B
barbless
Member
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2008
- Messages
- 483
"...Quickly: An alternative to using water in fracking for natural gas, potentially eliminating the water use and wastewater disposal concerns, detailed over at Inside Climate News. One major downside to date is that it costs more than using water in hydraulic fracturing, so few companies have been willing to use propane gel to crack the rock and get at natural gas..."
http://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/propane-gel-could-eliminate-water-use-fracking-satisfy-opponents.html
Yes, gasp, it costs more money.
The upside:
"New Waterless Fracking Method Avoids Pollution Problems, But Drillers Slow to Embrace It
Little-noticed drilling technique uses propane gel, not water, to release natural gas. Higher cost, lack of data and industry habit stand in the way.
By Anthony Brino, InsideClimate News, and Brian Nearing, Albany Times-Union
Nov 6, 2011
ALBANY, N.Y.—In the debate over hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, two facts are beyond dispute: Huge amounts of water are used to break up gas-bearing rock deep underground and huge amounts of polluted water are returned to the surface after the process is complete.
Tainted with chemicals, salts and even mild radioactivity, such water, when mishandled, has damaged the environment and threatened drinking water, helping fuel a heated debate in New York and other states over whether gas drilling is worth its risk to clean drinking water, rivers and streams.
Now, an emerging technology developed in Canada and just making its way to the U.S. does away with the need for water. Instead, it relies on a thick gel made from propane, a widely-available gas used by anyone who has fired up a backyard barbecue grill.
Called liquefied propane gas (LPG) fracturing, or simply "gas fracking," the waterless method was developed by a small energy company, GasFrac, based in Calgary, Alberta.
Still awaiting a patent in the U.S., the technique has been used about 1,000 times since 2008, mainly in gas wells in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and New Brunswick and a smaller handful of test wells in states that include Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Oklahoma and New Mexico, said GasFrac Chief Technology Officer Robert Lestz.
Like water, propane gel is pumped into deep shale formations a mile or more underground, creating immense pressure that cracks rocks to free trapped natural gas bubbles. Like water, the gel also carries small particles of sand or man-made material—known as proppant—that are forced into cracks to hold them open so the gas can flow out.
Unlike water, the gel does a kind of disappearing act underground. It reverts to vapor due to pressure and heat, then returns to the surface—along with the natural gas—for collection, possible reuse and ultimate resale..."
"...the propane method uses only about one quarter of the number of truck trips that water-based fracking employs, so the impact on local roads, the noise and dust annoyance to neighbors, and the trucking costs for drillers are reduced, he said..."
"...New York's DEC Weighs In
New York's Department of Environmental Conservation devoted a few paragraphs to propane fracking in its 1,500-page Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement report on natural gas drilling in September. It tersely declared that the technology was "not mature enough" to support drilling in New York.
As well as costing more than water, the LPG technology is proprietary to GasFrac, and so has limited availability, the DEC said.
But the agency also seemed to recognize the technology's potential, adding: "While it is not known if or when LPG hydraulic fracturing will be proposed in New York, having ... infrastructure in place may be an important factor in realizing the advantages of this technology."
New York would appear to have a ready source of propane for fracking, as a major propane pipeline runs from Pennsylvania through the heart of the Marcellus Shale area in the Southern Tier. The Teppco pipeline goes through Watkins Glen, Oneonta and Selkirk before continuing into New England.
"This technology will be 'mature' in our view when we have a proposal or an application to review," DEC spokeswoman DEC spokeswoman Charsleissa King said. "At this point we do not have anything before us. We have met with GasFrac to get a general understanding of the technology."
Lestz admits his company does not have nearly enough equipment to take its method mainstream. He said it envisions forming "strategic alliances" with larger, unidentified drilling companies to make its process more available..."
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20111104/gasfrac-propane-natural-gas-drilling-hydraulic-fracturing-fracking-drinking-water-marcellus-shale-new-york
Take-way the added costs are mostly at the front end- it costs more money to implement the extraction process.
Costs that won't be necessary: everything associated with decontaminating and disposing hydro-fracking wastewater.
Resistance to implementing the technology: overwhelmingly about patent royalties- right now, it's proprietary with only one company, Gas-Frac; the expense of investing in the new technology while discarding previous material investment in the inherently dirty hydro-fracking paradigm; the time delay involved in training enough workers to handle the new technology on a wide-scale basis.
Conclusion: despite the obvious advantages in the long run in terms of both environmental safety and resource recovery, the gas companies will implement this only if they're forced to do it, and even then, only grudgingly, in as few sites as possible.
At minimum, I think gel-fracking should be a pre-requirement for the most fragile geologies and the most sensitive ecological areas, and those places should be drilled last. The gas companies have access to a massive resource that isn't going anywhere, and gas extraction shouldn't be presented to the public as a boom-driven tempo task, with everyone in a hurry to drill and extract the maximum amount of gas in the shortest possible time frame.
And the last thing that we need is to have caution thrown to the wind- and reasonable alternatives discarded- by slavish allegiance to an exclusively price-driven greedhead boom/bust extraction model.
http://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/propane-gel-could-eliminate-water-use-fracking-satisfy-opponents.html
Yes, gasp, it costs more money.
The upside:
"New Waterless Fracking Method Avoids Pollution Problems, But Drillers Slow to Embrace It
Little-noticed drilling technique uses propane gel, not water, to release natural gas. Higher cost, lack of data and industry habit stand in the way.
By Anthony Brino, InsideClimate News, and Brian Nearing, Albany Times-Union
Nov 6, 2011
ALBANY, N.Y.—In the debate over hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, two facts are beyond dispute: Huge amounts of water are used to break up gas-bearing rock deep underground and huge amounts of polluted water are returned to the surface after the process is complete.
Tainted with chemicals, salts and even mild radioactivity, such water, when mishandled, has damaged the environment and threatened drinking water, helping fuel a heated debate in New York and other states over whether gas drilling is worth its risk to clean drinking water, rivers and streams.
Now, an emerging technology developed in Canada and just making its way to the U.S. does away with the need for water. Instead, it relies on a thick gel made from propane, a widely-available gas used by anyone who has fired up a backyard barbecue grill.
Called liquefied propane gas (LPG) fracturing, or simply "gas fracking," the waterless method was developed by a small energy company, GasFrac, based in Calgary, Alberta.
Still awaiting a patent in the U.S., the technique has been used about 1,000 times since 2008, mainly in gas wells in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and New Brunswick and a smaller handful of test wells in states that include Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Oklahoma and New Mexico, said GasFrac Chief Technology Officer Robert Lestz.
Like water, propane gel is pumped into deep shale formations a mile or more underground, creating immense pressure that cracks rocks to free trapped natural gas bubbles. Like water, the gel also carries small particles of sand or man-made material—known as proppant—that are forced into cracks to hold them open so the gas can flow out.
Unlike water, the gel does a kind of disappearing act underground. It reverts to vapor due to pressure and heat, then returns to the surface—along with the natural gas—for collection, possible reuse and ultimate resale..."
"...the propane method uses only about one quarter of the number of truck trips that water-based fracking employs, so the impact on local roads, the noise and dust annoyance to neighbors, and the trucking costs for drillers are reduced, he said..."
"...New York's DEC Weighs In
New York's Department of Environmental Conservation devoted a few paragraphs to propane fracking in its 1,500-page Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement report on natural gas drilling in September. It tersely declared that the technology was "not mature enough" to support drilling in New York.
As well as costing more than water, the LPG technology is proprietary to GasFrac, and so has limited availability, the DEC said.
But the agency also seemed to recognize the technology's potential, adding: "While it is not known if or when LPG hydraulic fracturing will be proposed in New York, having ... infrastructure in place may be an important factor in realizing the advantages of this technology."
New York would appear to have a ready source of propane for fracking, as a major propane pipeline runs from Pennsylvania through the heart of the Marcellus Shale area in the Southern Tier. The Teppco pipeline goes through Watkins Glen, Oneonta and Selkirk before continuing into New England.
"This technology will be 'mature' in our view when we have a proposal or an application to review," DEC spokeswoman DEC spokeswoman Charsleissa King said. "At this point we do not have anything before us. We have met with GasFrac to get a general understanding of the technology."
Lestz admits his company does not have nearly enough equipment to take its method mainstream. He said it envisions forming "strategic alliances" with larger, unidentified drilling companies to make its process more available..."
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20111104/gasfrac-propane-natural-gas-drilling-hydraulic-fracturing-fracking-drinking-water-marcellus-shale-new-york
Take-way the added costs are mostly at the front end- it costs more money to implement the extraction process.
Costs that won't be necessary: everything associated with decontaminating and disposing hydro-fracking wastewater.
Resistance to implementing the technology: overwhelmingly about patent royalties- right now, it's proprietary with only one company, Gas-Frac; the expense of investing in the new technology while discarding previous material investment in the inherently dirty hydro-fracking paradigm; the time delay involved in training enough workers to handle the new technology on a wide-scale basis.
Conclusion: despite the obvious advantages in the long run in terms of both environmental safety and resource recovery, the gas companies will implement this only if they're forced to do it, and even then, only grudgingly, in as few sites as possible.
At minimum, I think gel-fracking should be a pre-requirement for the most fragile geologies and the most sensitive ecological areas, and those places should be drilled last. The gas companies have access to a massive resource that isn't going anywhere, and gas extraction shouldn't be presented to the public as a boom-driven tempo task, with everyone in a hurry to drill and extract the maximum amount of gas in the shortest possible time frame.
And the last thing that we need is to have caution thrown to the wind- and reasonable alternatives discarded- by slavish allegiance to an exclusively price-driven greedhead boom/bust extraction model.
