Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
“What was true yesterday is no longer true today,” notes Andrew Place, of EQT
Corp, a gas exploration firm based in Pittsburgh. “Systems are evolving.… Public
concerns have pushed the engineers to come up with solutions.”
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Where some see risk, others see opportunity. By now hydrofracking has become
a large, well-funded business that is not likely to disappear soon. Given this reality,
a growing cadre of entrepreneurs and idealistic academics have been drawn to the
industry with the intention of “doing well by doing good” in the shale oil and gas
fields.
Graduate students, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and energy companies
large and small are betting that more efficient hydrofracking technologies—such
as new ceramic proppants designed with the help of nanotechnology by a Rice
University consortium—and better wastewater management, which has caught the
attention of global firms like Schlumberger and small firms like Ecologix, of
Alpharetta, Georgia, will be a profitable, expanding business for the foreseeable
future. “Hopefully, we'll mend the dispute between environmentalists and oil com-
panies by answering the wish list of both,” Ecologix CEO Eli Gruber explained to
the
Wall Street Journal
.
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fracking is contained within its name: the use of millions of gallons of water—at
least 70 billion to 140 billion gallons of H
2
O annually, according to the EPA—to
ing and population growth. As a Schlumberger representative told a conference
recently, if one million new wells are fracked worldwide by 2035, then reducing
drillers' use of fresh water “is no longer just an environmental issue—it has to be
an issue of strategic importance.”
Some innovative companies have seen the writing on the wall, and asked: what
else can we hydrofrack with?
In hundreds of small gas projects across Canada, and in a few test wells in the
United States, drillers have replaced the water in their fluids with liquefied pro-
plies, which is increasingly important in drought-prone places like Texas, Califor-
nia, and Alberta; it limits the chance of polluting surface water and groundwater
with spilled chemicals; and it removes the chance of setting off earthquakes by in-
jecting wastewater into fault zones.
