This is all great stuff, and all necessary to create our ongoing shale boom, but the real marvel is the innovation that has take place in the realm of Horizontal Drilling. While impressive in its own right, the main innovations in "Fracking" in recent years have been beefing up the generating horsepower to accommodate horizontal wells rather than vertical ones, and refining of the fluids used to conserve water and create better, longer lasting fractures in the target formation. This is a shame, because the truth is that, of the two technologies, Horizontal Drilling is the real marvel of engineering and scientific innovation. Once that statement is made, the conversation with news reporters, at townhall meetings and in public speaking engagements then quickly focuses on the "Fracking" part of the equation, leaving Horizontal Drilling to sit largely ignored and unappreciated by the media and the public at large. But with one common word - especially one like fracking that just sounds bad - it's easier to rally opposition.We often hear spokespeople for the oil and natural gas industry talk about how the massive new shale gas and oil resources discovered in recent years were made possible by the wedding of two technologies: Hydraulic Fracturing ("Fracking" in media parlance) and Horizontal Drilling. Oil and gas drilling employs complicated technology that can be difficult to explain to the general public. Groups like Baizel's that regularly go up against huge oil companies have embraced this expanded definition of fracking. hydraulic fracturing or it means the truck that ran off the road and spilled whatever the waste was it was hauling away from the well site," Baizel says. Baizel says people now use it to refer to just about anything to do with producing oil and gas. "I never would have predicted that it would have become the catchall term."įracking has evolved to mean more than just hydraulic fracturing. "In our organization we talked about fracking maybe eight years ago," says Bruce Baizel, with Earthworks' Oil and Gas Accountability Project. This focus on fracking and not horizontal drilling has surprised even some of the petroleum industry's critics. Horizontal drilling hasn't been distilled that way." Tucker says fracking has been distilled down to a curse word, "and that's important for press releases and bumper stickers and everything else. "It sort of has this naughty connotation to it." "It starts with F, ends in C-K," he says. So why all the focus on fracking?Ĭhris Tucker of Energy in Depth, a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, suspects the reason fracking has taken off - especially among the industry's opponents - is the word itself. While you won't hear about horizontal drilling in a song or see it on a bumper sticker, it's just as responsible as fracking for changing rural landscapes. Ono held a globe labeled "Mother Earth" as her son sang about the dangers of fracking, but they never mention horizontal drilling. This past summer Yoko Ono and her son, Sean Lennon, sang their fracking protest song "Don't Frack My Mother" on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. It's showing up in your movie theater in the recent film Promised Land and the 2010 film Gasland. The environmental consequences spawned a new protest movement. Instead of extracting gas from only a 100-foot section, now a driller can extract it from a section that extends a mile or more.Ĭombining both technologies has turned once sleepy communities into industrial zones in states such as North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas. But with horizontal drilling, Engelder says, the drill bit makes a turn and extends the well out - horizontally - through that layer of petroleum-rich shale. That means a driller would be able to extract oil or gas from only that 100-foot section. "A vertical well going through a hundred-foot-thick gas shale, like the Marcellus, contacts that formation for a hundred feet," says Terry Engelder, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. Horizontal drilling and fracking have been combined in recent years to make previously unprofitable deposits profitable. and one word comes to mind for a lot of people: "fracking." Hydraulic fracturing is a controversial technique that uses water, sand and potentially hazardous chemicals to break up rock deep underground to release oil and natural gas.īut there's another technology that is just as responsible for drilling booms happening across the country: horizontal drilling. Mention the recent surge in oil and natural gas production in the U.S.
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