Sunday 28 October 2018

Information On Clean Fracking Technology

By Jose Foster


Even though it is only presently that faccing is becoming popular, the technology has been in existence for nearly two centuries. Additional terms used in reference to the technology is hydrofracking, hydrofracturing, and faccing. History has it that fracking technology has been in existence since the 1800s. At that time, explosives were used in order to access underground oil shale formations and gas. Here is information one should know regarding clean fracking technology.

Firms later in 1930s made a decision to begin applying non-explosive methods. In the course of the next decade, experiments were done to find out how effectual non-explosive methods could be. The invention of hydrofrac technology was done by 1949. By 1950s, the use of the new technology became much popular. About 3000 wells were adopting the new technology per month at that time.

In the early versions of this technology, 750 gallons of fluid were used. The fluid was composed of gelled crude oil, gelled kerosene, water, and 400 pounds of sand. That amount and composition of fluid would remain in use for a very long time. Today, things have changed a bit, allowing between 75000 and 320000 pounds of sand and 8 million gallons of water to be used.

Different forms of fluid are also used due to technological improvements. Gels, slickwater, and foams are among common kinds of fluids used today. Many different ingredients are contained in the modern fracking fluid. Gum, guan, biocines, diesel fuel, friction reducers, benzene, and hydrochloric acid are examples of ingredients. These ingredients impact the environment negatively. The environmental degradation caused by the process has led to calls for making the process more environmentally friendly.

There should be careful disposal of wastewater produced to avert negative impact because a lot of water is utilized in fracking. Prior to 1985, all the resultant wastewater found its way in waterways of the state such as lakes, oceans and rivers. Today, however, it is different since the water is disposed in deep wells. These are also called brine disposal wells.

Besides being disposed of in brine disposal wells, some private treatment facilities take the wastewater to process it. However, even though the wastewater can be processed, not all of it can be processed successfully. Some still contain hydrofracturing fluid and need to be injected back into the ground or disposed in landfills. Even though these disposal methods seemed error proof, they are now being discovered to have some bad effects.

One of the main adverse effects associated with disposal of wastewater is contaminated drinking water. Somehow, the wastewater finds its way back into the water system and causes pollution. Also, water depletion has come up as a major effects associated with the use of such large amounts of water on oil extraction. Lastly, the environment is also affected negatively by both the process of hydrofracking and water disposal methods.

In order to scale down the impact resulting from fracking, there have been proposals on identifying methods of having wastewater reused. This has led to invention of a number of wastewater reuse methods. Additional methods of scaling down pollution are, reduction of amounts of freshwater used, preventing methane gas from escaping, and using other sources of energy instead of diesel.




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