What kind of drill is used in fracking?
27903354#2
The Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County (MAWC), the local water utility, leased the watershed in 1999 for gas drilling, and about 100 shallow gas wells have been drilled since then.
And in 2008, deeper drilling and fracking for gas in the Marcellus shale began near the reservoir.
As of 2013, 41 deep wells have been drilled on 6 pads. The drillers are Consol Energy's CNX Gas.
Some of the chemicals used by Consol for fracking have been listed online by the MAWC.
There is no information on the location, date, or total quantities of chemicals used, but Material Safety Data Sheets discuss the hazards and properties of these chemicals and others:
Beaver Run Reservoir
40243181#14
Since E&B Natural Resources will be using directional drilling for this project, traditional offshore drilling platforms will not be necessary for recovery. The process of Hydraulic Fracturing, or “fracking”, will also not be used, as the oil field provides naturally occurring characteristics that make the fracking unnecessary.
Berkeley Research Group Director William Hamm completed a study that estimated that the City of Hermosa would receive $519 million of total economic benefit from the project, a figure that was quickly criticized by opponents of the project as speculative and unreliable since it is based on a study paid for by E&B.
Hermosa Beach oil drilling controversy
2742905#40
In October 2014, Houston-based oil field services company Baker Hughes was reported to have produced 1,000 pink drill bits to raise breast cancer awareness. The land drill bits are used to break up geologic formations in oil patches for hydraulic fracturing. These ties have been criticized, because of the more than 700 chemicals used in fracking more than one third are endocrine disruptors and at least one quarter increase the risk of cancer.
Susan G. Komen for the Cure
23617#30
The oil and gas drilling industry uses massive semi trailer-transported triplex pumps called mud pumps to pump drilling mud, which cools the drill bit and carries the cuttings back to the surface.
Drillers use triplex or even quintuplex pumps to inject water and solvents deep into shale in the extraction process called "fracking".
Pump
8798949#154
The opposition against fracking activities in local townships has led companies to adopt a variety of public relations measures to assuage fears about fracking, including the admitted use of "military tactics to counter drilling opponents". At a conference where public relations measures were discussed, a senior executive at Anadarko Petroleum was recorded on tape saying, ""Download the US Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual, because we are dealing with an insurgency"", while referring to fracking opponents. Matt Pitzarella, spokesman for the most important fracking company in Pennsylvania, Range Resources, also told other conference attendees that Range employed psychological warfare operations veterans. According to Pitzarella, the experience learnt in the Middle East has been valuable to Range Resources in Pennsylvania, when dealing with emotionally charged township meetings and advising townships on zoning and local ordinances dealing with fracking. Furthermore, in a February 2012 campaign speech, Rick Santorum, a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination, referred to those objecting to hydraulic fracturing as environmental terrorists.
Hydraulic fracturing in the United States
6974748#14
Delegate Mizeur has been a high-profile supporter of stronger regulations on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In 2010, she authored a Baltimore Sun op-ed, "Water on fire," calling attention to the drilling practice. In 2011, she introduced the Marcellus Shale Safe Drilling Act to require strict safety studies on fracking in Maryland. Mizeur's bill passed the House but failed in the Senate. However, Mizeur's bill led to creation of the Marcellus Shale Safe Drilling Initiative under a gubernatorial Executive Order. Mizeur serves on the Initiative's Commission, which is charged with studying the environmental, economic, and health impacts of fracking.
Heather Mizeur
32544339#0
Hydraulic fracturing (also fracking, fraccing, frac'ing, hydrofracturing or hydrofracking) is a well stimulation technique in which rock is fractured by a pressurized liquid. The process involves the high-pressure injection of 'fracking fluid' (primarily water, containing sand or other proppants suspended with the aid of thickening agents) into a wellbore to create cracks in the deep-rock formations through which natural gas, petroleum, and brine will flow more freely. When the hydraulic pressure is removed from the well, small grains of hydraulic fracturing proppants (either sand or aluminium oxide) hold the fractures open.
Hydraulic fracturing
8798949#71
Despite researcher's knowledge about the adverse health effects these pollutants can have on humans and the environment, it's challenging to fully understand the direct health impacts that are a result from fracking and assess the potential long term health and environmental effects. This is because the oil and gas industry is legally protected from disclosing what is in the chemical compounds they use for fracking. “Policies are also lacking in requiring full health impact assessments to be required before companies are given the go-ahead to drill”
Hydraulic fracturing in the United States
35039706#39
A type of the fracking technique called slickwater fracking was used in Texas in 1998 to complete natural gas wells in the Barnett Shale. This type of completion was made possible by a number of advances in directional drilling and microseismic 3-dimensional imaging supported by the Department of Energy and other federal agencies, Drilling into shale now accounts for 30 percent of US gas production.
Hydraulic fracturing by country
5121584#7
In 2016, a Truthout investigation revealed commonplace fracking in the Gulf of Mexico, where offshore oil and gas drillers used fracking technology to maximize oil and gas production in aging undersea wells. A story broken by journalist Mike Ludwig revealed that the Obama administration had rubber-stamped 1,500 permit modifications to allow fracking in the Gulf of Mexico and had routinely excluded the practice from in-depth environmental reviews—even during the initial days of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. That investigation shined a critical light on industry's practice of mixing toxic fracking chemicals with drilling wastewater and dumping it directly into shallow waters of the Gulf. This practice was the subject of further legal challenges from environmental groups.
Truthout
35040068#74
Each individual fracking well requires a vast amount of truck traffic. Studies estimated that on average, to fracture (build and drill) a single well, between 1,760 and 1,904 truck trips are needed to transport equipment, chemicals, water and other materials; removing fracking wastes and transporting the natural gas require additional truck trips. The infrastructure deterioration caused by this heavy truck traffic has a huge economic impact/burden on local states. In July 2012, according to the Texas Department of Transportation, local fracking activities had cost an estimate of 2 billion dollars in damage to roads that connect drilling sites to storage sites. In Pennsylvania, a study conducted in 2014 based on data on the distribution of fracking well activity and the roadway type in the state estimated that the road reconstruction costs caused by additional heavy truck traffic from Marcellus Shale natural gas development in 2011 were about $13,000–$23,000 per well for all state roadway types.
Environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing in the United States