The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
by Russell Gold · 7 Apr 2014 · 423pp · 118,002 words
it spent a chunk of that on a sophisticated advertising campaign that preaches the gospel of domestic energy production and attempts to calm fears about hydraulic fracturing. Chesapeake drills more than a thousand wells every year and fracks each one. Once the bit churns through the dense rock, the company pumps in
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out of the earth and set out to figure it out. At the same time, he studied hydraulic fracturing and wrote a seminal paper on the new technology. The two interests were connected. If hydraulic fracturing could significantly increase the availability of oil and gas, it would make more oil available and push back
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1965 and 1970, and these new technologies would, at best, slow the decline on the far side of the bell curve. Despite familiarizing himself with hydraulic fracturing, Hubbert fundamentally misjudged its impact. US oil production did peak in 1970, as he predicted, and began to decline. By 2008, it was half the
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create more fractures. In addition, innovative pumping equipment added more horsepower to the job. Bob Fast and his colleagues at Stanolind continued their work on hydraulic fracturing through the years. The company grew interested in using highly explosive rocket fuel to make larger fractures. This decision was ill fated. On November 11
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. An opening emerged for an aspiring young Republican. He would win the seat and go on to play a crucial role in the spread of hydraulic fracturing as chief executive of Halliburton. His name was Dick Cheney. While interest in nuclear fracking disappeared, concerns about energy supply grew stronger. In November 1973
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producing our domestic resources.” Over the course of a decade, Yost helped pioneer many new technologies that would set the stage for the rise of hydraulic fracturing. He and his fellow engineers placed tiny cameras in the wells to figure out what was happening and shot sound waves underground to map the
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realize that getting out the oil and gas would require a new approach. Mitchell was fortunate to have acquired this acreage at the dawn of hydraulic fracturing. The D. J. Hughes well was drilled in late 1951. Bob Fast and his colleagues at Stanolind had only just begun to introduce their new
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success in Wise County. As it turned out, the secret to making these wells work was to frack them. “Hydraulic fracturing had just come in about two or three years before,” Mitchell said. “Without hydraulic fracturing, you couldn’t make decent wells.” Using this new technique, Mitchell made good wells. He wasn’t fracking
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in an email to clients and reporters. The bank noted that the man was none other than Dr. Claude E. Cooke Jr., a “legend of hydraulic fracturing.” I met Cooke a couple years later, after he’d called me to talk about fracking. After a couple meetings, in which he wore immaculately
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skateboarders with questionable judgment, is an industry legend. In 2006 the Society of Petroleum Engineers honored nine men (they were all men) as “Legends of Hydraulic Fracturing” for seminal innovations. While most of the honorees had a single contribution, Cooke had three. When Cooke first called me, he wanted to talk about
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mundane, but it is big business in the oil fields. The energy industry spends about $105 billion annually to extract energy from North America using hydraulic fracturing. About $5 billion of the $105 billion outlay is spent on cementing. This is not off-the-shelf cement found at Home Depot. The oil
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iteration of Battlestar Galactica, said he had never heard of the oil-field term. Not that it mattered. By the time opponents started referring to hydraulic fracturing as fracking, they were hitching themselves to an expletive. Before long, signs at protests rallies warned the industry, “Don’t Frack with Me.”1 From
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forward by Mitchell Energy. The federal government also provided stable and consistent policies, in particular how the injection of water that is the heart of hydraulic fracturing would be regulated. They contend the government laid the groundwork for the revolution. Finally, there are technocrats who celebrate the power of two disruptive technologies
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. “Thirty Years of Gas Shale Fracturing: What Have We Learned?” Paper presented at SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Florence, Italy, September 19–22, 2010. ———. “Hydraulic Fracturing 101: What Every Representative, Environmentalist, Regulator, Reporter, Investor, University Researcher, Neighbor and Engineer Should Know About Estimating Frac Risk and Improving Frac Performance in Unconventional
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Gas and Oil Wells.” Paper presented at SPE Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference, the Woodlands, Texas, February 6–8, 2012. Landrum, Jeff. Reflections of a Boomtown: A Photographic Essay of the Burkburnett Oil Boom. Burkburnett, TX
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: Self-published, 1982. Osborn, Stephen G., Avner Vengosh, Nathaniel R. Warner, and Robert B. Jackson. “Methane Contamination of Drinking Water Accompanying Gas-Well Drilling and Hydraulic Fracturing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108, no. 20 (May 17, 2011): 8172–76. Vallon, Dick. Burkburnett: It
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World, March 8, 1961. The Stanolind researchers published a number of scientific papers and patents. Bob Fast’s and George Howard’s 1970 book on hydraulic fracturing was also extremely helpful. Rebecca Radford at the Kansas Geological Society & Library in Wichita helped me find the scouting tickets for the Klepper #1 well
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Hydraulic Fracturing” in Petroleum Transactions, AIME (vol. 210, 1957). Hubbert famously spelled out his peak theory in “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuel” in Drilling and Production
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in Pennsylvania. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948. History of Petroleum Engineering. New York: American Petroleum Institute, 1961. Howard, George C., and C. Robert Fast. Hydraulic Fracturing. New York: Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME, 1970. Kreith, Frank, and Catherine B. Wrenn. The Nuclear Impact: A Case Study of the Plowshare Program
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Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Dallas, September 27–30, 1987. Yost II, A. B., and W. K. Overbey Jr. “Production and Stimulation Analysis of Multiple Hydraulic Fracturing of a 2,000-ft. Horizontal Well.” Paper presented at SPE Gas Technology Symposium, Dallas, June 7–9, 1989. Chapter 5: Wise County I am
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Oil Drilling, Is Prone to Failure.” Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2010. Legends of Drilling (CD-ROM). Houston: Society of Petroleum Engineers, 2009. Legends of Hydraulic Fracturing (CD-ROM). Houston: Society of Petroleum Engineers, 2010. Meyer, Andre J., and Claude E. Cooke Jr. “Application of Radial Differential Temperature (RDT) Logging to Detect
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, 153 Foster, Brad, 143–45, 147–48 Founders Well Participation Program, 202–3, 208 Four Sevens Oil, 150–51 Fox, Josh, 239, 260, 267 fracturing, hydraulic fracturing (fracking): Bakken Shale and, 38–49, 51–57, 60–62, 303 Barnett Shale and, 103–4, 113, 117–25, 128–30, 143–49, 153–54
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ignited the American energy revolution and changed the world / Russell Gold. p. cm 1. Petroleum industry and trade—Environmental aspects—United States. 2. Oil wells—Hydraulic fracturing. 3. Energy policy—United States. 4. Energy consumption—United States. I. Title. HD9565.G65 2014 333.8' 230973—dc23 2013028446 ISBN 978-1-4516-9228
The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters
by Gregory Zuckerman · 5 Nov 2013 · 483pp · 143,123 words
PHOTOGRAPHS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES CAST OF CHARACTERS MITCHELL ENERGY George Mitchell Founder Dan Steward Senior executive on the shale-drilling team Nicholas Steinsberger Engineer focused on hydraulic fracturing Kent Bowker Exploration geologist on the shale-drilling team Jim Henry Veteran geologist ORYX ENERGY Robert Hauptfuhrer Chief executive Kenneth Bowdon Geologist CHESAPEAKE ENERGY Aubrey
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world. But troubling questions have been raised about the environmental consequences of some of the production methods responsible for soaring oil and gas supplies, including hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Some worry about their impact on air and water quality, while others are concerned that fracking may contribute to climate change or lead
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, or broken up, rock formations by pummeling them with various liquids, creating pathways for natural gas to flow to the surface. The process was called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. But Hamm, along with other adventurous wildcatters around the country, had begun to combine improved fracking techniques with cutting-edge methods of drilling
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rock and getting the gas to flow. The technique, a way of “completing” oil and gas wells, or preparing them to produce energy, was called hydraulic fracturing, or “fraccing.” It entailed fracturing the rocks, or breaking them up, by pummeling them with various liquids to free up the gas trapped in those
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rocks. (Years later, hydraulic fracturing became known in the popular media as “fracking,” with a “k” replacing the “c.” From the beginning, industry members detested the word because of its
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pools of trapped oil or gas capable of flowing to the surface without the “artificial stimulation” of hydraulic fracturing. After decades of low gas prices, companies were struggling to keep costs down, not increase spending on hydraulic fracturing. But Mitchell didn’t have much to lose, so he gave fracking a try, hoping to
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.” It was just a technical term that meant a drill bit now could bore horizontally over short distances. It had nothing to do with the hydraulic fracturing of compressed rock that George Mitchell’s crew was focused on. Horizontal drilling was just an improved way to target oil and gas reservoirs below
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in another internal meeting. “Everything will change.” McClendon and Ward had embraced horizontal drilling before most competitors. Now they closely monitored how specialists were improving hydraulic fracturing techniques, enabling drillers to shatter gas-soaked rock to free natural gas. It dawned on the Chesapeake executives that a unique opportunity—maybe even a
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above the shale. Meanwhile, natural gas prices had climbed above four dollars per thousand cubic feet, making the added expense of combining horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing more palatable. What came next was another giant leap for American drillers, who were getting more comfortable working with shale even as the rest of
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also seeing success with the same integrated approach. News about both companies’ activities spread throughout the industry. Drilling horizontally, and then completing the wells with hydraulic fracturing, seemed a fresh breakthrough, one that turned the Barnett into a truly world-class reservoir that was a model for shale formations around the country
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rocks with extremely low permeability. Oil molecules, which move less easily through tight rock than gas molecules, were flowing, thanks to improved horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques. “We need to get more rigs in here!” Hamm told members of his team, encouraging them to drill wells elsewhere in Montana. Continental’s
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computer-controlled directional drilling motors to bore laterally. By the early 2000s, they found surprising success in the Elm Coulee field stimulating the rock with hydraulic fracturing. Findley and Lyco were meeting success in Montana, but Findley remained skeptical of the Bakken in North Dakota. “I could never see a trend as
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country, or in states like Texas with a long history of supporting the energy business. Pennsylvania wasn’t nearly as welcoming to the high-volume hydraulic fracturing cropping up around the state. Although Pennsylvania has a rich history of oil and gas drilling and was the site of the nation’s first
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of the flowback coming up to the surface from local wells. The growing questions resulted in New York’s placing a moratorium on high-volume hydraulic fracturing in the state. Meanwhile, a telegenic, articulate resident of Dimock named Victoria Switzer, who was frustrated by how noisy the area around her pretty wood
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, and Texas. Fox said his family had been offered $100,000 to lease their land in rural Pennsylvania and he was out to see if hydraulic fracturing was safe. The film told horror stories of individuals and animals allegedly harmed by drilling. Fox’s interviewees said methane from nearby gas drilling had
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one million Americans—or one in three hundred of the entire country—already had signed lease contracts with Chesapeake. They were clearly in favor of hydraulic fracturing and weren’t being harmed, he said. A segment of the crowd didn’t seem won over by McClendon. As he prepared to leave the
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pipeline might burst, causing damage. Their even bigger fear was that if a pipeline was built, gas drilling would come next. And that would mean hydraulic fracturing right in their backyards. Sidney residents wanted no part of it. The guest speaker that evening was Vera Scroggins, the rabble-rousing former schoolteacher in
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state. “We all lit the faucets growing up,” she says. “It wasn’t a big deal.” There are times when poorly sealed wells, rather than hydraulic fracturing, can lead to methane-filled drinking water. But that has occurred in a minority of wells, according to a 2013 study by Duke University examining
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has far greater population density than the United States, however, and more powerful environmental lobbies. France, Bulgaria, and a few other nations have already banned hydraulic fracturing due to concerns about environmental damage. A lack of experienced drilling crews and limited pipeline and other infrastructure also handicaps Europe. A sign of how
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Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people. Fernando Leon/Getty Images North America Charif Souki at his company’s Louisiana LNG terminal. Polaris Images Hydraulic fracturing creates pathways for oil and gas to flow from shale and other types of compressed rock. Courtesy of Nicolle Fuller Liz Irish (far right) and
Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce · 26 Apr 2011 · 520pp · 129,887 words
“frac spread” is oil-field lingo for the collection of trucks, trailers, pumps, hoses, pipes, personnel, sand chiefs, and tanks that are needed for the hydraulic fracturing (“frac” or “frac job”) of a particular subsurface geologic zone. On this particular day, a crew of about two dozen men backed by dozens of
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shale gas revolution that has changed the global natural gas business. The key technologies used on the two wells near Hillsboro—horizontal drilling and multistage hydraulic fracturing of wells with long laterals—have become standard for producing gas from shale. But it took years to perfect them. Over the past decade or
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ways to wring gas out of the shale. During the 1990s, Mitchell spent millions of dollars before his drilling crews discovered the right recipe for hydraulic fracturing. In 1997, they found that water injected under extremely high pressure was the winning formula, and that technique quickly spread. In 2003, horizontal drilling became
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process, traffic—from both heavy and light trucks—to and from the well site can be heavy. In addition, there are concerns about water and hydraulic fracturing. Properly fracturing a shale gas well requires the use of 1 to 3 million gallons of water.2 To obtain optimum results, oil-field service
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Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, along with representatives from New York and Pennsylvania, introduced a bill called the “FRAC Act” that would put regulation of hydraulic fracturing under the purview of federal regulators.3 If the bill becomes law, the oil and gas industry estimates that it could increase the cost of
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are continuing. Regardless of what happens in Wyoming, some industry opponents want more federal oversight on the oil and gas industry in general and the hydraulic fracturing process in particular. Calls for more regulation will almost certainly grow as drilling ramps up in the Marcellus Shale, which underlies large swaths of New
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and surrounding areas. The CEO of Chesapeake, Aubrey McClendon, has called on the industry to reveal all of the chemicals that are used during the hydraulic fracturing process.9 While environmentalists lauded Chesapeake’s announcement that it wouldn’t drill in the upstate New York watershed, the U.S. gas industry will
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years.”18 While that may be true, the gas industry must contend with significant opposition, particularly with regard to concerns about the possible dangers of hydraulic fracturing. Those concerns will not be alleviated quickly. And the industry will have to be far more open and transparent with regard to that technology. It
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the Marcellus Shale,” n.d., http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/46288.html. 3 David O. Williams, “DeGette, Polis Introduce FRAC Act Aimed at Closing Hydraulic Fracturing ‘Loophole,’” The Colorado Independent, June 9, 2009, http://coloradoindependent.com/30784/degette-polis-introduce-frac-act-aimed-at-closing
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-hydraulic-fracturing-loophole. 4 Oil & Gas Journal, “API Opposes Efforts to Federally Regulate Hydraulic Fracturing,” June 9, 2009, http://www.laserfocusworld.com/display_article/364231/7/none/none/Gener/API-opposes-efforts-to-federally-regulate-hydraulic
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-fracturin. 5 Jeremy Miller, “Of Hydraulic Fracturing and Drinking Water,” Green Inc., June 30, 2009, http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009
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/06/30/of-hydraulic-fracturing-and-drinking-water/?pagemode=print. 6 Abrahm Lustgarten, “Buried Secrets: Is Natural Gas Drilling Endangering US
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Water Supplies?” ProPublica, November 13, 2008, http://www.propublica.org/feature/buried-secrets-is-natural-gas-drilling-endangering-us-water-supplies-1113. 7 Miller, “Of Hydraulic Fracturing.” 8 Associated Press, “Wyo. Community Blames Fracking for Water Woes,” September 6, 2009, http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/sep/06/wyo-community-blames-fracking
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battery issue with continuing to improve “eco-bling” of essential commodities of increasing usage of, in the United States myths involving viability of Hybrid reactors Hydraulic fracturing Hydrocarbons biggest conventional discovery of burning gas from biomass vs. defined, and reasons for using environmental costs of global use of important U.S. development
Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil · 11 May 2017
from nonconventional sources of crude oil, including heavy oils (in many places around the world), oil embedded in tar sands (Alberta, Venezuela), and extraction by hydraulic fracturing to produce oil from shales. This technique, pioneered in the United States, has proved so successful that America became once again the world’s largest
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fuel’s efficient use for generating electricity by gas turbines and, even more efficiently, by combined-cycle gas turbines (see the next section). Post-2005 hydraulic fracturing has not only stopped the further decline of American natural gas extraction but also it made the country, again, the world’s largest producer. Pipeline
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supply (mainly owing to the reemergence of the United States as the world’s largest producer, thanks to rapid increases in shale oil production through hydraulic fracturing) brought a deep reversal. But this time there was a key difference: in order to protect the country’s global market share, Saudi leaders decided
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they totaled less than 12 Mt, not even 3% of all U.S. imports (USEIA 2016b)—and those, of course, have been diminishing steadily as hydraulic fracturing has made the country once again the world’s largest producer of crude oil and natural gas liquids (BP 2016). The verdict is simple: the
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. The impressive post-2005 rise in the recovery of crude oil from America’s abundant shale deposits—relying on a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (Smil 2015a) and making the country, once again, the world’s largest producer of oil and gas—illustrates enormous opportunities that remain to be fully
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smart phones begins 2000s Widespread installation of wind turbines and PV cells 2000 German Energiewende begins 2003 Three Gorges Dam completed (Yangzi river, China) 2007 Hydraulic fracturing takes off in the United States 2009 China becomes world’s largest consumer of energy 2011 Tsunami and mismanagement cause Fukushima nuclear disaster Global population
The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin · 14 Sep 2020
to open up tiny pathways in the dense shale so gas could flow through the rock and into the well. To do that, they applied hydraulic fracturing, later much better known as “fracking,” which uses cocktails of water, sand, gel, and some chemicals injected under high pressure into rocks that would break
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open tiny pores and liberate the gas. Hydraulic fracturing is a technology that had been developed in the late 1940s and has been commonly used in conventional oil and gas drilling ever since. But
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on top of each other like pancakes a mile or two beneath the surface, whose oil could be made to flow in abundant volumes with hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. “That,” said Sheffield, “was the aha moment.” Pioneer abruptly redirected its spending to that resource. In 2012, it drilled its first successful
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felt across virtually all states. This was true even in New York state, where environmental activists and politicians succeeded in getting the state to ban hydraulic fracturing and prevent a new natural gas pipeline that would have carried inexpensive natural gas from the Marcellus in Pennsylvania to gas-short New England. The
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successfully produce from that complex geology. But the shale revolution in the United States provided a possible solution for the Bazhenov—horizontal wells and multistage hydraulic fracturing. It was not just Russians who came up with that idea. In 2013, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that Russia’s “unproved technically
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change, 412 Eni, 256 environmental issues and activism and American shale gas reserves, 113 and Fukushima nuclear disaster, 87 and global power politics, xiii and hydraulic fracturing, 28–29 and indoor air pollution in developing countries, 407–8 and opposition to pipeline projects, 46–51 and U.S. transition to LNG exporter
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Hu Jintao, 157 Hungary, 110 Hussein, Saddam, 211–19, 221, 229–30, 232 Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, 198 hybrid cars, 330, 338–39 hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and Barnett Shale, 5–7 and Bazhenov formation, 98 and “green deal” proposals, 392 and horizontal drilling, 8, 10, 19, 98 and origins of
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economic ties, 177 and China’s development of oil resources, 158 and “commodity supercycle,” 56–57 and impact of collapse on Iraq, 233 impact of hydraulic fracturing on, 9, 14–15 and Iranian Revolution, 207 and ISIS attacks in Iraq, 267–68 and Mexican economy, 42 and oil embargo of 1973, 53
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China, 174–75 and container shipping, 161–64 and current geopolitical challenges, 425 and electric vehicles, xviii, 327–46, 368–71, 415, 427, 430 and hydraulic fracturing techniques, 7 and “low-carbon energy,” 418 and oil sands production, 46 and pace of innovation, 429 and sanctions against Russia, 97–98 and U
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein · 15 Sep 2014 · 829pp · 229,566 words
from conventional sources of fossil fuels to even dirtier and more dangerous versions—bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, oil from deepwater drilling, gas from hydraulic fracturing (fracking), coal from detonated mountains, and so on. Meanwhile, each supercharged natural disaster produces new irony-laden snapshots of a climate increasingly inhospitable to the
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inquisitiveness, and their drive, in order to produce new energy sources.” And of course the Heartland audience cheered earnestly for the intellectual breakthrough that is hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) combined with horizontal drilling, the technology that has finally allowed the fossil fuel industry to screw us sideways.44 And it’s these
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economically possible within the next few decades. The other key change is that the vast majority of new gas projects in North America rely on hydraulic fracturing—not conventional drilling—and fracking-based exploration and production are on the rise around the world.48 These developments have significantly weakened the climate case
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and high-risk forms of fossil fuel. Communities in France, upon discovering that their land has been leased to a gas company for something called “hydraulic fracturing”—a previously unknown practice in Europe—got in contact with French-speaking activists in Quebec, who had successfully won a moratorium against the practice (and
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with oil tankers, courting disaster. No place, it seems, is off limits, and no extractive activity has set its sights on more new land than hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. To quote Chesapeake Energy’s then-CEO Aubrey McClendon, in 2010, “In the last few years we have discovered the equivalent of
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Pinedale Anticline: A Natural-Gas Success Story,” WyoHistory.org (Wyoming State Historical Society), http://www .wyohistory.org; Bryan Schutt, et al., “For Veteran Producing States, Hydraulic Fracturing Concerns Limited,” SNL Energy Gas Utility Week, July 11, 2011; “Working with Companies: BP and Development by Design,” Nature Conservancy, http://www.nature.org. 53
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, 2013; “Greek Granny Goads Riot Police at Gold Mining Protest with Wartime Song,” (video) Keep Talking Greece, March 8, 2013; David Herron, “Government Still Ensuring Hydraulic Fracturing Happens in Pungesti, Romania, Despite Protests by Villagers,” The Long Tail Pipe, January 5, 2014. 23. FOOTNOTE: Maxime Combes, “Let’s Frackdown the Fracking Companies
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, February 25, 2014; “The Damage for Gulf Coast Residents: Economic, Environmental, Emotional,” poll, ABC News/Washington Post, July 14, 2010. 52. “Current High Volume Horizontal Hydraulic Fracturing Drilling Bans and Moratoria in NY State,” FracTracker.org, http://www.fractracker.org. 53. “Minisink Compressor Project: Environmental Assessment,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, March 2012
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Two to Three Times Higher than Thought,” Agence France-Presse, February 3, 2014. 75. “Regulation of Hydraulic Fracturing Under the Safe Drinking Water Act,” Environmental Protection Agency, http://water.epa.gov; Mary Tiemann and Adam Vann, “Hydraulic Fracturing and Safe Drinking Water Act Regulatory Issues,” Congressional Research Service, Report R41760, January 10, 2013; Lisa
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Drilling Technology,” Marcellus Shale no. 6, Paleontological Research Institution, January 2012, p. 3; “70 TO 300 TIMES”: Seth B. Shonkoff, “Public Health Dimensions of Horizontal Hydraulic Fracturing: Knowledge, Obstacles, Tactics, and Opportunities,” 11th Hour Project, Schmidt Family Foundation, April 18, 2012, http://www.psr.org; 280 BILLION: Elizabeth Ridlington and John Rumpler
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://www.environmentamerica.org; “ENOUGH TO FLOOD”: Suzanne Goldenberg, “Fracking Produces Annual Toxic Water Enough to Flood Washington DC,” Guardian, October 4, 2013. 21. Monika Freyman, “Hydraulic Fracturing and Water Stress: Water Demand by the Numbers,” Ceres, February 2014, pp. 49–50, 59–63; David Smith, “Proposed Fracking in South Africa Beauty Spot
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Blasted,” Guardian, August 23, 2013; “Hydraulic Fracturing and the Karoo,” Shell South Africa, July 2012, http://www.shell.com/zaf.html; “Tampering with the Earth’s Breath” (video), Green Renaissance, Vimeo, May
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viability of renewable energy vs., 349, 398, 399, 400–401 see also extractive industries Fox, Josh, 217 Fox, Nick, 245 Fox News, 35, 227 fracking (hydraulic fracturing), 2, 57, 71, 94, 129, 142–43, 144, 147, 213–17, 235n, 237–38, 239, 249, 287, 310, 312–13, 357n, 446, 451 bans and
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, 186 as “God Species,” 279, 289, 395 Hungary, 75 hunger, 100, 135 hurricanes, 4, 9, 14, 47n, 105, 107, 108, 404, 407 hybrid cars, 35 hydraulic fracturing, see fracking hydrocarbons, 237 metabolizing of, 433 reserves of, 150 hydroelectric power, 97, 100, 182 Iceland, 243 ice shelves, 176 Ickes, Harold, 293 Idaho, 318
The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future
by Michael Levi · 28 Apr 2013
1980s, when the French firm Elf Aquitaine demonstrated its commercial promise in southwest France and off the Mediterranean shores of Italy.6 The second technology, hydraulic fracturing, was introduced into commercial practice by Stanolind Oil and Gas in 1947 at the Hugoton field in Grant County, Kansas.7 Similar techniques were used
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tap into it. In the 1980s, George Mitchell, a Texas entrepreneur, began to experiment with combinations of horizontal drilling to span the deep shale with hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas within it; by the late 1990s, his engineers had made the essential commercial breakthroughs. Yet as recently as 2009, you couldn
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. There, the evidence is mixed. In the most careful and prominent study to date, four Duke University scholars compared methane levels in drinking water near hydraulic fracturing activities with those elsewhere, and they found that being near drilling made high methane concentrations more likely.66 The problem is that there are two
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: the Elm Coulee Field, which was discovered in 2000 and then proceeded to more than double its output every year. Drillers married horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing, just as they had with natural gas, to unlock petroleum that others previously assumed was economically impossible to extract. But few beyond the state paid
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Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) Ethanol Fossil fuels Fracking Fuel economy standards Gas-to-liquids (GTL) GDP Gigawatt (GW) Green jobs Greenhouse gases Horizontal drilling Hybrid Hydraulic fracturing Intermittent sources Keystone XL kilowatt-hour (kWh) Levelized cost of electricity mpg The average fuel economy of all the cars and trucks sold by a
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given resource; CO2-EOR is one variation A gasoline substitute produced from biological materials Oil, natural gas, and coal Colloquial term used to describe either hydraulic fracturing or the entire process of extracting natural gas from shale See CAFE standard Technology that converts natural gas into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, or methanol
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that can be released in the event of a supply emergency Oil produced from formations in which oil cannot flow under normal conditions; produced using hydraulic fracturing to enhance mobility Energy whose production leads to few or no carbon dioxide emissions This page intentionally left blank NOTES CH AP TER 1 1
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10, 2001, http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Class2/horz05092001a/index.htm. 220 • NOTES FOR PAGES 24–29 7. Carl T. Montgomery and Michael B. Smith, “Hydraulic Fracturing: History of an Enduring Technology,” Journal of Petroleum Technology (December 2010). 8. Ibid. 9. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2009 (Washington, D
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,” Washington, D.C., National Academies Press, June 15, 2012. 66. Stephen G. Osborn et al., “Methane Contamination of Drinking Water Accompanying Gas-Well Drilling and Hydraulic Fracturing,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 20 (2011). 67. Ibid. 68. Tom Hayes, “Gas Shale Produced Water, Presentation to the RPSEA/GTI
The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin · 14 May 2011 · 1,373pp · 300,577 words
as one of the leading figures in the field and made a variety of major contributions, including a seminal paper in 1957, “The Mechanics of Hydraulic Fracturing.” One of his fundamental objectives was to move geology from what he called its “natural-history phase” to “physical science phase,” firmly based in physics
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the Bakken, writing it off as “an economically unattractive resource.”26 But then the impact of the technology for liberating shale gas—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—be came evident. “As shale gas began to grow, we asked ourselves ‘Why not apply it to oil?’ ” said John Hess, CEO of Hess, one
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George Mitchell would not give up; he insisted that they were getting closer to cracking the Barnett’s code.3 BREAKTHROUGH Fraccing—otherwise known as hydraulic fracturing—is a technique that was first used at the end of the 1940s. It injects large amounts of water, under high pressure, combined with sand
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process—including the water aspects—is heavily regulated by a mixture of state and federal agencies. The states are the primary regulators of drilling, including hydraulic fracturing as well as all other activities inherent in the production of oil and gas. While the federal government has ultimate authority over water treatment and
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Explorer Ford Motor Fossil Fuel Age, Rickover’s prediction of end of fossil fuels see also coal; gas, natural; oil Fourier, Joseph Fourth Corridor fraccing (hydraulic fracturing) France biofuel in cars in electricity of Iraq War and LNG and nuclear power of oil-company mergers in oil use of Suez crisis and
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of reformulated taxes on U.S. market for Venezuela’s importation of Gasolineless Sundays gasoline stations gas revolution diversification and emergence of Gazprom and fraccing (hydraulic fracturing) and global gas and Section 29 and shale gas and Ukraine vs. Russia and Gaza Gazprom GDP of China energy efficiency and of Qatar world
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Houston, Tex. Hubbert, M. King Hubbert’s Peak Hubbert’s Pimple Hu Jintao Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Rita Hussein, Saddam Gulf War and Iraq War and hydraulic fracturing, see fraccing hydrocarbonolostic hydrocarbons see also coal; gas, natural; oil hydrogen hydrogen bomb hydrogen sulfide hydrolysis hydropower in California in China as fuel choice Ibn
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gas global energy LNG and over-the-counter regulation vs. Markey, Edward Mars Marx, Karl Maryland Massachusetts Matzke, Richard Mauna Loa Maycock, Paul “Mechanics of Hydraulic Fracturing, The” (Hubbert) Mediterranean Caspian Derby and Eastern Insull on Karine A intercepted in natural gas in Medium and Long-Term Development Plan for Renewable Energy
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in Venezuela Tbilisi see also Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline Technocracy technology CCS China’s access to communications disruptive electricity and energy efficiency and fraccing (hydraulic fracturing) globalization and horizontal drilling information (IT) Iran and Kashagan field and natural gas and nuclear energy and oil and advances in oil sands peak oil
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
by Alex Epstein · 13 Nov 2014 · 257pp · 67,152 words
public policies . . .”43 Around the world, it is fashionable to attack every new fossil fuel development and every new form of fossil fuel technology, from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the United States to oil sands (“tar sands”) in Canada. To think about dire measures like this without seriously reflecting on the predictions
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overcoming these obstacles. One is shale energy technology, often referred to as fracking in the media and fracing in the industry. Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing, one of several technologies that can be used to get natural gas out of shale. This technology has attracted attention based on claims that it
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a common practice to attack fossil fuels by misrepresenting them as fundamentally or uniquely dangerous. This is what’s behind the current attack on fracking—hydraulic fracturing, part of the shale energy revolution I discussed in chapter 3. There are at least four common fallacies used to discourage big-picture thinking and
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important technology of our generation. THE ABUSE-USE FALLACY The largest fossil fuel controversy today, besides the broader climate change issue, is fracking—shorthand for hydraulic fracturing—one of several key technologies for getting oil and gas out of dense shale rock, resources that exist in enormous quantities but had previously been
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activity, but in almost all cases, it is completely inconsequential and not even discernible at the surface. A typical tremor that can be caused by hydraulic fracturing is −2 on the Richter scale, a “quake” that is not felt at the surface, causes no damage, and can be measured only deep underground
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. Sierra Club, “Beyond Natural Gas,” http://content.sierraclub.org/naturalgas (accessed May 8, 2014). 21. N. R. Warpinski, J. Du, and U. Zimmer, “Measurements of Hydraulic-Fracture-Induced Seismicity,” Society of Petroleum Engineers, SPE 151597, 2012, http://www.energy4me.org/hydraulicfracturing/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/SPE-151597-MS-P1.pdf. 22
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. Ibid. 23. American Petroleum Institute, “The Facts About Hydraulic Fracturing and Seismic Activity,” 2014, www.api.org/~/media/Files/Policy/Hydraulic_Fracturing/HF-and-Seismic-Activity-Report-v2.pdf. 24. Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, “Innovation and the Greening of Alberta’s
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protecting, 25 as standard of value, 30, 60, 84, 85, 88, 92, 114, 136, 173, 197, 201 hunger, 80–81 hurricanes, 24, 25, 106, 125 hydraulic fracturing, see fracking hydrocarbons, 67, 68 hydroelectric power: limitations of, 59–60 opponents of, 54, 60, 135 reliability of, 12, 59 as supplement, 44 hydrofluoric acid
A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by Tony Weis and Joshua Kahn Russell · 14 Oct 2014 · 501pp · 134,867 words
tied to the decline of conventional oil and gas reserves. In addition to tar sands, this general pressure is also central to the rise of hydraulic fracturing (more commonly known as “fracking”) for “tight” oil and natural gas and the mining of kerogen shale (a bitumen-like substance), as well as increasing
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surface. This also requires a tremendous amount of energy, which has been drawn mainly from natural gas (which ties the industry to the expansion of hydraulic fracturing). In the future, nuclear power plants may be constructed in the area to satisfy these immense energy demands.15 Tar sands companies also have a
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search for new (though ultimately finite) oil supplies in ways that often have high energy and resource demands (as in the tar sands, and in hydraulic fracturing for shale oil and gas) and carry a large ecological burden. In sum, the conceptual framework of petro-capitalism centres oil as the lifeblood of
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, increasingly expensive, and dangerous methods. These methods are what I refer to here as “extreme” extraction, from turning coal into liquid forms of energy, to hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) to open huge swaths of natural gas and trapped “tight” oil in the US and Russia, and the net result threatens to add
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; reduction in, 218; scarcity of, 221; unconventional, 28, 313; unsustainable deployment of, 300 FPIC (free, prior, and informed consent), 119, 257, 265, 268–69 fracking (hydraulic fracturing), 6, 7, 9, 26, 99–100, 117, 158, 191, 204, 236, 281, 283, 308, 313–15 France, Canadian embassy in, 57 Free Trade Agreements (FTAs
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Hughes, Simon, 209 human rights, 13, 75, 94, 126, 230, 250, 270, 275, 288, 294 Hupacasath First Nation, 93 Hurricane Katrina, 182 Hurricane Sandy, 230 hydraulic fracturing. See fracking hydrocarbon consumption, 25 hydrocarbon extraction, 105 hydrocarbons, 9, 231, 254, 281, 285 Idle No More movement, 16, 29, 74–75, 144, 214, 231
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