The whole oil scene in California is bad...Between the number of unplugged wells (just look at photos of South Belridge field to get an idea of the potential of what is out there) and the amount of water used in California for oil production (it is a bit different than every other basin in the U.S. due to the oil gravity - the vast majority need steam flooding, so 3-5 barrels of fresh water/bbl oil produced), the state, the one oil producer that you would think wants to be environmentally friendly, is probably the worst of the top producing states.
As someone from the South Hills area, I, too, am interested in seeing how this goes...Pittsburgh has really changed over the past 30-40 years, replacing a massively overwhelming population of blue collar jobs with white collar (mostly doctors and lawyers). I know a lot of folk who work at/have worked at U.S. Steel and hope the transition works out for them.
Having served on boards, the one thing I have not seen that would be really key (and maybe I just have not been lucky in my searches), is something that answers the question of what is the language around releasing information regarding the company to the press or in a research capacity? Typically there are rules that are set up to give the board notice of anything going out to the public, be it an article or research paper, that allows for a heads up or gives time to discuss the implications of such a thing. While whistleblowers are necessary, was there a need to be a sort of whistleblower in this case? Was there adequate board discussion around the subject and the paper before the release? If not, nobody needs a rogue board member like that and it was definitely not in the interest of the company - she is the one at fault here. If that process did happen, she definitely did the right thing and shame on the board for not getting out in front of it.
So, to capture this better, would you then design your factory with acoustics in mind (more so than now), too? Like areas where soundwaves would bounce to resonate and concentrate to hit sensors?
Interesting idea to jack up beef prices even more... So, having worked with a few ranchers out in Wyoming on the oil and gas side, I can tell you that in some cases the cattle have access to free water, but it ain't that good water you and I can drink. Produced water from oil and gas wells, depending on cleanliness at the well head, can be "land applied" and that is what some ranchers use. This water is a health hazard for us, but is supposedly fit for cattle. That water still evolves entrained gas and has some sort of rough minerals/chemicals for the body in it. I wonder if this is all getting captured by their calculations.
True story. I have been to SA a number of times and know have seen how dry it can get down there (though with what water you have, it is beautiful). We also have a lot of farmers and ranchers picking up the oil and gas royalty income in the U.S. Weird thing/something I have never really gotten over in terms of agriculture...Not frac water, but produced formation water (which is also usually reinjected for disposal - and that is a whole other topic that is concerning), is land applied in some areas for cattle to drink. Here is the thing - it is potable for animals but not safe for human consumption, yet we will eventually eat them. Produced formation water (ancient seawater with some heavier and sometimes slightly radioactive materials) doesn't strike me as something anything living could properly filter. The practice is common in Wyoming - where a lot of beef cattle live. Not sure about TX, but wouldn't be surprised if it was acceptable practice there.
You are totally right, the amount of chemical in comparison to the total frac job is small, but when you start putting 8-16 wells in the same space where once we only did 4, then it starts to add up. I used to have a full chemical list somewhere, but can't seem to find it right now. Also, to your point, things like benzene and toluene are in the mix at times - and if a company has a "proprietary" mix there can easily be some really rough carcinogens in that, too. This is a slightly different topic, but the amount of clean water used in the process is an eye opener. Say you will have 8 wells on a 1280 spacing (so 2 mile laterals, roughly), and they use 75,000 bbls of water - fresh water, you can't have any side reactions happening and recycled water adds significant cost to an already pricey well (probably $7.2- $8 million each for drill/completion), that is 25.2 million gallons of water for just one pad of wells. In terms of future water access, coupled with "is that water clean?", it becomes a real issue. Typically frac flowback water is dumped to a lined pit (which, at times, it can leak through to the ground water), and that water is then transported to an injection well nearby to inject at some point below the water table. But you can't always trust people to do that right things when costs come up. There are bad injection wells where the water is absorbed at the water table level.
So, 99.6% of the frac job is sand (or something like it) and water. The rest is "chemicals". Of course, this number varies wildly based on recipe - 92-99% is usually the range. You would figure out the other chemicals the same way. Problem is percentages could be in percentage or decimal format and/or those numbers could just be straight up wrong, or you aren't provided other info that is relevant in the calc.
Also worth mentioning, where the article talks about "proprietary recipes" - that isn't just referencing one chemical in many cases. They will just enter that phrase as the full list of chemicals used.
I have used the FracFocus database for about 6 or 7 years now (been a petroleum/reservoir engineer for ~20 years), and it is quite depressing to look at some of the chemicals they use. While I applaud the study, it would be interesting to see how much cleanup they have tried to do on the data to yield their numbers (OpenFF isn't great). I have written a fairly long cleanup in Python to get some of the data valuable to the industry. Hydraulic Fracturing recipes differ from basin to basin based on geologies/depths/and major product being produced, just to name a few variables. Doing some math, because they have decided to report the numbers in a very convoluted way (they don't give it in barrels or lbs, they give it in volume percentage based on bulk water volume reported - this leads to inconsistent numbers because the carrier fluid isn't just water, it is water and some other chemical, which differs well to well, that increases the density - which will mess with final volume/weight counts on the various chemicals). The other major issue is what you call a chemical. For example, one chemical can have 10 different names, and pumpers (field personnel) are entering the data by hand a lot of time. Some guy, taking mud samples for an oil company, working at a site 50 miles from Midland, isn't really caring how he is spelling "2-acryloyloxyethyl(benzyl)dimethylammonium chloride" at 4 in the morning. So, on top of chemicals with multiple names (and just field reference names), you have spelling errors galore. Also, when going through the database, there is no standardized way to enter percentages...nor do they care if those percentages add up to 1 (100?). The study does what it is supposed to do - identifies "bad stuff goes into the ground", but we really can't judge what the real amount is given how error full the database is. To finish a thought from before, the thing that E&P companies get from the database on competitors is how much sand (what kind of sand/proppant, too) and water they are using to fracture the rock in a well. The completion is the more expensive part of the drilling/completion/facilities cost of a well. If you are interested in seeing what the database looks like, here is the location. I haven't cleaned it in a bit, and it looks like they changed up the site some, so take this link FWIW. https://dev.fracfocus.org/index.php/data-download
The list is very much Australian. As someone who has done land leasing for natural resources, you can rack up a pretty huge leasing position pretty quick (I know these people on the infographic own it, but back in the day it was pretty easy to just pay next to nothing for a lot of these parcels - Gina Rinehart has expanded her kingdom, but she inherited an awful lot from Langley). One time, I was looking at something for oil and gas exploration and they came back with a number of $20,000,000 - I was thinking, "Oh, that is going to be something, like, 20,000 acres, probably." They gave me the numbers and I converted it acreage, looked at it on a map and recalc'd a few times because I thought I was way off. Nope. It was just an equivalent acreage as Tennessee, that's all.
Speaking of the rich, I found this video interesting about luxury goods right now. Patrick Boyle has some other good videos on YouTube, as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH6pF-gXbuw
Exxon is a behemoth that spreads its money over everything just to catch something - and even that is done poorly over there. They do have a number of legacy fields that if not already on CO2 flooding, may become candidates in their eyes soon. But that is where "being done poorly" comes in again. CO2 flooding, like water flooding, should start sooner than later to catch a certain pressure and oil/water
amount/quality regime in the reservoir. Guaranteed, they will try to make it look like they are being sustainable by showing off how they are using the CO2, recycling it and, at some point, sequestering it, but it will be done in the most inefficient manner possible and probably result in losing a good amount of CO2 to the atmosphere due to poor field oversight of the equipment. Challenges that will come up due to whatever stage a reservoir might be in: https://www.mdpi.com/energies/energies-10-00345/article_depl...
Interesting. In that part of the world, the crust is actually some of the thinnest on Earth. Shell drilled some thermal wells up there in the 70s - when it comes to tech, they have always been the most progressive of the E&P industry - that isn't saying much, but they have been more advanced/interested than any other. Because of the crust being thinnest there, the geothermal gradient is supposed to be better, but that being said, the original Shell wells weren't drilled deep enough - I reviewed them a long time ago, but think they were targeting some 300 feet. When done, all they did was make uncomfortably hot water and no steam - so they will probably need to go to that 500' mark someone here mentioned.
I was going to post this response, too. Yes, you can close it because it is duplicate, but god knows the huge range of how good people are at explaining something to people of various levels of understanding.
This is awesome. As someone who lives in the U.S, had a heart attack (double bypass), and a week hospital stay...I want to see if $298,000 was the right price.
I have read it, and yes, this is true...but I actually had a boss that would just demean you in front of anyone and every so often threw a chair, so my stress was coming from multiple fronts.
So the "Sunday Scaries" are real - where you dread going into your toxic job on Monday. Diet and genetics are big contributors to the blockages forming, and the stress sets it off. I had mine (which lead to a double bypass) on a Sunday morning. My job, at the time, was very high stress and I started dreaded going in every Sunday. I could feel panic attacks welling up on Sundays quite often. This is absolutely just opinion, but talking to some other people that were in the hospital with me, it sounded like I definitely wasn't alone in this life experience.
Anyone here ever take analytical chem lab? This is essentially how you get graded. Just wondering if anyone else was subjected to punishment for being careful?
I love these things - to see everything sort of classified, and all at once, helps me find things I would never think to look for. Forgive me if this has been posted somewhere else, but if you want to see a reddit map, here it is (maybe you found it already in their github, but I just have it as a bookmark): https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/?x=18083.096950551575...
A preventative like this is good to know, but, really, all you need to do is drink a lot of water through the day. That is the number one way to avoid a kidney stone. I have had a urologist say, "Hell, you can drink enough beer, and you should be good." - Though, if you are prone to gout (your body generally likes to make crystals), beer ain't a great choice.
Pretty good to know. For those of you that get gout and don't know about it, cherry juice is a good preventative and useful if you are having an attack. I will be making cherry lemonade a staple...