A Local Oilman Talks About Frac'ing

A Local Oilman Talks About Frac'ing

Rush Warren and Frac on top of Tres Cuevas

From the top of Tres Cuevas Mountain, you can see forever, but at the lower elevation, where frac'ing is discussed, the view is not so clear.

I accepted the invitation of Rush Warren to visit him at Lone Star Ranch, near the base of the mountain. It is his and wife Penni's home. The ranch is north of Lajitas International Airport and is named after Lone Star Mine, which is located on the top and back side of Tres Cuevas Mountain.

Rush says the original mining town of Terlingua was here. It is his understanding that 3,000 to 5,000 people inhabited the town around 1900. Several ruins still stand, including the Terlingua Jail and a machine shop.

Rush is president of Warren Acquisition, Inc., whose business is oil and gas exploration. He had told me that frac'ing in oil and gas fields dated to the 1970's. With documentary movies like "Gasland," which portrayed gas coming out of water faucets being ignited and a story last week headlining "Big Oil, Bad Air: Fracking the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas," I wanted to get an oilman's opinion.

We had exchanged email on the subject, and Rush sent me an article by the Geological Society of America (GSA) that it said was a primer for the general public and journalists. Rush gave the article a solid "A" and nearly an "A plus." To begin the Big Bend Times ongoing coverage of the issue, I will quote liberally from the write-up.

Rush does take exception with the article's use of the word fracking instead of frac'ing. Incidentally, he named his labrador retriever Frac more than nine years ago.

As we were seated on his sofa, the area oilman and neighbor stood by this email assertion:

"I hear of people claiming to be environmentalists banging the war drums of environmental concerns of frac'ing, which for some reason they call 'fracking.' I have yet to actually hear of anything that has actually happened as a direct result of frac'ing.

"I have heard them attempt to claim that it causes earthquakes and water quality issues, among other disasters in an attempt to scare gullible people, but facts backing their stories are lacking. It is interesting that even though we have been using huge frac jobs since the 1970's that all of a sudden now it causes earthquakes.

"Frac'ing may be new news to them, but oil people have known about fracs for decades. These stories are created to instill fear in the people in order to promote a political agenda against the use of hydrocarbons in general."

According to the GSA report, hydraulic fracturing, also called frac'ing, is a technological process used in the development of natural gas and oil resources. Used commercially since the 1940s, it has only relatively recently been used to extract gas and oil from shales and other tight reserves. Development of lower cost, more effective fracturing fluids, with horizontal well drilling and subsurface imaging, created a technological breakthrough that is largely responsible for the increase in domestic production of shale gas in the last few years and longer for tight gas.

Continued use of hydralic fracturing can be expected, given projections of future shale gas and tight gas contributions to total U.S. gas production, unless it is banned or replaced by other technologies. Hydraulic fracturing has expanded oil and gas development to new areas of the United States and internationally, including Canada, Australia, and Argentina. In contrast, some governments have limited the use of it. For example, South Africa only recently lifted a moratorium, New York State has a moratorium, and France has banned its use.

Hydraulic fracturing has become a highly contentious public policy issue because of concerns about the environmental and health effects of its use. What are the environmental risks? What are the health risks from the chemicals injected into the ground? Will it take away water needed for food production and cities? Does it trigger earthquakes? Does expansion of this technology for fossil fuels mean a decreased commitment to renewable energy technology?

Oil and natural gas, which are hydrocarbons, reside in the pore spaces between grains of rock (called reservoir rock) in the subsurface. If geologic conditions are favorable, hydrocarbons flow freely from reservoir rocks to oil and gas wells. Production from these rocks is traditionally referred to as "conventional" hydrocarbon reserves. However, in some rocks, hydrocarbons are trapped within microscopic pore space in the rock. This is especially true in fine-grained rocks, such as shales, that have very small and poorly connected pore spaces not conducive to the free flow of liquid or gas (called low-permeability rocks).

Natural gas that occurs in the pore spaces of shale is called shale gas. Some sandstones and carbonate rocks (such as limestone) with similarly low permeability are often referred to as "tight" formations. Geologists have long known that large quantities of oil and natural gas occur in formations like these (often referred to as tight oil or gas). Hydraulic fracturing can enhance the permeability of these rocks to a point where oil and gas can economically be extracted.

Frac'ing is a technique used to stimulate production of oil and gas after a well has been drilled. It consists of injecting a mixture of water, sand, and chemical additives through a well drilled into an oil- or gas-bearing rock formation under high but controlled pressure. The process is designed to create small cracks within (and thus fracture) the formation and propagate those fractures to a desired distance from the well bore by controlling the rate, pressure, and timing of fluid injection. Engineers use pressure and fluid characteristics to restrict those fractures to the target reservoir rock, typically limited to a distance of a few hundred feet from the well. Proppant (sand or sometimes other inert material, such as ceramic beads) is carried into the newly formed fractures to keep them open after the pressure is released and allow fluids (generally hydrocarbons) that were trapped in the rock to flow through the fractures more efficiently.

Some of the water/chemical/proppant fracturing fluids remain in the subsurface. Some of this fluid mixture (called flowback water) returns to the surface, often along with oil, natural gas, and water that was already naturally present in the producing formation. The natural formation water is known as produced water and much of it is highly sailine. The hydrocarbons are separated from the returned fluid at the surface, and the flowback and produced water is collected in tanks or lined pits. Handling and disposal of returned fluids has historically been part of all oil and gas drilling operations, and is not exclusive to wells that have been hydraulically fractured. Similarly, proper well construction is an essential component of all well-completion operations, not only wells that involve hydraulic fracturing. Well completion and construction, along with fluid disposal, are inherent to oil and gas development.

Desolate machine shop

Terlingua Jail