Fracking and the Environment: Myth and Reality
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 มิ.ย. 2024
- The contents of all the fracking fluids, why they are used, and what is done with them. The amount of water used for hydraulic fracturing and how that compares to other uses of water. Storage ponds for fracking fluids and reuse of the waste water. Water catching on fire and what that has to do with fracking. Shale with Gas and Oil across the country and over time. Earthquake magnitude and the ones caused by fracking: microearthquakes. Comparisons to other fossil fuels.
Professor, I don’t know if you will read this but to a lot of kids like me who made mistakes or maybe didn’t have their cards line up didn’t make it to college… yet the fact that I can sit and listen and learn about energy and fuel is such a great experience.
I learn so much, and am captivated by every video of yours I watch. I feel like I can become learned, and gross not just intellectually… but as a person
Thank you professor. I am so grateful for what you do
you don't need college - especially when you got all the course online for free.
We take old water we recycle the water and use it again halliburton always pumps and storing produced water and using it for the next job
I'm a 20-year petroleum engineer. This is a very good and accurately represented video on this topic. I wish more people would take the time to watch and understand this. Hydraulic fracturing is not the demon the media makes it out to be
Fking love this guy. I keep watching his videos. The TH-cam algorithm was like “soooo....you like that Chernobyl mini series? How about this guy?”
Jack lynch I found him the same way.
Lol same
same lol
Same here
Same here!
Hello as a person that been fracing for over 13 years. Sometimes we use produced water that's water that's flowed back. An sometimes we won't use the gel. Will just do an FR job aka friction reducer job. But your video was spot on though.any other question as far as other chemicals that are used or what else that goes on in fracing just reply. Your presentation are awesome though keep it up.
I'm guessing you didn't watch the whole video.
For my own curiosity
- Is there a particular type of sand that is used in the fracking mix?
- Are any guar gum substitutes used?
@jfrie d. Normally 100 mesh an 40/50 grain sand is used but theres others used As well
@@jfried6754 xanthan gum is also used so is salt water
When I’m fracking it’s very wet and messy. Gel lubricants are often used, but not always. Many things depend on who you’re doing the fracing with. Oftentimes there’s an odor in the air noticed afterwards. When this odor is detected, we spray the entire area from above with chemicals to mask the odor and prevent it from becoming too noticeable to people in our vicinity.
We are very good at this kind of cleanup/coverup. In fact, we’ve been fracking for years and most folks living in our immediate vicinity still have no idea that we’re totally fracking on a regular basis.
Thank you professor for you free knowledge. I appreciate that you have made these videos for all to see and learn from. Keep up the good work!
I wish you did a podcast, your lectures are incredibly interesting and really easy to follow even when you're discussing complex subjects. Really appreciate these videos
Another excellent de-mystification of an important issue where the public's technical understanding is largely the result of watching TV instead of presentations like this. Thanks...and keep 'em coming. Cheers.
IN New Zealand our petrol at the pump prices went from $2 per litre to $1 per litre all thanks to fracking. Ok since then, its back up to $2 but that is because we have an Authoritarian government that increased petrol taxes and inflation.
@@TheBelrick lmao ok nutjob moron
@@r3d0c ah yes, the one who supports lowering the quality of life on purpose
As an aerospace engineer I appreciate that our energy needs require practical compromises and demystifying the public’s reactive perceptions to certain energy solutions. I appreciate your TH-cam series regarding nuclear energy. However, this presentation seemed to be less discussion regarding the science and more about defensive arguments. You literally said that the rare instances of poorly treated fracking brine are addressed by regulatory oversight. Do you really believe this? Really? Hw many federal agencies and personnel oversee these fracking locations? What are statistics regarding industry penalties issued and paid (not overturned or reduced) for improper operation? It is a disservice to just say it is handled without evidence. Consequently I don’t feel this review was balanced and comprehensive.
I cant speak for the oil/gas industry but in coal mining there are government inspectors on the mine sight weekly or even multiple times per week. I can confirm they do their job because I have been in trouble with them. They certainly inspect every aspect of the mining operation and I have witnessed them completely shut down mining processes for things not being correct. Im sure oil/gas has a similar inspection arm.
And you completely trust a political entity to do what is necessary without any bias or influence.
Friendly reminder water USE isn't the issue with fracking, mostly because they use non-potable/brackish water. The issue is methane leaking (2-3% of production) and water contamination. Can be from not even leaking fracking fluid, but disruption of the formation similar to mining, leeching heavy metals/hydrocarbons into the water table.
I was thinking about that. I am curious to his response on methane leakage. And leakage of putting said water back in the ground with chemicals.
Interesting point on fracking being beneficial for earthquakes however I only see this happening near areas of tectonic pressure. And then there are long term effects of leaving said liquids inside the earth. Of course, if it isn't left inside the earth then that isn't an issue. The pumping of liquid methane does sound interesting however the runoff of methane in our atmosphere might be something to be concerned.
Honestly, resource management should be more of a concern as consistent lack of planning ahead has caused issues. Not that I think we will run out for quite some time, however I do think that it is important to plan ahead for future generations even if it seems irrelevant for our lifetime. 2-3% loss is quite a bit and will add up over time. It's important that enough resources get put into R&D of loss prevention and to do so quickly.
Coal pollutes far more water than natural gas. With natural gas, carbon dioxide may be a problem, but coal also has heavy metals and other unpleasant things.
coal is a molecular mess full of all sorts of shit, probably 1 carbon atom for each hydrogen, if not more. With methane it's 4 hydrogens for 1 carbon. It's insanely clean compared to coal
@@moonasha What I was commenting on is that people point out the lower carbon dioxide created by burning natural gas compared to coal, but then there is the fear of fracking contaminating the ground water supply. My point was that coal tends to generate more water pollution than fracking for natural gas. Natural gas is much better for reducing both air and water pollution. While people point to videos with people's drinking water burning as the natural gas leaves it, there has always been natural gas in well water way before fracking. It might be interesting to do patent searches for devices to separate natural gas and hydrogen sulfide from well water before World War II to show it was a problem well before fracking.
@@lewisdoherty7621 Lots of methane escapes during the fracking process. Over the 20 to 50 year term that is of most concern for climate change, fracked natural gas is at least as harmful to the Earth's temperature as coal.
saladnuts the energy is coming from carbon-hydrogen bonds
Source please, oh wise internet scientist.
How about the 1,300 diesel fueled tractor trailers it takes to frac a well, and all the diesel powered equipment it take to operate the well and compress the gas in the pipelines to transport it
I wish he would have mentioned that the water once used for fraking cannot renter the water cycle either via treatment or dissolution. Water used for agriculture or household use, even black water can be treated and eventually reused, if not always be readied for potable use. However, fraking fluid can only ever be used for fraking. Additionally if commercial use produces waste water, its disposal is subject to the clean water act, however fraking fluid is not. Rather convenient for the industry...
But all this is moot. Fraking has rarely ever been profitable, case in point: Louisiana. Examine the financial status of the firms engaged in fraking, at least one of them is filing for bankruptcy a month, heck even the firm that was the trailblazer, Chesapeake energy, is bankrupt. Other examples: Ultra Petroleum, C&J Energy, Diamond Offshore, MDC energy to name a few.
Solar and wind is the way forward, augmented by Nuclear and Hydroelectric.
@Мухэммэд Харис i dont know whether you are being facetious, but there are numerous hazards, apart from green house gas emissions, but yes, removing water from the biosphere is a concern too, especially when that is not brackish or sea water.
This is the big problem, we have politicians talking on TV instead of high qualify technicians explaining how things works.
100% agree. Many ppl could be convinced through reasoning and argumentation, instead we have fearmongering and conspiracy.
@@CraftyF0X But don't forget that if we were to listen to scientists we would all be smoking a pack a day. They told us it was not only safe, but even good for you. Even if you managed to free all science from sponsors with an agenda you will never be rid of the fact that science is evolving. What good science says today doesn't guarantee it is correct in 10 years. New scientific research may find old truths to be faulty. That is why it is called science. If it wasn't so they would call it religion. Science isn't gospel.
Science must be interpreted by people that are in power to decide what to do. That is the nature of the beast. That means that some people in power will deny current science in the belief that it is not correct (their belief in this is close to religion) or due to the fact that they know that following up the science will cost power or money or both.
@@KjartanAndersen Yea your first point is not quite right. There were some fake studies back then from supposed scientists on the side of tobacco industry, but it was clear and easily tracable under what sort of incentive system they operated. For example, many climate change denier "scientist" nowdays easily linked to the fossil fuel industry or to some of their interest groups. That is why the question of consensus is important in case you aren't a specialist yourself, so you still have a clue on which idea is better supported by the experts on the field. It won't make you automaticly right, as science is not matter of democratic opinion, but it certeanly gives you a higher probability of being correct, than just beliving the one or two odd guy who advocate for the different position.
"They told us it was not only safe, but even good for you. Even if you managed to free all science from sponsors with an agenda you will never be rid of the fact that science is evolving. What good science says today doesn't guarantee it is correct in 10 years. New scientific research may find old truths to be faulty. That is why it is called science. If it wasn't so they would call it religion. Science isn't gospel.
"
That is al right, but how it is a counter against my position ? Science is a process, by definition its evolving and not perfect it doesn't mean it isn't the best method to approximate reality. What else you propose we should use instead ?
"That means that some people in power will deny current science in the belief that it is not correct (their belief in this is close to religion) or due to the fact that they know that following up the science will cost power or money or both."
Yeah my problem with this is that I know enough ppl in position of power to know that they aren't necessary the brightest ones but certeanly the most confident ones and so their judgements in fields they clearly don't know anything about will rarely ever give any value to their decisions, while the rest of us has to carry the consequences. And as you said there are self interest aspects too.
We should always listen to at least two conflicting high quality technicians. I like him - he's a professor at a reputable institution and I always pay attention to what he says - but I'll always check for a counter point. Technicians are not apolitical individuals given no individual is apolitical.
For instance, how to clean a place where contaminated water was incorrectly dumped? Are penalties comparable to the gains from that incorrect dumping? One of the reasons I like this guy is that he does not hide things - might have a bias on the emphasis he puts but he opens the door for us to do our own digging!
@thievesarmy There's another explanation from the Science Historian who found out it was a consensus - at least is an explanation for why senior scientists deny climate change: these people grew up and did important work during the Cold War and see any expansion of the State as a route to Soviet Communism. From "Merchants of Doubt". The others are just sell outs, like you said.
Love these videos and the way he delivers them.
In general, I love the knowledge this man shares. However my curiosity about fracking continues after watching this. Mini earthquakes induced in areas nowhere near natural faults seems disconnected from possible benefits of lubricating the San Andreas Fault. Also, although it is possible for well water to naturally absorb methane, that also seems very different from a previously clean well suddenly developing methane absorption after the geological structures separating groundwater from methane were fractured. I’d love to see a video address these questions - I genuinely want to understand.
This much longer interview on hydraulic fracturing with Dr Mukul Sharma on Alex Epstein's "Power Hour" series may interest you th-cam.com/video/Lj8vZIinpG0/w-d-xo.html
The fact is you were told a lot of BS before most likely.
@@duradim1 The fact is when conventional oil stocks run out or start to dwindle in a couple of decades (?) shale oil/gas will become increasingly profitable to mine and there's no way environmentalists will be able to stop its development. From what I've seen US companies are getting hydraulic fracturing techniques down to fine art and accidents seem to be getting quite rare. Other options are liquefied coal or nuclear, maybe a couple more. But biofuels, wind turbines or solar panels are not feasible options, at least not at present and I can't see how they will ever be.
We tend to think of earthquakes as a problem generally confined to the Western US. West of the Rockies and into Alaska. This just isn't the case. There are Earthquakes all over the USA on a fairly regular basis. I looked at the USGS site when I posted this and it reported only 4 in the continental USA in the last 24 hours, and two of them were East of the Rockies. None of them were over a 3.0 on the Richter scale. I'd imagine a number of people in West Texas or Eastern Oklahoma, where two of these quakes occurred, didn't even feel them. They probably wondered why their dog was acting strange and went back to Netflix.
While there is an increase in earthquakes near fracking sites, Earthquakes are simply a fact of life in many areas of the USA. The answer to me, would not be to heavily regulate the seismic dangers associated with fracking, but rather to make sure your local building codes adequately address earthquake danger. California, Nevada, Alaska, etc. all have rather extensive building codes that deal with seismic activity. Take some notes and build the houses and schools and shopping centers to deal with some motion.
You can't regulate the motion out of the ground, especially in the United States. We simply have too many active faults kicking around. Instead, make sure your structures can handle the occasional tremor and go on with your daily life.
salah bensalah The cost and energy require,ents to remove carbon from the air need to be added to the cost of natural gas and oil so the market can make rational decisions and adapt correctly.
Here in Oklahoma, we have tied together that injection wells near fault lines are a bad thing. Our experience is/was that injection wells along a fault line were causing large earthquakes in addition to the many small ones you described. When we shut those down and relocated them to areas further away from the fault lines, our earthquakes slowed significantly. Just tossing this out there to help clarify.
I think you misunderstand. If you are getting midlevel quakes when fracking adds some lubricants, it means you have the potential for a much larger earthquake without fracking. When that big one finally hits, you won't need to worry about what fracking did or didn't do. Most of your buildings will be rubble because you have no earthquake-resistant building codes. Fracking is delaying and reducing the risk of the BIG earthquake.
Quite ironic that the regulators are rushing to stop this particular fracking, but probably won't bother updating your building codes.
@@kodiak2fitty That goes against the evidence that Oklahoma already has that we had big earthquakes while fracking, and now we are down to smaller ones less often after eliminating fracking at fault lines.
i think you forgot a very important item - the injection wells that caused those quakes are (were) injecting fluid from oil wells not fracking wells
Thank you, I too am an Oklahoman and yes, you are correct. And we proudly are harnessing wind power. Oklahoman's value our home and our future.
I remember I used to repeat the "fracking causes flammable tap water" thing like all the time and when it was demonstrated to me that it wasn't true I felt like such an idiot. I live nowhere near a fracking site and if I open my kitchen sink tap just a little bit and hold a lighter to it occasionally a bubble of gas will light on fire. I guess it's more common with well water which is why people who live far out near fracking sites see it more often.
Please address the issue of methane release in fracking oil. It seems to be a huge problem, especially now that EPA allows release instead of capture or even flaring.
Methane is very short lived and does not have a huge global warming effect. Reason being all the radiation methane can absorb is also absorbed by water vapor. By the time water vapor gets done absorbing radiation, there is very little for methane to and it can’t cause that much heating if any. Methane is about 2ppm, water is about 25,000ppm
Methane release from the artic tundra areas warming up is a much larger issue
@@thepope2412 Saying that something small can't have a large effect is purely wrong. The amount of CO2 in our atmosphere is also very comparatively low to other compounds but plays a huge factor in the climate of our planet.
@@thepope2412 Some of what you said is simply not true. Methane only absorbs light in a couple of fairly narrow IR bands, and at the 7-8 micrometer band water vapor dominates, but if you look at the 5 micrometer band - there it out-absorbs water vapor - even at it's currently low concentration. webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C74828&Type=IR-SPEC&Index=1#IR-SPEC. Water vapor is basically transparent at 5 um. And while it is fairly short lived, short lived is still on the order of 12 years, and it breaks down (in the presence of hydroxyl radicals) into water and CO2, so it continues to act as a greenhouse gas long afterwards. All that being said - you're main point that it doesn't have a _huge_ global warming effect is probably not wrong. But we we really can't ignore it and I think it's worth tracking and probably worth regulation. And I wish that he had addressed the role that natural gas fracking plays in its release.
@@snobrder4evr methane at 2 ppm to CO2 at about 350 ppm is a lot
My biggest question around Fracking is reguarding groundwater contamination.... I see large deposit in Michigan.. but I am concerned with contamination of fossil fuels in the great lakes.
Yeah, he didn't address that at all.
To this day there isn't a lot of research into the impacts of fracking on groundwater, particularly the long-term impacts. As to whether there's a conspiracy against that particular research by OnG we'll probably never know but it's definitely an area worth studying. There's research regarding the impacts of surface water contamination on the immediate environment from extraction but that is only a small part of the larger picture.
on top of professor energy’s knowledge, I do appreciate his humor.
A great video, as always. The "daemon" isn't specifically fracking, rather the use of fossil fuels generally, and for the sake of addressing climate change we need to move full speed away from ALL fossil fuel usage, towards a combination of nuclear and renewables.
Make everything safe and efficient, that's my motto.
Great lecture.
if our ancestors stayed in caves and didnt risk hunting mastodons they too were being safe and energy efficient.
@Johnny Dong nah. just authoritarian thugs scaring people into submission.
Everybody's gangsta until fracking water gets into the water table.
Dave nice I got you back utube. Love your lectures esp. for the ley. More more more
I am curious about the underground shifting of water is a contributor or cause of sinkholes? Or what exactly is occurring?
I used to live in the city of farmer city, Illinois. The water had large amounts of natural gas in it. If you were to fill a one gallon jug with water, gas would froth off of it. Enough gas to set that gas on fire with a lighter. Enough gas to allow it to burn for a few seconds after you would take the lighter away.
Keep in mind that the natural gas that comes up from relatively shallow water wells can be a useful fuel source. I know a person that uses natural gas that comes up from a water well to run a small bakery. It could be used to heat water or to heat a house.
@@charlesaanonson3954 really? That sounds really interesting
Got a question. How much water does it take one unit of oil or gas out the ground, or what is the ratio of water to extracted substance?
This was very enlightening. What was always concerned about are toxic solvents used as part of the fracking fluid. Then there is the disposal of the fluid. As I understand it, the fluid is pumped back into the exhausted well and sealed. The concern is that if the seal fails over time and the waste fluid escapes into the water table. How do you clean up the water table??
Yes, the well is far below the water table as far as we understand it today. I don't think this precludes the possibility that the fluid could resurface in the future.
Consider how to mine oil conventionally, you use a *diesel and sludge mix* to lube the drill called "mud"
please put up more
Excellent lecture.
I understand this is a US based channel and everything, but you'll really need to switch to SI units. It's almost impossible for the rest of the world to visualise the quantities you'll use. Even here in the UK, we've essentially ditched imperial. We still learn common conversions since a decent chunk of us might end up in the US, but SI makes so much more sense. Love the videos as a chemical engineering student though. 9.5/10. Just change the units, or even a caption will do.
I second this. But I first require that the rest of the world start speaking only English. They are confusing the rest of us by their use of Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.
If you can't imagine what a gallon is, then you are pretty intellectually lazy. I have to know what a liter is, you can know what a gallon is.
@@kodiak2fitty most people already do that, as the comment you've replied to proves.
In the US we can understand both systems. Step up your game.
In the netherlands the whole province of groningen is sinking away because we're pumping shale gas. Theres hundreths of people who have their houses damaged, cant sell their houses anymore and getting any sort of compensation from either the company responsible or the dutch state has proven to be a very long process.
I can feel for ya, But the Netherlands is reclaimed land that is bellow the sea level and is a constant battle wether they stop pumping gas out of the ground or not. Louisiana in the United States is in the same boat minus the pumping gas out of the ground and it is still incrementally sinking too.
@@TheTitaniumSkull actually groningen isn't reclaimed land
Not to be off topic but Would love to hear about Fukushima where they're going to be dumping it into the ocean , and thought about dilution is the solution , and what it's going due for the environment.
Absolutely nothing. Amount of tritium at Fukushima is truly insignificant. 2.1 grams of the weakest radioactive material known to man. Dumped into the ocean the tritium levels would increase by about a millionth of a percent.
Search for Thunderf00t. He made a documentary about that.
Nobody could argue with such a magnificent tie.
It’s nice listening to informed, intelligent and unbiased people. It seems rare though.
Certainly cant get that from our media.
thank you for putting up these videos. i'm learning a lot.
So, no water wells ruined by fracking? Is it also true that fracking results in beautiful rainbows and free ice cream? Why was it permitted in secret? by Dick Cheney
Can you use ocean water?
A question/point regarding water usage of fracking - can the water used be recovered? Because plenty of the water used by humans is reused, after being cleaned by natural or artificial systems.
As I understand it, most or all of the water used to frack is currently unrecoverable.
Yes, it called flowback or production water and often when a well is being developed they get more back than they put in.
That's what a lot of the water haulers in the oilfields deal with. The excess water being taken out of the wells due to both what got put in during the fraccing job and what may be in the formation naturally.
@@tcmtech7515 they do get back more water than they put in, but it is incredibly salty. It usually contains carcinogens like benzene and in some areas radionuclides that build up in scale on the trucks and pipes and over time become dangerously radioactive.
So to answer the original question, the water is typically not reused except for additional fracking purposes. It can technically be treated to drinking water standards, but that level of treatment is so cost prohibitive that it would make the entire operation unfeasible to begin with. That’s why so much water still gets dumped into disposal wells
@@levelhead4597
There is a lot of use for salt water. Did you even watch the video? I know for a fact that all the roads near me use salt water in the winter
@@MinecraftMasterNo1 you're correct that there are other uses for saltwater. but it's not just salty water. It contains other toxins as well, including radionuclides, VOCs etc..
Can you provide some references to agency inspection and investigation reports, and documentation that fines were paid due to improper fracking procedures and/or fluid disposal?
I never heard of companies being shut down. How many companies where held to the fire for disregarding safe practices?
@@simclardy1 0 ta answer ya question and he's jus spewin some nonsense about the regulators cumin down on sum in the frackin industry. I couldnt believe he stated it was a great thing for frackin and causin the plate shifts. So wen a major quake hits due ta frackin in his neck of the woods and creates much damage he wont be sayin frackin is a great thing for the planet
For spills you should be able to google spills and your state or province. I worked up stream of the frac crews in drilling. The closest I came improper fracking procedure was on a well down at Brooks, Alberta. While cementing intermediate casing the driller damage a part of the cementer's equipment. In the time it took to shut down and make repairs the hole packed off and they did not get cement to surface. In that case the oil company had to call into Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) to get permission to continue drilling.
@The Irish Italian The general public (count myself included) have no idea what an earth you are saying. Please don't assume that all peoples understand your jargon. Plain simple English is best !!!!!!
@@Leopold5100 Learn to frack
Yes, But we have a Number of Serious Energy Problems.
For Example :- No Quality Long Term Plan. What will we Use in the Years 2500, 3000?.
Thanks for the Knowledge.
@Creepy Hair Sniffer CHS, Nice Try, By 2500 All the Nuclear Raw Material will be used.
Just take a Look at how Much We Used in the Last 100 Years.
CHS, Wake Up, There is No Quality Long Term Plan for Energy.
We are Setting aside Zero Fossil Fuels, Zero Nuclear Material for Our Descendents Post The Year 2500, Post The Year 3000, Post The Year 5000.
Nuclear
What I thinks ridiculous is that they say, it's oil shale, when really it more like natural gas shale. The oil they do get i hears is the nastiest, tarr oil that exists. And they have to put in lots of water, and a lot more shot for that.
George Mitchelle discovered that fracing works best with the slick water method. And higher than 20000 psi pressures.
Matt Damon says fracking is bad and he played a Genius in a movie once so his opinion on fracking more relevant than your scientific analysis.
No Matt Damon here, just families whose water wells were polluted:
th-cam.com/video/5JF7QjIf00U/w-d-xo.html
The day your water supply becomes toxic, they call you names when you complain about it and nobody lifts a finger to help you, come back here and read your comment.
@@Goreuncle Ok, but was any of that proven by actual scientists to be caused or exacerbated by fracking?
@@Goreuncle Umm that whole thing was debunked hard for the scam it was years ago. Where you been the whole time? Hiding in some denialist envirot@rds echo chambers or something? You do know everyone else has the internet too and can fact check you all on this tuff in literally seconds, right? :P
th-cam.com/video/Bn3alMSIecE/w-d-xo.html
www.kbcsandbox7.com/eid/gasland-debunked
th-cam.com/video/HCr1gyNuwus/w-d-xo.html
@@Goreuncle that wasn't true.. I believe Tcmtech is correct.. can you show other
No scientific analysis in this vid, just propaganda.
Just fracked wells the other week that used 336,000 gallons per zone, so approximately 10 million gallons per well given that they were 30 zones apiece. 10 well pad = 100 million gallons.
What he said about the increase of earthquakes because of fracking isn't correct. There has never been any evidence that small micro-quakes can relieve enough stress to prevent a larger earthquake. The reason for this is simply that there aren't enough micro-quakes to even put a dent in the energy released during a major earthquake. Let me explain...
Lets use the example of a 7.0 earthquake. The energy released in a 7.0 earthquake is equivalent to approximately 500 Kilotons of TNT. The energy released in a 3.0 earthquake is equivalent to approximately 0.5 tons of TNT. Remember, the scale is logarithmic. You would need 1,000,000 (one million) 3.0 earthquakes to release the same amount of energy as a 7.0 earthquake. At best, fracking MAY cause upwards of 10,000 micro-quakes a year - well below the 1 million needed. But what if we wanted to just reduce a 7.0 to a 6.0? Well again, the scale is logarithmic. A 6.0 earthquake is equivalent to about 15 Kilotons of TNT, which is 485 Kilotons less in than the equivalent TNT of a 7.0. So to reduce a 7.0 to a 6.0 would require enough micro-quakes to release the equivalent of 485 kilotons of TNT - or about 970,000 3.0 earthquakes. To reduce a 6.0 to a 5.0 would require around 29,000 3.0 earthquakes, and so forth. Simply put, there are nowhere near enough micro-quakes to release enough energy to make any sort of dent in earthquake magnitudes.
Side Note: Most definitions of a micro-quake put them at 2.0 or below, so I was being generous by using the 3.0.
.05% of 3,000,000 gallons is 15,000 gallons. That's 15,000 gallons of anti freeze, isopropanol, swimming pool cleaner, and a host of other chemicals, per mine, per Frack. I'm no rocket surgeon, but that can't be good.
If we had to stop hydraulic fracking, we would likely need to revert to coal as our primary source of electricity. And the result of that would be a higher release of greenhouse gases. All in all, fracking is likely the better choice from that perspective.
My neighbor in Pennsylvania was working in his back yard making a whole lotta noise. I asked him what's he doing back there? He turned around and said " That ain't none of your fracking bidniss"!💥😂💥
Was he actually fracking 😂?
I’d be interested in hearing his views on climate change.
He's just a recruiter for the fossil fool industry. Climate change is incompatible with his job of finding people willing to wreck the climate for a good salary and fossil fool profits.
Jeffrey Turner: Yeah, that’s how it looks, particularly when he ventured off into how fracking is a blessing for humanity.
@@jeffreyturner5331 yeah this is kind of unfortunate. I'm a Oil and gas support up here in Alberta, Canada (our Texas) and he is attacking straw man arguments. Instant loss of credibility. There are other (logical) ways to support the o and g industry but this isn't one of them.
@@jeffreyturner5331 i guess youre not an engineer
i suspect his views line up closely with bjorn lomborg. he did a video on the kyoto protocol and assigned homework that addressed global warming through a cost benefit analysis focusing on the economics. He's also a proponent of nuclear power and researching bio-engineering solutions.
Yeah, this fits pretty well with what I had been able to learn. (Energy is not my field; my field was antibody-chemistry.) Fracking seems to be about as messy as other forms of energy-production. The key is you need a government to police the industry correctly and provide adequate oversight. The current crowd does not inspire confidence. Neither does the opposition.
It is a pleasure to listen to a Professor that leaves politics out of the discussion and focuses on facts and reality.
The problem is energy policy and practice is inherently political in this country. It's so easy to make it sound like fracking isn't all that bad for the environment, but when you consider the oil and gas industry spends billions to lobby Congress to let them cut corners, to reduce the oversight of safety programs and the EPA, and that the fines when they do cause a catastrophe typically aren't high enough to dramatically affect the bottom line... it makes you wonder why they would be doing that if it's really so safe.
3mg aint nothin. I think the real concern are the injection wells. They dont have to treat it to inject it into the ground
40 years at the end of the day is not along time
Kinda deflected that micro earthquake bit which doesn't really make a more compelling point but that's alright. Love ya proff
Earthquakes aren't really a major issue from fracking. The overwhelming environmental damage comes from their methane and CO2 emissions.
There are many ways they can frack but using water is the most common, there is about 40% flow back if the water injected, this is mainly saline and with it come uranium, radon etc and that can and does end up in the water table plus other chemical used in the process, it's not made up when people become ill from the pollution from this process and it's not made up when rock moves because it's takes in a liquid formation due to thousands of fractures it never had before, it's a no brainer any process, mining, fracking, quarrying will have secondary implications, those are hushered up as much as money can buy to protect investment and returns, it's business
Sounds like an idea that David Jones/Daedalus would have come up with and that his company, DREADCO, would have developed.
That 1 little arrow is not pointing to Chattanooga Tennessee.
Shattering the Earth's bed rock... Sounds completely safe, what could possibly go wrong?
Correct me if I'm wrong but 0.5% of chemicals of 3000000 liter and 300000 kg sand is 16500 liters of chemicals. That still seems a lot of chemicals, but I'm no expert.
I think a lot of the opposition to fracking stems from opposition to fossil fuels in general, and the unfair subsidies and lack of regulation the fossil fuel companies receive.
There are environmental hazards with fracking and some subsidies that seem unfair, but if we embraced it we could easily not only be energy independent but a net exporter, which would leave no reason for all these wars overseas that the cause always leads back to energy pipelines. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been killed just to keep Europe reliant on Russian oil and LNG pipelines. The entire Syrian conflict came from the Quatar/Turkey pipeline dispute. Environmental activists shut down all of Germany's nuclear reactors leading to TONS more coal fire plants and even more pollution. Shutting down pipelines also lead to more oil spills via railways and trucks.
Sounds great if you don't ask any questions doesn't it?
No mention of radon, uranium, heavy metals forced up into the water table and the gallons of goodies that remain in ground water that are not recovered from the fracking fluid. How many millions of gallons of ethylene glycol is that exactly? Why was it that car antifreeze had to go green? Probably just to drive the price up. Maybe because it's poisoning the water table? Say 60/40
Great well with great water didn't burn for 20 years before fracking and now it does. Naturally occurring? Lol
Anyone ever smell the air near fracking operations? You will always know the smell after you figure it out. Have one in your neighborhood and breathe that 24/7. What could go wrong?
No argument that some fracking is needed. Also no argument against the proof shown in the anti fracking videos that it's not rosey as this video paints it. Sounds like the fine print says $$$ paid for by someone getting rich from fracking. Not paid for by the family living next to the frackin thing!
This guy has to have tenure because he isn't drinking the Kool-Aid.
Salt water dissolves uranium in dark shale. Wastewater from some locations is now a radiological hazard.
The pipes pulled from the wells can be radioactive as well as magnetized from the movement of the radioactive fluids.
Just a welder sharing an anecdote.
Pass it on.
So many battlestar Galactica references
Sir, your lectures are the bomb!
Go with LP gas fracking.
Companies will always cut corners to save money. Fracking companies will always find a way to make this “safe” procedure damaging, unhealthy and harmful.
Good lecture. Still doesn’t address the global warming but that is the nature of the beast.
The majority of problems caused fracking result of drillers inadequate sealing the bore hole.
The same is true in events such as the Deep water horizon fiasco .
Profits over safety is a poor model.
I worked in fraccing and the vast majority of those situations come from inept/grossly under trained work crew issues.
Sad fact of life is too many companies are not crooked operators but just near impossibly lazy/cheap/sloppy on properly training their crews to know how to do their jobs properly.
Most often aggravated by ladder climbing fuckwits lying their way into management or higher positions and screwing things up from there by running off everyone below them (almost always the crew members with functional knowledge and skills at or above their own) that they felt was a threat to their undeserving jobs even when there was no real threat by them.
100 gallons of water per person per day - that's about double the average amount used per person in the UK - sad times :(
100 us gallons are "only" 83 imperial gallons, but they still use more than UK
Check out Frack Nation documentary.
12:00 how would we prevent that? Why would we even bother trying to prevent that?
“Micro earth quakes are a good thing”
You should include the whole point as that quote doesn't cover his point
Did you have a point to the contrary?
@@Tooncow2 California,being the ecological capital of America ever take him to his word,or they are not disaster zone prone enough to take him to task,or even being very smart people know he's running backwards for the good of democrats.Its my my coveys bedtime.
oh,it would disturb endangered species.Good point.
In the end it comes down to economics.
That’s the bottom line in the US. Not that I necessarily have a problem with it as long as companies abide by substantive regulations that are not just window dressing and actually get barred from simply re-forming as a new company if they are caught and fined out of existence. Mitigation techniques are expensive and not always followed. Economically, they don’t make sense… depending upon your context.
fracking does not "use water", it "makes use of water", the water does not disappear after it is used
It does, however, turn clean water into contaminated water. You could filter out the water and then properly dispose of all the rest but that is too expensive so the gas companies just let it run into the river.
@@rockets4kids there's a river right next to every fracking operation?
@@rockets4kids have you seen the list of "ingredients" ? you've eaten 3/4 of them today, and used the rest in cosmetics
@@ticklemeandillhurtyou5800 All topography drains into a river.
@@EmilNicolaiePerhinschi The problem is that list is far from complete. news.yale.edu/2016/01/06/toxins-found-fracking-fluids-and-wastewater-study-shows
The amount of water used is a straw man argument. The concern is, and always was, methane seepage in rivers and natural water outlets, water table contamination by heavy metals and toxic chemicals and the ever growing financial (and energy) costs of extracting deeper and deeper deposits. Fracking is not evil in and of itself, but it is a bit the equivalent of sucking water out of a stone…why bother?
Basically: it used to be a problem but we've *mostly* fixed it and there are ways we could do it that are way better but we're not doing yet, and also we're guessing that maybe the earth tremors could be a good thing but that's not based on evidence only conjecture. As you just said, geologists need to study this conjecture to find out if it's true, or if these microfractures will actually cause the plates to speed up in movement relative to each other and cause *more* high magnitude earthquakes.
Not a very convincing argument to continue fracking. All you have demonstrated is that things are not *as* bad as some people make them out to be. This is obvious. Natural gas is much better than other fossil fuels. We should still entirely focus on switching to nuclear (which we should have done decades ago) in our inevitable transition to renewables instead of focusing on how to minimize the damage done by archaic methods so that we can keep using them even longer.
Greetings. Ready?
What a mastered lecture for dilettantes
I hear him but also saw another video on global warming,and getting to the point of no return
Very enjoyable and educational video, thank you.
Modern nuclear power generation is initially much more expensive and more difficult, but fewer negative environmental consequences per capita per lifespan than freeing carbon locked away in the earths crust. But who cares about consequences? Certainly not the wealthiest country in history.
The risk to benefit analysis is always wrong if you have unknown risks. Human factors increase the risk dramatically and those increase exponentially with money.
In a non insane economy (anywhere outside the USA) these considerations rule out all but the safest locations for fracking.
Actually it's more often the reverse and by a large margin. Outside the US most countries, especially 3rd world ones, have very poor to almost no real safety/environmental regulation at all.
Did you seriously say anywhere else than the US has safer fracking..? Literally the opposite, the US is leading industry in advanced and safe fracking. It always fucking dumbfounds me how people believe this ridiculous myths about the US, how they're "dirty" and don't have good regulations... When in reality the US has very stringent regulations on manufacturing and production to decrease safety hazards.
Same haircut since college.
i said trees in a previous comment. We regulate sulfur dioxide from coal fired power plants because it hurts forests. In this one i agree with you but remind you there was a guy in Oaklohma SP sorry who was pumping to much waste down one well and we were getting 4-5 level earthquakes. i hope he is out of business.
The sad thing is that all this simply enables us to continue an ultimately doomed progression - a society that depends on ever-growing resource use of every kind. Eventually, we hit the final limits and wars begin over what remains, because the current (let alone future) populations simply can't be maintained any longer - certainly not in the lifestyles they've become addicted to. Meanwhile, we are slowly destroying the Earth's ability to recover.
It's not the fracking itself that is the big problem - it is the culture it is allowing to continue.
If you assume limited resources, than you will eventually reach the limit regardless of consumption level. Fortunately, with technology, we can bypass such restaints.
@@Illyrien Nature gas and oil are none renewable resources sooner or later you get to the point where it's no long profitable to extract the resource.
@@Illyrien Reality doesn't care about assumptions. Oil and gas are limited and we extract them at a rate millions of time faster than they are replenished.
@@skunkjobb But why assume that we will continue to use oil and gas?
Transition away from fossils is happening. In the end there is the law of the conservation of mass combined with the theory of relativity meaning that there literally is an endless supply of Energy.
So you're saying we should take out some American cities to reduce water consumption?
Wireline isn't causing "giant" explosions perforating the well casing with those tiny little shape charges. Maybe a very very very out dated method of dropping WW2 surplus torpedoes down there.
Wireline drilling is a technique where the rock core can be removed in a cylindrical "barrel" brought up to the surface on a long wire cable without having to remove the drilling rods from the hole as was done in older drilling techniques.
@@karhukivi Wireline in hydraulic fracturing is a third party service that pumps explosives down into the well and detonates them. The string of explosives is called the gun. Each explosive is packed into a metal cylinder that has holes offset every so many degrees. As the explosives go off the outward force or energy generated is multiplied and expelled through the offset holes. This concentrated energy perforates the steel and concrete casing and starts the fracture into the shale formation.
@@brob-zy8zi Wireline is a method of lowering an internal cylinder on a wire cable to avoid having to remove all the drillrods from a hole. Standard in oil well and mineral exploration drilling drilling to remove drill core and lower sondes. I've been using it for 40 years.
@@karhukivi Dude, I have years of experience in hydraulic fracturing. Wireline is a broad term. In hydraulic fracturing wireline services lower explosives into the hole to perforate the well bore so pumping can begin. They also set plugs to separate stages and run fishing operations. It's a broad terminology. I've been in operations involved in pumping the explosives down more times than I can count and in getting them unstuck or running tractors etc.
@@brob-zy8zi They may call that "wirelining", but as I said, wireline equipment can be used to lower all sorts of tools and probes down a hole inside the drill string as well as the applications you talk about. Try googling on "wireline" and you will see the sorts of things that it refers to other than your specific applications. We use wireline drills in mineral exploration all the time to remove the core barrel and no explosives are ever used except on rare occasions when the rods are seriously jammed and the string has to be broken.
It is a ton of contaminated water left behind, it is a crime
I work in frack and I've been saying these things for years. When Fracking first started booming, mistakes were made and we learned from those mistakes. Same thing happens with any new technology. The benefits of American energy independence far outweighs the downside to hydraulic fracturing. Consumers are not going to reduce usage. If anything, it will continue to increase. Natural Gas is a great transition fuel to get us through the next 40-50 years while we research better battery technology to store energy from renewables and make them more robust against spikes in demand. It will also help reduce emissions by filling the gap as we reduce usage of very dirty energy sources like coal and build more nuclear reactors, which take years to build and bring online because of their heavy regulation. Smaller modular reactors could be a game changer, but R&D on anything nuclear isn't cost effective enough to justify it as the ROI just isn't where it needs to be for a company to pull the trigger. That may change in the future, especially if it gets subsidized. Seeing as how most establishment politicians are greased with oil money, I don't see it happening anytime soon.
When you start exporting the natural gas you’ve moved beyond energy independence and into the realm of pure greed.
@@waynebreivogel1742 That's called competition, and it helps drive the price down in other economies, making it a more viable energy source for less prosperous countries, thus reducing carbon emissions even more. It's not greed unless people need it to survive and you're hoarding it to raise prices, like OPEC does with oil. They call them a cartel for a reason. Flooding the market with cheap energy forces them to adapt and become more efficient, which is exactly what they did to us 10 years ago. They drove nearly every US fracking service provider out of business by flooding the market, and only the most efficient and cost effective survived. Now they're paying for it because now we're more efficient than them, and they can only let prices stay low for so long before they start to suffer too. It's a battle of efficiency, driven by the free market. That is a very good thing.
US companies are already planning for the future by investing in new technology in electric pumping fleets to stay ahead of the competition. Mark my words, in 5 years, the majority of all fracking in North America will be with electric fleets with AI driven automation controlling the frac process.
@Мухэммэд Харис Probably not, but compared to other industries, it's a miniscule amount. Since switching to produced water and reusing frack fluid, it's even less. He addresses this in the video at around 3:00.
Or use LP and nitrogen fracking.
100 gallons per day no way, not me.
You sure about that? What about the water it takes for the agriculture to provide your food. Just because you don't use it directly does not mean to support all the things you use and consume through the day count towards the total. Think about all the things in society the use water and divide that use between everyone.
@@KamAbbott Yes but he didn't say anything about indirect water use.. He implied direct water use only. I agree that heaps and heaps of water goes into indirect uses.
That is an average. If you don't use that amount then someone else is using more than a 100 gal to make the average work. There is a big difference between households with meters and those without. Non metered use 70% more water.
@@KamAbbott
You are CORRECT
This may include other water use like gardening, car wash, restaurants, office buildings, schools, etc
This is groundbreaking technology.
Pun intended?
Using fossil fuels is messy, which is why we should stop doing it altogether.
Then we need to build a bunch of nuclear plants.
It's all to burn hydrocarbons...
Regarding earthquakes, I’m from The Netherlands. We have natural gas reverses in the north and they started drilling in the sixties (I think). We are not anywhere near a fault line, but earthquakes have occurred and are still occurring. Not huge ones, but 2-3 on the Richter scale. Which is still enough to cause damage to properties, devaluing them. And making people feel unsafe in their homes. Though we are not fracking, just drilling. Not sure if that makes a difference.
The drilling is actually ending because people started to protest. Basically the government made a lot of money off of the gas (in The Netherlands, if you own a piece of land, you only own the surface; anything beneath is owned by the government). And they didn’t compensate the people that suffered these consequences well enough.
Prof, as a working geophysicist I love your videos but I'm sorry, this is misleading. And there are more important reasons not to frack.
Your comment would be more useful if you listed a couple of those reasons.
@@simperingham why don't you go live on the moon?
What reasons?
@@redroverredrover5311 because it just gets too cold in the winter for my liking.
i want to know how much was donated for the making of this video
Any Battlestar galactica fans here?
Seawater
I was working in Youngstown, Ohio back in 2011 when the earthquakes started there. The area with the most intense fracking wells around the city actually produced 12 separate earthquakes around December of that year.
The gentleman in the video describes "mini-earthquakes" that "you can't even feel." I felt at least half of the 12 and the magnitude 4.0 quake literally shook where I was working in Warren, Ohio and it was scary af. And it wasn't just a flash and over. It lasted what felt like minutes but was probably more like 30 seconds. I'm going to tell you right now, I don't know the science behind what's happening but I do *know* he's underselling that particular side effect.
Maybe they've gotten better at it in the last 10 years. I have no doubt they have. Maybe there would've eventually been a "big one" in Youngstown (not normally a place with a lot of seismic activity) at some point and this alleviated it. I don't know. But when you fabricate or, in this case, undersell the impact of something in an attempt to minimize, it makes me wonder about the motivations behind the message, and I have really liked the professor's videos on other topics.
That said, I was there. I know. You're wrong.