There are ways of becoming an oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome apart from directly investing. The country is enjoying a massive oil boom thanks to oil and gas deposits trapped deep inside small-grained shale rock deposits that like beneath Oklahoma, Texas and much of New England. These rich reserves have already propelled the United States into the top position of oil producers in the world.
New technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made it possible to access vast stores of fossil fuels that were previously unavailable. Coaxing the black sticky stuff and the lighter gas fractions of liquid petroleum requires a different approach from drilling a conventional oil well. First, fluids are injected thousands of feet into the Earth's crust via perforations in horizontal pipelines.
A single hydraulic fracturing project can require anywhere from three to thirty or more million gallons of water. Sand is used to prop the fractures open so that the gas and oil can flow out of the rocks and through the pipes to the surface. Multiply that volume of water by the tens of thousands of projects that are anticipated, and you can see why developing new technologies is so important.
Simply managing the high volumes of frac water from the source to the drill site, through processing tanks and into the rock, and handling back flow and produced water has meant that new technologies have been forced to evolve rapidly. Produced water is that which is originally in the rock formation before any frac water has been injected. It comes up with the frac backflow when the fracturing phase of the job is complete.
Produced water can amount to anywhere between three and eight times or more the volume that is pumped under pressure into the ground in order to create the fractures. Some of it is recycled, some of it is transferred into rapid evaporation pits to minimize the amount that has to be transported off site. The remainder is injected, sometimes at high pressures, into wastewater disposal wells.
It is the disposal wells and the process of injecting the produced water into disposal wells, and not the water injected in the fracturing process, that has been implicated in abnormal seismic activity. Following the justifiably expressed public concerns, the US Geological Survey in California have been monitoring these associated seismic incidents, known in Oklahoma as "frackquakes."
Scientists with the USGS have established that there is definitely a link between injecting water into disposal wells and associated seismic activity. Another problem with frac water management is the prospect of contaminating public water supplies. There have been reports of people igniting fires under their taps.
Oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome and other productive shale formations have been of huge benefit to the country. The continental United States are sitting on enough fuel to comfortably supply our needs for the next 90 years. Side benefits will be the development of new frac water management and recycling technologies which will be beneficial in their own right.
New technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made it possible to access vast stores of fossil fuels that were previously unavailable. Coaxing the black sticky stuff and the lighter gas fractions of liquid petroleum requires a different approach from drilling a conventional oil well. First, fluids are injected thousands of feet into the Earth's crust via perforations in horizontal pipelines.
A single hydraulic fracturing project can require anywhere from three to thirty or more million gallons of water. Sand is used to prop the fractures open so that the gas and oil can flow out of the rocks and through the pipes to the surface. Multiply that volume of water by the tens of thousands of projects that are anticipated, and you can see why developing new technologies is so important.
Simply managing the high volumes of frac water from the source to the drill site, through processing tanks and into the rock, and handling back flow and produced water has meant that new technologies have been forced to evolve rapidly. Produced water is that which is originally in the rock formation before any frac water has been injected. It comes up with the frac backflow when the fracturing phase of the job is complete.
Produced water can amount to anywhere between three and eight times or more the volume that is pumped under pressure into the ground in order to create the fractures. Some of it is recycled, some of it is transferred into rapid evaporation pits to minimize the amount that has to be transported off site. The remainder is injected, sometimes at high pressures, into wastewater disposal wells.
It is the disposal wells and the process of injecting the produced water into disposal wells, and not the water injected in the fracturing process, that has been implicated in abnormal seismic activity. Following the justifiably expressed public concerns, the US Geological Survey in California have been monitoring these associated seismic incidents, known in Oklahoma as "frackquakes."
Scientists with the USGS have established that there is definitely a link between injecting water into disposal wells and associated seismic activity. Another problem with frac water management is the prospect of contaminating public water supplies. There have been reports of people igniting fires under their taps.
Oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome and other productive shale formations have been of huge benefit to the country. The continental United States are sitting on enough fuel to comfortably supply our needs for the next 90 years. Side benefits will be the development of new frac water management and recycling technologies which will be beneficial in their own right.
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