Want to get excited about Shale gas? Read this. (Sewickley: inspectors, maintenance)

[ki0eh]

Question posed to me today - Do any frackers use hydrofluoric acid?

[Honest Bob]

Call Mike Scarantine @ Universal Well Service - (814) 938-2051

Or

Haliburton - (724) 479-9046

They will answer any questions you might have as to which chemicals they presently use to fracture gas wells.

[Honest Bob]

Halliburton Watch

Those chemicals include diesel fuel, hydrochloric acid

http://www.halliburton.com/public/pe...b/H/H06640.pdf

I can take you to natural gas wells that were drilled 1 , 5, 10 and 40 years ago and I can physically show you the gas leaking past the drill case.

On paper, they tell you that they can cement the drill casing and nothing will leak, in real world terms, it doesn't always work.

If you can show me someone that can put Hydrochloric acid at 10,000 psi and 400*F in their mouth and live, I will give you a million dollars.. The movie that someone posted on here is pretty bogus. As I said before - we have a 55 Gallon drum of the acid in the engine shop that we use to "hot tank" old engine blocks. Only we don't heat it up, because then you couldn't keep it in a plastic drum!

[ki0eh]

The reason I was asking was that someone who used to work in a glass plant, was asking me because he heard some were using hydroFLUORIC acid (different stuff than hydroCHLORIC) which he used to use to dissolve GLASS!

[PeeAye Native]

Originally Posted by ditchdigger

Quoted from a number of differnt sources:

I think the confusion stems from Little Bevis missing the bolded part. Just because somebody taps the Marcellus gas doesn't mean we're going to shut off every other gas supply in the meantime.

The right way to state this is: At current rates of extraction, at current market prices, and with current technology, the field will be depleted in X number of years. For example, three to five years ago, it would have been 100 years until depletion (because of very, very low overall extraction rates, and known reserve estimates were increasing).

The usual example used to describe this is the loaves of bread on a grocery store shelf. People's tendency is to think of the amount of gas or oil available (world wide or in any particular field) as the day's loaves of bread on a store shelf, once they are gone there is no more. However that is not correct. The shelves are restocked, and the correct way to view a mineral or oil or gas reserve is that the daily deliveries that restock the bread are the equivalent of new technology for discovering more gas and new means of extracting more of it than could be done previously, and higher market prices turn situations what were once not profitable to extract into profitable situations.

Supposedly the Marcellus Shale is just one more example of this in action. It took newer technology/newer studies to find and prove the natural gas was there, and new technology (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing) to make getting it out feasible, and to a lesser extent, higher market prices to make it profitable. Those factors will continue to trend to make more and more of it available.

[jimboburnsy]

Originally Posted by ki0eh

Question posed to me today - Do any frackers use hydrofluoric acid?

I've never seen hydroflouric used but I haven't worked in all of the shale areas either. HCl is very common as well as some organic acids like acetic and very concentrated citric acid.

Acid is generally used in relatively small amounts for shale applications. We're talking about 25-100 bbls (1,000 - 4,000 gallons) for the purposes of etching out cement debris around the perforations and cleaning up near-wellbore damage. It is usually considered to be a precursory operation to the body of the frac in which water with (i) a friction reducing agent (hydrating acrylic polymer - you could drink it but it would taste like sh*t and give you incredible diarrhea), (ii) a surfactant (the most commonly used is a by-product from the manufacture of Dawn dish soap), (iii) a contact biocide (DO NOT want to drink that stuff) to prevent bacteria introduced with the frac fluid from growing in the formation and (iv) sometimes a clay control/clay sequestering agent to prevent formation fines from swelling when in contact with fresh water are used to carry sand down the wellbore and out into the formation to provide a nice, permeable path of conductivity back to the surface.

[ki0eh]

Originally Posted by jimboburnsy

I've never seen hydroflouric used

Thanks!

Any comment, in the spirit of the day, on the widespread use of DHMO? Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division - dihydrogen monoxide info

[jimboburnsy]

Originally Posted by ki0eh

Thanks!

Any comment, in the spirit of the day, on the widespread use of DHMO? Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division - dihydrogen monoxide info

Dihydrous oxygen = water, yes?

The volume of a shale frac is as important as any other aspect of the design.

Shale doesn't fracture in the same predictable pattern that sandstones do. To imagine what is happening underground when a section of the Marcellus is fracture stimulated, hitting a car windshield with a hammer is a good visualization. A "shatter" pattern of fractures works out into the formation from the wellbore. The more thoroughly shattered the formation is and the longer the linear distance that the individual fractures run out into the formation, the better the stimulation will be. The key with shale is creating as much new surface area as is possible and the best way to do that is to pump enormous volumes of water at very high rates. A really big shale frac would be something like 3 or 4 thousand barrels (1 bbl = 42 gallons).

To put that in perspective, NY state has about 975 golf courses. Each one of those golf courses uses about 3,000 bbls of water per day. In the busiest heyday of the Barnett Shale around Ft. Worth, I think that there may have been 30 or 40 frac crews working on the busiest day imagineable and maybe 5 or 10 would have been pumping really big shale fracs.

My conclusion: Golf is a much less green than fracing as far as water usage is concerned.

[jimboburnsy]

Originally Posted by jimboburnsy

Dihydrous oxygen = water, yes?

The volume of a shale frac is as important as any other aspect of the design.

Shale doesn't fracture in the same predictable pattern that sandstones do. To imagine what is happening underground when a section of the Marcellus is fracture stimulated, hitting a car windshield with a hammer is a good visualization. A "shatter" pattern of fractures works out into the formation from the wellbore. The more thoroughly shattered the formation is and the longer the linear distance that the individual fractures run out into the formation, the better the stimulation will be. The key with shale is creating as much new surface area as is possible and the best way to do that is to pump enormous volumes of water at very high rates. A really big shale frac would be something like 3 or 4 thousand barrels (1 bbl = 42 gallons).

To put that in perspective, NY state has about 975 golf courses. Each one of those golf courses uses about 3,000 bbls of water per day. In the busiest heyday of the Barnett Shale around Ft. Worth, I think that there may have been 30 or 40 frac crews working on the busiest day imagineable and maybe 5 or 10 would have been pumping really big shale fracs.

My conclusion: Golf is a much less green than fracing as far as water usage is concerned.

Actually,

A really big shale job is more like 60,000 bbls although par for the course is more like 25,000-30,000. My math skills were not so great as my drinking skills last night.

Even so, the conclusion holds. Golf courses in NY drink substantially more than 1,000,000,000 bbls of water per year.

Even so, golf courses drink billions

[ki0eh]

Pesticide use, habitat conversion, driving your Escalade to the golf course, etc. - I can see a case being made for golf having higher environmental impact than the shale gas development.