[ExI] Hydraulic Fracturing [WAS Re: Cephalization, proles...]

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 2:42 PM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:
>
> Do you know what is the subject under discussion here?
>
> This is called "hydraulic fracturing".
>
> It is about taking a large flow of water from rivers, adding (known +
> unknown) chemicals to the water, then heating it up and sending it
> underground, where it forces the gas out of the rocks, and comes back up
> again as a gas-water mixture.
>
> Then the gas is extracted from the mixture, and ..... oh dear.
>
> The water that comes back up seems to be poisoned.

### No, it isn't poisoned. First of all, fluids are used only in the
first part of the process, the actual drilling, which may last a few
months, followed by many years of gas recovery without or with only
negligible fluid accumulation. Secondly, there are no "poisons" in the
fracking fluids, only relatively minor amounts of common chemicals
which at the concentrations present do not threaten anybody, even
workers directly dealing with them. The main components of fracking
fluids are water, sand, common bleach (which mostly decomposes
underground), a detergent and a lubricant, usually oil. After recovery
the fluids may have trace amounts of various minerals leached from
shale, but then all well water also has minerals leached from shale.
Most fracking operations re-use their fluids, since this is cheaper
than dumping them, and cleaning the fluids is easy too - by
sedimentation, biological remediation, filtration, flocculation, any
of the common techniques of waste water treatment.

Again, Richard, read up on the technology but please avoid eco-fascist
propaganda sites as your sources.

Rafal