People often ask about oil industry practices and I love to share my knowledge with them. More knowledge is always good and unfortunately much of the popular information available from the media is often lacking in important details.
Lately, the public has come to be concerned about an old oilfield technique that is receiving a lot of usage by oil and gas companies as new tight-rock reservoirs are being developed. Names like the Marcellus Shale, Big Horn River (Canada), and Barnett Shale are in the news a lot. Much of the concern is around near-surface water supplies. However, most gas formations are thousands of feet deeper than drinking water supplies and the robust design of wells and the physical separation by many layers of rock makes contamination almost impossible.
These reservoirs have long been known to contain gas, but the rock is so tight, that is, impermeable to gas flow, that they were not much produced. Revolutionary changes in the design of hydraulic fracturing processes, new horizontal drilling technologies and new chemical treatments that prevent rock swelling now allow successful and economic production.
The industry has long held that chemicals used in fracturing are not detrimental, and a lot of environmental and biological testing has taken place. However, most chemicals, which address specific chemistry aspects of the well and rock properties, are proprietary developments of the fracturing companies. For obvious competition reasons they have been reluctant to make public their formulations. But the industry now realizes that good publicity is more profitable than secrecy and companies are opening up to the public. It is supporting open-disclosure legislation in many states, such as Texas, where Rick Perry just signed a bill.
One new resource available to you is at http://fracfocus.org/. This industry supported site provides information and chemical analysis to the public for fractured wells all around the country. The well database is a little sparse right now, but realize that over 40,000 wells are drilled every year in the US. If you are concerned about the chemicals, look at this page and see how small the quantities are: http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/why-chemicals-are-used
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