Delving Into the Pro-Fracking Stance

Vortex Tools explores why the oil and gas industry believes fracking does not contaminate groundwater, and why, even when they are to blame (in this case of contamination or otherwise), they won’t take responsibility until they’re forced to do so.

With the potential changes coming to hydraulic fracturing in 2012, we’ve spent a number of blogs recently focusing on the controversial practice.

To recap here are the two opposing stances:

1) The oil and gas industry believes that the science behind fracking is sound, and when enacted properly, no groundwater contamination occurs, as the fracking veins don’t spread anywhere near water. They also contend that many of the pollutants blamed on fracking chemicals are actually naturally occurring.

2) Environmentalists contend that fracking chemicals are responsible for groundwater contamination, and that given the way water naturally flows to the path of least resistance, the veins created by the force of fracking not only provide routes for contamination, but fundamentally damage the rock structure, causing even more problems (some say earthquakes).

While the environmentalist stance is (mostly) easy to understand, it seems as though the pro-fracking stance needs more of an explanation to not just seem like some cover story to avert blame (especially as oil and gas companies are already branded as eco-villains).

When I checked in with an operator on the fracking controversy, he wrote the following:

Everywhere I know of where true science has been applied, it has been found to be of no effect. We had a water well on the ranch in Southeastern Colorado that made enough methane to run an industrial engine, and no well had been drilled for 15 miles in any direction.  You don’t have to be in the O & G business very long until a farmer or rancher will tell you, “You need to lease my land.  I know there is oil and gas here because I get it from my water well.”  But you drill a well and they say, “you contaminated my water well, pay up.”

Oil and gas migrate thru a thousand feet of “impermeable sediments” over hundreds of thousands of years, not decades. It can happen thru faulty cementing of the casing or casing failures, but, if it occurs during fracking, you know instantly.  You can run a temperature survey after a frac or put a small radioactive tag in the proppant and see exactly where it went.  

Fracture generation generally is out and down, with some up, due to the forces of gravity.  The “up’ stops when a clay or shale bed of relatively small thickness is reached.  To have 100′ of total fracture height takes a tremendous amount of horsepower and an extremely brittle, homogeneous formation.

Oil and gas entities are in the business of trying to generate profits for their shareholders, not paying out huge sums for contaminated water wells, whether the damage is insured or not.  Therefore, fracture height, surrounding sediment beds and cement and casing integrity are always taken into account in the frac design. 

This operator would admit, along with most oil and gas workers, that when mistakes are made, they are costly (environmentally, financially, time wise). So even though the oil and gas industry can argue the validity of the science and the natural occurrence of deemed pollutants, mistakes aren’t about good science or what’s naturally occurring. Mistakes are when things went wrong and the companies at fault should be held responsible.

That said, with the debate about what would have happened naturally (without oil and gas companies’ intervention) and the accepted large cost of faulty business practice, no company is going to take the burden when the proof of fault is — despite what either side would say — undetermined. By the end of 2012, however, that debate may be over.

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Colin McKay Miller is the Marketing Manager for the SpiroFlo Holdings group of companies:

–SpiroFlo for residential hot water savings (delivered 35% faster with up to a 5% volume savings on every hot water outlet in the home) and industrial water purification (biofilm removal).

–Vortex Tools for extending the life of oil and gas wells (recovering up to 10 times more NGLs, reducing flowback startup times, replacing VRUs, eliminating paraffin and freezing in winter, etc.).

–Ecotech for cost-effective non-thermal drying (for biosolids, sugar beets, etc.)