The sand stays in the ground to prop the cracks open.
On an earlier thread, I was wondering about recyled glass - but not sure how easy it is to make. I mean - you can go to the craft store and buy all sorts of sizes of glass beads - but don’t know if it would be cheaper than mining the sand.
Pretty much anything would have to be shipped.
If they can get the beads or grains of glass as small as sand grains I would not see why it shouldn’t work, after all isn’t glass made out of silicon from sand ? And just as harden ?
Use free recycled glass is pulverize it, use the natural gas that is flared to provide the energy source for the working stations to pulverize the free cheap recycled glass.
Every town, county, state should have some kind of glass recycling program, therefore save on shipping costs and mining the sand that is used.
The glass pulverising stations can work in conjunction with the gas flare, also save money from the regulations of flaring the natural gas.
It’s a win win situation if it cost less to produce pulverised glass instead of mining the sand and shipping it, and if pulverised recycled glass could work in fracking instead of sand.
Actually ? You would get finer grain particles from pulverised recycled glass because the sand that was used to make the glass was melted in with the other elements to make glass, and ? The environmentalist might be happy because the used recycled glass won’t pollute under ground, and it would be a recycled product not filling up landfills.
Could they lace the fracking sand with metal fragments to trace the fractures and where the fractures are going with high performance metal detectors ? Would it help the drilling heads “ see “ where they are going ?