Friday Funny: Fracking protestors and their petro-sourced belongings

Life is a risky business and modern life might be more so if it weren’t for a host of safety methods used during the many production, manufacturing and labor saving processes carried out to make our life better and more healthy.
The odd thing about this discussion of the dangers of minute quantities of fracking additives, no one discusses the large quantities of extremely toxic and dangerous fluids that come back out of the well in the form of hydrogen sulfide, oil, petroleum products and gas. Most of us safely handle extremely energy rich gasoline on a weekly basis (could I say explosive? the same can be said of NG).
Is anyone advocating dropping these safety methods or (really?) getting rid of the benefits of these labor saving and enjoyable outcomes?
Yes we should continue to try to eliminate the risk but we should look at the data and determine where the risk can really be found and focus on it. Mindlessly attacking proven low risk behavior is really ignorant. Politicizing your favorite demons is normal but we all need to pick our battles very carefully.
Bernie

Of course these protesters are far worse than foolishly funny, trespassing hypocrites.
They are also scurrilous liars.
Many of them know full well there is no legitimacy to their claims about fracking.
My Texas oil man brother produced a very good summary.
“When we are drilling a well, we are required to protect ALL useable groundwater to a depth specified by the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality. This depth is specified during the permitting process. The depth typically is around 1200′. Protection is by way of cementing pipe in the shallow section of the well bore. This is called surface casing. We first drill a 12 3/4″ diameter hole to 1200 feet. Then we run 8 5/8″ heavy wall seamless steel pipe to that depth with centralizers to keep it in the center of the well bore. Now we pump a calculated volume of cement down the pipe displacing it with salt water back up the outside of the pipe (annular space) until it reaches the surface. Excess cement volume is calculated to ensure we reach surface while a small amount of cement remains inside the bottom of the pipe (usually 20 – 50 feet). If less washout has occurred during drilling of the surface hole than calculated we sometimes circulate as much as 35 barrels of excess cement to surface as we displace the cement down the pipe. After all we don’t want to leave too much cement inside the pipe. Once cementing is done we must wait a minimum of 8 hours for the fast setting cement slurry to harden. During the running and cementing of the surface casing a representative of the Oil & Gas Division of the Texas Railroad Commission usually comes by to witness the process….we are required to notice them when it will be done. The composition of the cement slurry including all all additives, strengtheners and drying agents as well as the number and placing of centralizers is submitted for approval during the permitting process.
Now, and only now, that the surface hole has been properly cased can drilling continue to total depth. We go back into the cased hole with a 7 7/8″ bit and tag cement near the bottom of the surface casing and spend several hours drilling out cement until we get out of the pipe and start making open hole. The hole is then drilled to the permitted total depth, logged and cored. If it looks like it is going to be a producer the surface casing process is repeated with a string of production pipe. By this I mean we run 4 1/2″, 11.6 lb/ft steel pipe from total depth to surface, centralize and cement. Now we have 2 concentric strings of pipe protecting the groundwater and no hydrocarbon productive zone open into the well bore….that comes later during well completion operations.
By the time we move into the completion phase the drilling rig and all other equipment has been moved off. A work-over-well servicing rig is moved on location and a perforating truck is rigged up. A gun is lowered into the hole by wire line and the pipe is perforated with say 4 shots a foot through several feet of the productive zone. Our completion depths (where we perforate) are fairly shallow and are typically 4000 – 5500 feet. The perforating truck is released and the “frac” company starts mobilizing and placing equipment for the hydraulic fracturing of the well. This usually entails about 18 – 20 eighteen wheelers that include pumps, hoppers, blenders, tanks and what not. The sand laden frac fluid is pumped down the 4 1/2″ production pipe and pressured up until the rock behind the pipe and cement at the perforations breaks down or “fractures”. That pressure point is referred to as the “breakdown pressure point”. Pumping continues until the allotted sand has been delivered into the fracturing rock through the perforations via the frac fluid. Keep in mind the “fracking” occurs at an isolated zone 4000 feet below the protected ground water. After the frac job the well is shut in, all equipment except the “frac tanks” is released and the flow back of the fluid commences. Flow back is controlled to recover the fluid into surface tanks for disposal and done at a rate to ensure the sand stays in the formation as a proppant to hold the artificially created fractures open. Frac designs and computer modeling of the rock lithology show fracturing reaches out from the well bore horizontally 250 – 700 feet depending on the size of the frac. Vertical growth during the frac job is usually limited to under 200 feet and can be controlled during the frac job by adjusting the injection rate.
There you have it. Everything from depth of surface water to be protected, chemical composition of cement, number and placement of centralizers to the disposal of the recovered frac fluid is regulated. Gas in water wells from what we do? I don’t think so. Not if rules are followed. Sure there are accidents and certainly an occasional operator that gets away with not complying but all the regulations in the world won’t cure that. Nor will a ban on fracturing.”

SandyInLimousin says:
August 24, 2013 at 6:42 am
Surely Northern Holland is sinking for the same reason southern England is, namely up lift in northern Europe after the last lot of ice sheets retreated?
Yes that is right, but the “conventional” gas extraction adds to that, so that part of The Netherlands (Slochteren / Groningen) is sinking faster than the rest… Not spectacular, but measurable: maximum 35 cm over the past 50 years over an area with a diameter of 60 km around the main wells.

Neil says: @ur momisugly August 24, 2013 at 4:51 am
Would you frack 1 mile from a village?
Heck I would frack under my own house and I have a well for water. Know of any companies looking for a farm for fracking NG???

Neil, more to the point is WWF, Geenpeace, Sierra Club willing to PAY ME NOT TO FRACK on MY LAND? If they are not they have STOLEN from me the value of the minerals they are not allowing me to develop.
This is what this whole mess is about. Do people have the right to own property or not. The Communists say not but they are not about to show their hand so we get the soft sell under the guise of environmentalism. It is a sheepskin hiding the wolf and that is shown by the fact people will be worse off and their wealth will be moved to the elite and their rights removed.
Heck the 2012 IMF report even shows that is what is happening.

….New convergence and strengthened interdependence coincide with a third trend, relating to income distribution. In many countries the distribution of income has become more unequal, and the top earners’ share of income in particular has risen dramatically. In the United States the share of the top 1 percent has close to tripled over the past three decades, now accounting for about 20 percent of total U.S. income (Alvaredo and others, 2012)….
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/09/dervis.htm

And another paper shows who is controlling the show.

The Network of Global Corporate Control
ABSTRACT
The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025995

These are the people actually running the show by providing the funding for the NGOs.

…”Very few of even the larger international NGOs are operationally democratic, in the sense that members elect officers or direct policy on particular issues,” notes Peter Spiro. “Arguably it is more often money than membership that determines influence, and money more often represents the support of centralized elites, such as major foundations, than of the grass roots.” (The CGG has benefited substantially from the largesse of the MacArthur, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations.) …

The Rockefeller foundations fund Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.

Wikipedia: A Pennsylvania family was forced to abandon because of fracking pollution of their 10-acre farm. The family was paid 750,000USD by Range Resources Corporation to depart from a more recently installed petroleum well plant, though the family was oddly required to sign an agreement which stated that they now nor ever will suffer any adverse medical effects from the toxic exposure.[94]
gail : you don’t own the mineral rights on your property (in Uk) anyway. You only own the top two spits of soil I believe. If someone discovered gold say 3 feet down on your property it would not be yours to sell or benefit from – the way I understand uk landlaw. You’d have to bid for it somehow for rights to extract…

“…do anti-fracking protestors think nylon tents, PVC groundsheets, and plastics grow on trees?”
Well, actually, they did grow on trees… then the trees died, got buried, got compressed and cooked underground for millions of years, when someone dug them out and processed them into whatever was needed. Plastics did grow on trees, just very old ones!
FD
PS: Sorry, I could not resist the obvious pun on a pun.

Neil says:
August 24, 2013 at 8:49 am
Dear Neil,
How it relates is very clear. There is risk and reward associated with life and it cannot be escaped. Whether it be surgery, fracking, or going to the grocery store.

Neil says:
August 24, 2013 at 7:24 am
gail: – the claim of hypocrisy is/was wrong. see my 1st couple of comments above
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No Neil YOU are wrong.
If you are not willing to live the lifestyle you wish to CONDEMN the rest of us to then you are a hypocrite. The biggest hypocrites are people like Al Gore and Maurice Strong who grow rich by scamming people like you.
If you do not understand exactly what the consequences are of removing oil, natural gas and coal from the world’s energy mix and substituting grossly polluting and environmentally unfriendly bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes then you are criminally ignorant and should keep your mouth shut.
I did my homework. We looked at wind mills, solar panels and geothermal as options and the only one that showed promise once you scratched the surface was replacing our heat pump with geothermal. The other was Biogas from Manure but it is not economically feasible for a small operation due to regulations and cost.

mogamboguru says:
August 24, 2013 at 9:05 am

Personally, I think that poisoning potable water with hydrocarbons and natural gas by destroying the layers of rock which are separating oil and gas from water so much, that you can set the water pouring from your kitchen’s water-tab on fire, is not a viable long-term solution for our energy-needs.

Ah, you are a Gasland and Promised Land victim. Sorry to hear that. Qatar, UAE and other oil rich Arab countries though is pleased so many believed the lies.

Neil you need a BS detector big time. ,
If you were simply a wee bit more curious and clicked further you would see how unrelated to fracking that family’s circumstance was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_Resources
Here’s a pic of fracking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HydroFrac2.svg
They did not “abandon” their farm because of fracking.