My guess is that the secret ingredients are petrochemicals that are entirely unnecessary... sand and hot water under pressure alone are all that is necessary to fracture the rock. But the secret ingredients, together with a lot of snake oil sell these fluids to the drillers, and the fracking fluids industry makes out like bandits. And it scares the hell out of the public, not to mention first responders, who really need to know what they are dealing with when the inevitable accidents happen. I should again point out that John Wilkes Booth was a fracker. His company used black powder, and their fracking was not a success. It shut in the well instead of increasing the flow of crude. So the next year, he went down to DC and killed Abe Lincoln. In following years, the industry used nitroglycerine torpedoes... and hoist by their own petard was sometimes quite accurate. Hydrofracking wasnt used until the 1940s. Directional drilling came along a bit later, although I saw old wells on Long Beach in the 1980s that were drilled at an angle such that they were accessing pools beneath the Pacific, but the pipe wasnt bent. Current fracking is a combination of deep drilling, breaking up the rock that contains the hydrocarbons, and directional drilling, which allows for drilling perpendicular to the earths surface. Your hydrocarbon industry history lesson for the day.
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 11:17:16 +0000
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