These are great days to invest money in black gold. We are not even at the apex of a shale oil and gas boom and already the United States has surpassed Russia as the No One supplier of oil in the world. There are good reasons and many ways to become an oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome or one of thousands of potential drilling sites.
New technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made it possible to access vast stores of fossil fuels that were previously unavailable. Coaxing the black sticky stuff and the lighter gas fractions of liquid petroleum requires a different approach from drilling a conventional oil well. First, fluids are injected thousands of feet into the Earth's crust via perforations in horizontal pipelines.
Mixed in with huge volumes of water are a large amount of sand, used to prop the fractures open so that the oil and gas that lies within can flow outwards to the surface. A single shale formation can take anywhere from a few million gallons to tens of millions of gallons of water to extract the resources buried deep within the rock. Multiply that by the 37,000 active sites, and that is an almost incalculable amount of water.
Simply managing the high volumes of frac water from the source to the drill site, through processing tanks and into the rock, and handling back flow and produced water has meant that new technologies have been forced to evolve rapidly. Produced water is that which is originally in the rock formation before any frac water has been injected. It comes up with the frac backflow when the fracturing phase of the job is complete.
The amount of produced water coming out of a well can be several times the volume that was injected in. Some of this water is trucked or piped to be recycled and used elsewhere. A small fraction can even be cleaned up for commercial and domestic use. Rapid evaporation pits are sometimes constructed to minimize the volume of water that needs to be managed. Much of it is injected into disposal wells.
It is the wastewater disposal wells that are responsible for the occurrence of abnormal seismic activity in areas that are being fractured. Understandably, the public is concerned about this seismic activity. So much that the United States Geological Survey of southern California has been studying what have become known in Oklahoma as "frackquakes." It is not the water used for fracturing that causes the seismic activity.
The Survey has confirmed that there is a close temporal relationship between the injection of water into disposal wells and the occurrence of these frackquakes. The public is also understandably worried about another, separate, problem with hydraulic fracturing. This is the potential for contamination of public water supplies with mud, sand and toxic fracking chemicals.
Oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome and other productive shale formations have been of huge benefit to the country. The continental United States are sitting on enough fuel to comfortably supply our needs for the next 90 years. Side benefits will be the development of new frac water management and recycling technologies which will be beneficial in their own right.
New technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made it possible to access vast stores of fossil fuels that were previously unavailable. Coaxing the black sticky stuff and the lighter gas fractions of liquid petroleum requires a different approach from drilling a conventional oil well. First, fluids are injected thousands of feet into the Earth's crust via perforations in horizontal pipelines.
Mixed in with huge volumes of water are a large amount of sand, used to prop the fractures open so that the oil and gas that lies within can flow outwards to the surface. A single shale formation can take anywhere from a few million gallons to tens of millions of gallons of water to extract the resources buried deep within the rock. Multiply that by the 37,000 active sites, and that is an almost incalculable amount of water.
Simply managing the high volumes of frac water from the source to the drill site, through processing tanks and into the rock, and handling back flow and produced water has meant that new technologies have been forced to evolve rapidly. Produced water is that which is originally in the rock formation before any frac water has been injected. It comes up with the frac backflow when the fracturing phase of the job is complete.
The amount of produced water coming out of a well can be several times the volume that was injected in. Some of this water is trucked or piped to be recycled and used elsewhere. A small fraction can even be cleaned up for commercial and domestic use. Rapid evaporation pits are sometimes constructed to minimize the volume of water that needs to be managed. Much of it is injected into disposal wells.
It is the wastewater disposal wells that are responsible for the occurrence of abnormal seismic activity in areas that are being fractured. Understandably, the public is concerned about this seismic activity. So much that the United States Geological Survey of southern California has been studying what have become known in Oklahoma as "frackquakes." It is not the water used for fracturing that causes the seismic activity.
The Survey has confirmed that there is a close temporal relationship between the injection of water into disposal wells and the occurrence of these frackquakes. The public is also understandably worried about another, separate, problem with hydraulic fracturing. This is the potential for contamination of public water supplies with mud, sand and toxic fracking chemicals.
Oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome and other productive shale formations have been of huge benefit to the country. The continental United States are sitting on enough fuel to comfortably supply our needs for the next 90 years. Side benefits will be the development of new frac water management and recycling technologies which will be beneficial in their own right.
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You can visit www.texasenergyexploration.com for more helpful information about Indirectly Becoming An Oil And Gas Investor Brookshire Salt Dome.
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