Monday 31 December 2012

Natural gas and hydraulic fracturing (fracking)

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Bath Geological Society has a talk about fracking on April 4th 2013. The full programme is available on the website.

4 comments:

Ian said...

This video both annoyed me and intrigued me.
Of course you will never get steel tubes to rupture with RDX or dynamite if one end is open to the atmosphere. It would probably require a massive charge of a detonator such as lead azide alone to rupture such an assembly. And as for methane in water - I suspect several homes in Bristol could give a similar demonstration - ever since British Gas and the water boards sub-contracted out their street work.
But seriously,  just how much methane is naturally dissolved in our aquifers?
And more to the point, why won't fracking companies list the secret chemicals they add to the water? It's this secrecy that engenders fear.
One of them is guar gum, harmless as far as I know, but the fracking industry is pricing it out of its traditional food market.

Ian Donaldson said...

I've now learnt that they also pump in gas under high pressure with the fracking water. This is probably nitrogen, an expensive commodity as it has to be separated from liquified air.

You can't use compressed air for it forms an explosive combination with hydrocarbons at high pressures.

It seems that oil companies hate this clip of methane in tap water.

Of course it's not dissolved, it's pretty insoluble in water at ordinary pressures. It must be from a very bubbly water-well.

Anonymous said...

During my career I've seen a lot of Guar Gum used in drilling mud, mixed up with seawater to make something like wallpaper paste. It's not only the hydraulic fracturing companies that use it. I think one attraction is that it doesn't biodegrade as fast as regular starch. However emptying a mud tank after a week or three in a tropical climate usually showed the bottom foot or so to be really foul.

Food use - not for me thanks, I'll have something out of a tin.

Bruce

Anonymous said...

During my career I've seen a lot of Guar Gum used in drilling mud, mixed up with seawater to make something like wallpaper paste. It's not only the hydraulic fracturing companies that use it. I think one attraction is that it doesn't biodegrade as fast as regular starch. However emptying a mud tank after a week or three in a tropical climate usually showed the bottom foot or so to be really foul.

Food use - not for me thanks, I'll have something out of a tin.

Bruce