Fracking Financial Bonanza of Recent Origin

While hydraulic fracking has been in use since 1949, it was not until 2008, when engineers developed technology that improved the ability to steer drill bits and to perform surface data acquisition to locate gas in shale, rather than drill right through it, that fracking became the financial bonanza it is now.

Fracking advocates claim that two million frack treatments have been pumped without a single case of polluting a water aquifer.

The depth of shale gas deposits drilled is 6,000-10,000 feet, they explain, while water aquifers exist at an average of 500 feet.

Claims of ‘migration’ between shale gas and water aquifers due to fracking, they say, are impossible since gas would have to pass through millions of tons of impermeable rock.

The shale, undisturbed since the Paleozoic Era, when there were but three continents and seed bearing plants had yet to emerge on earth, sits 5,000 to 10,000 feet below ground in what are now parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere.

Four hundred million years ago, mountains rose out of the sea, and the basin deepened. Erosion of clay and rock fell into watery troughs and was carried into the sea. Sea plants, mainly plankton, combined with mountain sediment falling to the sea bottom, covered over reservoirs of petroleum. As the sea deepened, devoid of oxygen, the sediment of sea plants and mountain clay hardened into impermeable shale trapping the petroleum under it. When the sea subsided, and during deeper burial, as layers of the earth piled above it generated heat, some 240 million years ago, the liquid petroleum was cracked into gas.

This gas, since the Triassic Period, has waited for frackers to tap it all for a potential estimated 100-year consumption of man.