapid changes in business. With terrible violence sweeping a number of OPEC countries, it is reassuring that America enjoys energy security. The country also benefits from improved balance of payments, which is leading to a much stronger dollar and increased purchasing power.
Responding to excess supply, oil and gas prices have recently dropped. This has reduced incentives to drill still more wells. Thus, the number of active drilling rigs decreased from 1741 to 1010 over the last year. Many of the dormant rigs have been shipped abroad, to countries where they be used to drill more wells and whose increased production will contribute to the global oil glut and and help to sustain low prices.
The analytical instrument industry, especially process analytics, is starting to see orders for new instruments to support the reshoring of energy-intensive industries.
Speaking of analysis, a report in Chemical and Engineering News described problems with flowback and production water from gas and oil wells.2 One issue is that the composition of these waters is different and depends on the formation being drilled and well treatments used. What to do with these waters?
While at Pittcon in March, I attended the plenary lecture given by Professor Naomi J. Halas of Rice University (Houston, Tex.). She demonstrated that nanomaterials can greatly reduce the cost of evaporation or solar powered distillation of water. When optically dense nanomaterials are mixed with surface water, they trap the incident light, which is converted to heat and leads to evaporation. The liquid deeper in the tank does not change temperature, as it would if the light transmitted went deeper, as in conventional Beer’s-law effect. This process may enable water removal for other purposes and reduce the volume of brine.
Production water from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania contains high concentrations of bromide. Adding bromine to coal reduces mercury emission from coal-fired power plants.3 (Perhaps there is a market for this brine.) It would be somewhat remarkable if production water from gas wells could be used to reduce the environmental burden of coal-fired power plants.
Earthquakes are a new risk associated with sequestering production water, and the problem to date seems to have hit Oklahoma the hardest. In sequestering, the production water is injected into very deep formations of basement rock. Soon after this process started in Oklahoma in 2011, a swarm of earthquakes began jolting the state. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, 585 earthquakes registering 3.0 or more have been recorded.4 Seismic activity prior to the drilling was very low
Just outside of Denver, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal disposed of wastewater from the production of nerve gases for chemical warfare.5 The water, injected at depths of 12,000 ft below the surface, was implicated as the primary cause of similar earthquake swarms. Eventually, the earthquakes led to the termination of the deep injection program and the well was sealed shut.
The problem may be injection into a formation that is already saturated. Perhaps it would be better to recycle the production water into the producing formation. This has been done successfully in the oil fields in Los Angeles Harbor. Water flooding is an accepted technique in secondary oil recovery.6
Fracking is responsible for major changes in America. Hopefully, the associated problems, such as earthquake swarms, can be mitigated, or drilling/production in some specific locations may not be worth the risk. Still, on balance, America is better off with this technology.
References
- http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2015/04/01/how-much-u-s-oil-and-gas-comes-from-fracking/
- http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i11/Figuring-Fracking-Wastewater.html
- http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i11/Bromine-Comes-Rescue-Mercury-Power.html
- http://www.wsj.com/articles/frackings-new-legal-threat-earthquake-suits-">http://www.wsj.com/articles/frackings-new-legal-threat-earthquake-suits-1427736148
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_Arsenal
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_injection_%28oil_production%29
Robert L. Stevenson, Ph.D., is Editor Emeritus, American Laboratory/Labcompare; e-mail: [email protected].