Hydraulic Fracturing

Term Paper

The Legal Environment

Hydraulic Fracturing

Professor Ariyana Randolph

I. Introduction

Hydraulic Fracturing also known as fracking is extraction natural gas from wells deep in the earth. This is done when drilling into reservoir rock formations. Chemical laced water and sand are blasted into the rock layers which causes the rock to fracture and break and release natural gas’s. The laced water used to blast in the rocks is also known as fracking fluid. The fracking fluid that is used to fracture the rocks is slurry of water with chemical additives. Other things can be injected as well like carbon dioxide, compressed gases, gel, air, foams and even nitrogen. Proppant is also used in fracturing it is a solid material made up of treated sand and man-made ceramic materials. Proppant is used to keep an inducedfracture open during or after treatment. Proppant is added to fracking fluid which varies in composition because of the type of fracturing used. And it can be in gel or foam or even slickwater based. The injected water is about 98-99.5% water. For each fracking they can use up to 300 tons chemicals and 8 million gallons of water. Each reservoir rock can be fracked up to 18 times if they want.

II. Body

a. History

Hydraulic fracturing is not new to worldwide at all. Hydraulic fracturing was started back in 1946 in Hugoton field of Kansas or near Duncan Oklahoma in 1949, and it was commercially in Halliburton in 1949. Because there was so many things that required gas and oil this was quickly adopted and used worldwide. Since Hydraulic fracking was developed it has been used over 1 million times. The technology is improving and developing every year, there is an estimate of 35000 wells that are being fractured each year. If we didn’t have hydraulic fracturing the production would be hard to do, 80% of production would be impossible. Hydraulic fracturing has increasingly developed more advanced technology that has been used over the...