Fraccing

In this post below the nature and implications of fraccing came up in the comments and there were some technical issues which I'm certainly no expert on tossed around. I contacted a friend of mine who works in the industry, a PhD lab type directly involved with the process and asked him for information. He had mentioned the topic to me before, so most of what I remembered was correct. Here it is:

Anyway:

...geologically significant amount of poison they inject...

Most of a frac fluid is water.  The second most important ingredient is guar gum or a cellulose derivative that you could eat with a spoon.  In fact, you do eat guar gum with a spoon in many kinds of ice cream.  Some of the other ingredients are pretty nasty, but "geologically significant"?  I don't know how he defines that, but we're talking pounds here, not tons, and the stuff is dissolved in hundreds or thousands of times its weight in water.  Putting Drano in your sink or bleach in your laundry probably produces a more toxic solution.

...don't actually ever recover...

The amount of frac fluid recovered varies, but a large fraction is recovered.  Keep in mind that the fluid that is not recovered is in a hydrocarbon producing formation and is probably less toxic than the crude oil it mixes with.

...fraccing is a single shot process...

Not necessarily.  In some cases, wells are worked over many times during their producing lifetime and may be fracced numerous times.

...Fraccing gets a quick spike in production, but...wears out within weeks or months...

This is where an understanding of integral calculus would be helpful.  A well has a dramatic increase in its production rate after a frac job, and will continue to produce more than an unstimulated well for a period that depends on conditions but may well be years.  The thing to look at is the area under the decline curve.  Total production from a fracced well  is many times greater than that from an unfracced well.

...a get rich quick scheme that only pays off in the short term...

Oil companies are willing to pay literally millions of dollars to frac their wells.  Obviously, they think it pays off in the long term.

...fraccing destroys their source of water...

Oil companies are required to cement steel casing in oil wells to isolate and protect ground water.  Honest, it works.  The other thing to keep in mind is that the aquifers are generally a few hundred feet down.  Oil and gas wells are thousands of feet deep.  In central Wyoming we're generally working at a depth of about two miles.  The stuff just doesn't migrate that far, especially since to have a hydrocarbon trap you need an impermeable cap rock.  It's kind of like the guy three blocks away complaining that his roses died because you sprayed your dandelions.

...rash of earthquakes that started shaking central Oklahoma...

I am not aware that earthquakes flattened any towns in central Oklahoma.  Commercial fraccing has been going on in Oklahoma since the late 1940s, so if there is a real problem it should be well documented.  I would be interested in seeing dates, places, and intensities for these supposed seismic events.  I suspect that most of them were detected by very sensitive monitoring instrumentation and were not as intense as the vibration created by a heavy truck on the freeway.  In fact, they may have been caused by heavy trucks on the freeway.  Also, we may be falling victim to the cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy.  Just because things are correlated doesn't mean they are cause and effect.

The facts are out there.  The American Petroleum Institute has information on their website, www.api.org.  Halliburton has information on its website, www.halliburton.com.  There are other sources.  It will, of course, be argued that these organizations are biased and aren't giving out the facts, but maybe people should at least make the effort to find out what information is out there.

I would also suggest that there is a balance that needs to be considered.  It is perhaps a bit hypocritical to insist on banning hydraulic fracturing while living in a house heated with natural gas or heating oil and lit with electricity generated in a power plant that burns natural gas, and driving a car powered by gasoline.  The risks from hydraulic fracturing are minimal, the benefits are immense.
A couple more points about the earthquakes...

On doing a little research (a process I would recommend to all), it seems that the increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma is real and is correlated with disposal wells and the injection of large amounts of water over long periods of time.  There has been some damage but it's the disposal wells, not the frac jobs that seem to be causing the increase.

Generally, areas with active faults don't make good hydrocarbon traps and would not be likely to be drilled or fracced.

The earthquake bit corresponds to the rash of small to modest quakes, magnitude 2-4, we had here in Denver in the early to mid 60's. It was discovered that a disposal well on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was lubing a shallow fault. The quakes ended when we stopped doing it.

One more thing: Note the correct spelling of fraccing by the folks that do it for a living.