I Really Enjoyed Seeing This - Fracking Ban Fails in Loveland

[Ronin13]

If I had land with gas/oil under it I would not hesitate to let them frack on it and live on it.

You'd make a pretty penny doing so as well...

[hurley842002]

You'd make a pretty penny doing so as well...

Yup, there are a few privately owned properties around Longmont that have operations in their back yard, I'd love to be in their shoes!

[Ronin13]

Yup, there are a few privately owned properties around Longmont that have operations in their back yard, I'd love to be in their shoes!

I have a buddy that worked a site near Rangely a few years back, the property owner decided after they were done (post-royalties) to take a 1 year leave from his work and travel he made that much, and still had enough to bolster his retirement account. Yeah, I'd love to be in their shoes too, and his property value went up after they left because the grounds they used got re-sodded and restored to look better than they did before the surveyors arrived.

[Irving]

Enlighten me!

Would you guys care to share any info on fracking you may have? I have not researched it one bit. It's become the same as drugs or abortion, love it or hate it and I know nothing other than the slick commercials on tv.

Are the chemicals they use safe if they hit the water table? And how about the earthquakes, just rumors? Any ties there - or nobody knows yet?

On another note, I find it kind of amazing we use this technology to extract the last molecules of oil, which in some cases we sell, the US is an oil exporter, while we import from many places including the middle east. We sell ours to buy theirs, one the surface it makes no sense to me, anyway now I'm rambling...

Imagine a 20 story hotel. The roof is the surface of the Earth. The water table (which covers pretty much the entire surface of the planet) takes up floors 17-20. The oil is located in the basement. The oil well is the size of a drinking straw. A hole is drilled through the roof, through the water table, through all the floors, to the oil. In the basement of the hotel, is a restaurant, and one regular sized booth is the target area to where the well is drilled.

[SIDE NOTE ABOUT SHALE] Shale is porous, but it is not permeable. If you imagine a sponge, a sponge is both porous (lots of holes) and permeable (the holes connect with each other), so if you fill a sponge with water, it is easy to get the water out by squeezing the sponge. Shale is more like a pomegranate, lots of little chambers full of oil, but they don't connect with each other. So if you stuck a syringe into a pomegranate, you could empty one chamber, and that is it. [END NOTE]

With hydraulic fracturing, they run hydraulic fluid down into the well and use that pressure to fracture the area as much as they can, to break all the individual chambers apart to access more fluid. Now remember the booth example. When fracturing, the drillers would be lucky to get a fracture long enough to touch the ceiling of the roof of the room that booth is located in; 17 floors below the bottom of the water table. To say that fractures let oil into water is not accurate. Remember that the substance we are dealing with between the fractured areas and the water table is solid rock. Remember when the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico ruptured, and the complaint was that the extra pressure was making things difficult? Well when dealing with solid rock, those levels of pressure are reached only about 100 feet below the surface. So, again, with 17 floors worth of solid rock between the highest fracture and the bottom of the water table, no oil is getting to the water table.

As most oil wells need to punch through the water table, if you get a crack in your well, there is a risk to exposing oil into the water table. For scale, a crack in the well may be a pin hole in a drinking straw, running through 3 floors of hotel filled with water. Oil CAN get into the water table through a broken well, but the difference in the amount of oil per the amount of water is likely in favor of the water. There are real risks with hydraulic fluid and oil contamination, but they are not generally risks in the same manner as anti-oil/anti-fracking people present. Media and TV ads would have one believe that oil deposits and water tables are right next to each other, and oil companies are blasting oil chambers apart, right into the water table. I think the real issue is what is done with the hydraulic fluid once it is pumped back out of the well, as it generally stored somewhere, but where?

I'm not an internet expert at all. This was the way the situation was explained to me in general terms, using the hotel analogy and a drinking straw as a reference for scale. My college roommate was a Geophysicist. Now that we're all grown up, he gets paid a lot of money to know what he is talking about when it comes to oil. Geophysicists are the guys that locate the oil by the way, using seismic trucks.

That's the way I understand it anyway.

[hurley842002]

I had a general idea, but your explanation makes it even easier to understand. Thanks for sharing Irving.

[bryjcom]

I live next to a manager that works for an oil company. He was saying that they are drilling 20-25k feet below the surface.

They also case the walls of the hole with steel liner and concrete to protect the ground water

[Irving]

I have a buddy that worked a site near Rangely a few years back, the property owner decided after they were done (post-royalties) to take a 1 year leave from his work and travel he made that much, and still had enough to bolster his retirement account. Yeah, I'd love to be in their shoes too, and his property value went up after they left because the grounds they used got re-sodded and restored to look better than they did before the surveyors arrived.

Post royalties on a healthy well, you can take the rest of your life off, even if you were only 1 year-old. Depending on the amount of land you have, you can easily take a year off just for the lease amount. I know of one that just signed a lease for $1,000 an acre.

[Bailey Guns]

Great explanation, Irving. Hadn't heard it put like that before.

[Bailey Guns]

(We do not export oil. Gas on the other hand...)

We do export some oil. Even though exporting crude has been banned in the US since the 70s, there are some exceptions that allow oil to be exported. It's frequently exported to Canada and a lot is exported out of AK. But most is exported after it's been refined into gasoline and other products.

[roberth]

Thank you Irving, now I have a better understanding of fracking.