Tiny: beating up on you in the hydraulic fracturing thread...
Ha. Funny, I must admit I didn't walk away from that exchange thinking you'd beat up on me. Far from it, really. I don't think hydraulic fracturing stands up to any sort of logic except the economic ones. Misplaced priorities in my estimation. But the real focus of that conversation had less to do with fracturing than with green energy, right? My next post will detail subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuels. Say, how did the private sector come up with the engineering science behind hydraulic fracturing?
Originally Posted by agrarian
Be real Agrarian, I knocked you up one side and down the other. Yes, fossil fuels do get ridiculous subsidies, but not so much in the USA and Western Europe as in developing countries. They don't make sense, even if you're a skeptic about global warming. In places like Indonesia and Venezuela where you see subsidies for gasoline and diesel, they represent a subsidy for wealthier citizens, who can afford to buy cars and trucks.
As to the science of hydraulic fracturing, until recently it wasn't worth jack shit. It was based on theoretical models from principals of rock mechanics. The models assumed you had fractures propagating out perpendicularly from the wellbore in the direction of least stress. So at each point along a horizontal wellbore where the operator injected fluid and sand, the thought was that you'd have something like two sheets, small gaps in the rock that you'd prop open with sand, extending in two directions, 180 degrees apart. (This is simplified btw, hard to explain just with text.) More recently they've obtained core data after fracking, where they actually retrieve the fractured rock from the subsurface. It shows it's much messier. The process actually creates rubble around the wellbore.
Anyway, a lot of practices were based on trial and error, using the faulty theoretical model. The companies try different fluids, different concentrations of sand, different quantities of fluids and sand, different pumping pressures, etc., and see how the wells perform.