Fracking Rant

the science is settled: people are morons.

[rquoter]Ryan Carlyle, BSChE, Subsea hydraulics engineer

Trying to have a serious discussion about the safety and risk profile of shale gas fracking is maddening. For starters, the fact that I work in the industry and have actual professional exposure to fracking and well design is seen by many to somehow disqualify me from talking about it. Nevermind that I'm a specialist in well containment, safety, and spill prevention systems. "Industry insiders can't be trusted blah blah." Which is the equivalent of saying one of GM's auto engineers shouldn't be trusted in the subject of car performance.

If you don't want to listen to people who do this professionally, how the hell are you going to find anyone with any expertise?

The ensuing lack of exposure to anyone with a shred of technical competence on the subject has dreadfully clouded the waters. This should be a boring and entirely uncontroversial issue. It pains me deeply that I have to keep arguing about it.

The core problem seems to be that the anti-fracking activists aren't aware of the correct terminology or processes for what they're opposing. That makes it impossible to have any sort of meaningful technical discussion on the issue.

And it dreadfully biases the google search results away from competent commentators, because professionals don't use the nonsensical/inaccurate terminology picked up by activists. We don't talk about fracking contaminating water wells, we talk about conductor casing cement bond integrity or wastewater handling/treatment. Those are actual, real environmental concerns that all oil/gas activity must deal with. That's what we talk about. It's all over Journal of Petroleum Technology, Oilfield Review, and other industry-specific academic publications. Seriously, I think every issue of JPT has an obligatory article about frac fluid treatment/recycling now. I'm pretty bored with the subject.

But you won't find many academic studies refuting dumb made-up theories from activists because, to be blunt, the industry has better stuff to do than argue with self-righteous morons. These are people who clearly made up their mind about the subject without bothering to learn anything about it. People who don't even get the basic terminology right, but are adamantly against the process anyway, are zealots and just aren't worth engaging with.

For example, the actual "hydraulic fracturing" process has absolutely nothing to do with water contamination, seismic activity, or any of that. When those issues occur, it is due to other unrelated phases in the gas extraction process. Uninformed (but angry) people have rolled up the entire shale well construction, gas production, and waste disposal process under this "fracking" umbrella term without having the faintest idea what it actually means. The actual hydraulic fracturing stage is not the source of any of the issues people are pinning on it.

The seismicity issue is a great example. Improperly-sited wastewater disposal wells, pumping for decades into closed geological formations, can build sufficient pressure to alter large-scale seismic stress distributions and cause small earthquakes. This is a credible, fairly well-supported theory that no one really denies. But it's not fracking! It's regular oil and gas industry water disposal, which pre-dates the fracking boom by decades. Injection wells have been the preferred disposal method for oilfield waste fluids (>95% of which are natural brines produced by older wells along with oil) ever since the Clean Water Act restricted surface discharges. Continuous pumping of billions of gallons of fluid over several decades is a fundamentally different process from hydraulic fracturing, which is a couple days of pumping to place some sand in the ground, followed by immediately flowing the fluid back out. Different purposes, different timescales, different orders of magnitude of energy pumped into the ground, different equipment, different reservoir geologies, different regulations. The only similarity is that both involve big pumps and a well.

If you want to have a serious discussion about seismic activity from improperly-managed wastewater disposal wells, great. We can talk about that. It's an issue the industry is aware of and is working on. It shouldn't happen but it occasionally does. We can engage with the public and regulators in a meaningful way on that subject. But if you say FRACKING is causing seismic activity, you clearly don't know have the faintest idea what you're talking about.

Imagine complaining to your electrician when your home's plumbing leaks. It's like that. The wrong terminology is being used and the experts aren't going to take it seriously.

We cannot have meaningful discussions when one side refuses to learn the vocabulary or basic process behind the activity. That's what frustrates me and many industry experts so much about this subject. None of the accusations make any sense. It's impossible to argue with people who just mash random technical terms together in a way that sounds scary.

And the stuff that people are actually worried about, when you dig through the incorrect terminology, is not specific to shale gas at all! They are the same issues all types of oil/gas activity have. Surface spills, poor cement bonding, waste disposal. The actual fracking step does nothing whatsoever to elevate the risk profile versus a typical "conventional" well or unfracked well. All these concerns are universal for all wells, with or without fracking.

If you want to oppose all oil/gas activity because of the risk of poor casing integrity causing aquifer contamination, fine, we can have a rational discussion on those terms. But I'm going to win that argument, because saying we should stop making oil/gas wells right now is basically a death sentence for 6.5 billion people. The planet and economy can't currently support the world's population without fossil fuels. Maybe someday, but not today and not for decades to come. We're stuck with oil and gas drilling for a while yet. So let's have serious, rational discussions on how to reduce the harm that causes, and please, please, please stop arguing past each other.[/rquoter]

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