Even though the birth of fracking began in the 1860s, the birth of modern day hydraulic fracturing began in the 1940s. In 1947, Floyd Farris of Stanolind Oil and Gas began a study on the relationship between oil and gas production output, and the amount of pressurized treatment being used on each well
Thoughtful environmentalists have had to appreciate with awe and wonder what natural gas has meant to greenhouse emissions, which have been reduced nearly 15% since the fracking/shale revolution began, all the while increasing the underlying energy production many times over.
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Thoughtful environmentalist...
Name one.
Fracking in Texas is the only thing that prevented a second Great Depression during the Obama regime.
Today is also the day that the 1st Patent was awarded for the 1st Electric Guitar:-)
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-ever-electric-guitar-patent-awarded-to-the-electro-string-corporation
Modern fracking is the greenest technology of the past 20 years, and the envious greens hate it.
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Natural gas allowed us to meet the Kyoto protocol without ever joining.
Technological innovation seems to be much better all around for the environment than more government regulation and giving politicians more money.
Fracking aquifers to enhance flow rates predates its use in the petroleum/hydrocarbon industry.
Fracking has been going on for decades. The ZEBCO (Zero Hour Bomb Co) got it’s start making torpedoes for oil wells, and Operation Gasbuggy used underground nukes to fracture the rocks. It worked well, except the gas was now radioactive.
Conservative friends in OK have been concerned with the marked increase in earthquakes since fracking increased.
I’m not a geologist nor do I play one on tv. Just wondering about this coincidence.
I have no recollection of hearing anything about fracking outside of the US.
Are there other shale formations around the world where fracking would work, or do they somehow appear only in North America?
Conventional production is drilling straight down into smaller pockets of hydrocarbons. When the oil stops pouring they send down steam and explosives to continue production. This is enhanced recovery and has been going on for most of a century.
Hydraulic fracturing is different. It extracts hydrocarbons from vast layers of dry shale. These layers are all over, often stacked above or below other layers. The driller rotates the bit to horizontal and traverses the thin layer for a mile. Then they explode the shale, pump in sand and produce. This is expensive but easily affordable given today’s prices.
Hydraulic fracturing has been going on since the 40’s. I even witnessed one the the first frac jobs as a kid near Ringwood, Ok. It was in the Mississippi Lime rather than a shale formation.
We have alway known that there were hydrocarbons in shales but vertical drilling did not give enough exposure to the borehole to make to economical, typically 50 to 100 ft.
It is horizontal drilling that made it work where now you have 5 to 10 thousand feet of shale exposure to the bore hole. So one well does what before would have taken 50 or more.
They will now say we will run out of sand for fracking just as they said we would run out of oil....
Fracking in many ways is an extension of the gas/fluid injection technology to extract out oil and natural gas that have been around for many decades. People forget that crude oil in much of California has about the viscosity of molasses at room temperature (good luck getting California crude oil to flow out of a beaker at such a temperature!) and the predecessor to fracking—CO2 and high-pressure steam injection—was developed many decades ago to extract out California crude oil.
How do they turn the 90 degree corner from vertical to horizontal drilling?
This article is ignorant beyond the pale. FRACing was done LOOOONG before George Mitchell used it on shale in the Fort Worthless basin.
The revolution is not stimulation of reservoir rock by breaking it open under tension and filling the void with more permeable sand. The revolution is in stimulating shale and sandy / silty shale.
Fact is though that George Mitchell didn’t do it first. Companies like Dominion Resources were producing from the Devonian Shale in Appalachia for many years before the Fort Worthless Basin work was ever even a glimmer in anyone’s eye.