By Heather Douglas
“Hydraulic fracturing has become an incredibly controversial method of extracting oil and natural gas in Canada and around the world. Since this technology burst onto the national consciousness, hundreds of polls have been taken globally, each one showing a sharp divide between supporters and naysayers.” Mattie Prodanovic, Behind Public Opinion: What Makes Hydraulic Fracturing Controversial (2014).
The fracking industry – the supporters — claim it has introduced a variety of “green technological advances” in the past few years that should allay the fears of the public. The naysayers – generally well-educated women holding egalitarian worldviews – are concerned about drinking water contamination, toxic chemical use, and the huge amounts of water needed to fracture a well.
Yet a number of international service companies have devoted considerable time, effort, and money to research how to make fracing greener. Among the most prominent are Baker Hughes, FTS International, Halliburton, Schlumberger and STEP Energy Services.
These industry heavyweights, most headquartered in Texas, all believe the investments they’ve made, and the resulting advancements they have introduced, should convince their opponents fracking is safe, cost effective, and environmentally friendly. These include: an emphasis on protecting the aquifers, a focus on eliminating the use of water altogether, and new processes to boost production.
Emphasis on Protecting Aquifers
Industry has focused its efforts on safeguarding aquifers by ensuring each well is adequately cased and maintains zonal isolation. This while using environmentally-friendly chemistry during the cementing, acidizing, and well completions processes, while monitoring the path of treatments, using micro-seismics, and replacing biocides with ultraviolet light.
Entrix, an environmental consulting firm, worked with Baker Hughes, to develop what it calls the SmartCare selection system to choose the right compounds to do the job, without the fear of contaminating uphole aquifers. Producers like these biologically safe substances as they cost about the same as the former caustic chemicals.
FTS International introduced Slickwater Green which, the company says, “is a product that eliminates the need for many liquid products currently used in this operation and operates best using recycled water.” Venus Green, another innovation it brought to market, is “an emulsified acid that uses an environmentally friendly formulation to stimulate carbonate reservoirs,” the company reports. Some of the ingredients in its products are also used in cosmetics and the food industry.
Halliburton focused its effort on providing adequate casing to protect the aquifers by commercializing its CleanSuite technologies including CleanStim, CleanStream, and CleanWave, as well as 3D subsurface fracture mapping and dry polymer blending. CleanStim uses ingredients from the food industry, and although not edible, it “offers an extra margin of safety if there’s an incident at the wellsite,” the company says. Every approved ingredient comes from the U.S. Food and Administrations’ CFR 21 list, which defines food “fit for human consumption.”
Focus on Eliminating Water Altogether
Industry has discovered the use of ultra-high quality foams also reduces the quantity it needs for injection. Some frackers have been able to decrease the number of water trucks and the amount of water used by up to 95 per cent. Operators are pleased because this eliminates the need for post-frac cleanup, saves on the cost of water disposal, frac tank rentals, sand haulers, and proportioning units. The engineers love the fact that little polymer residue eliminates formation damage.
STEP Energy Services focused its research on getting rid of water in fracing operations altogether. The company understood that Canadians view the use of water treated with chemicals as a “poison pill” so experimented with other liquids. The winner was liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) – propane and butane – gelled with proprietary chemicals.
Importance of Increasing Production
Baker Hughes has long been a fan of fracing, especially in shale formations, because it reduces the number of wells needed, more effectively drains the reservoirs, and its price tag is much cheaper than nuclear, solar, or wind. The company focused its attention on water treatment systems, especially thermal evaporation technology.
FTS invested a lot of money into nanoparticle dispersion which detaches the hydrocarbon from the rock, and has proven particularly effective in recompleting older wells as well as cleaning injection and disposal wells. Producers are partial to any process that scrubs formation damage, removes water blockages, and boosts production.
Schlumberger worked on the development of analytical reservoir simulation techniques to better understand and model fractured well performance. The development of RA tracers enabled companies to measure what was happening around the wellbore and how the fracking treatments behaved. Then microseismic mapping occurred and proved that fracture growth was far more complicated than first understood.
Schlumberger then evaluated complex fracture models and how proppant and fluid technology worked. Then the company introduced new components were introduced ranging from high-strength sintered bauxite and intermediate strength ceramics, resin-coated proppants and cross-linked fracing fluids (foamed, emulsified, alcohol, and oil-based) which worked in water-sensitive and under-pressured horizons.
Next came improvements in multi-stage completions technologies which work in both vertical and horizontal wells. These enhancements include drillable operations, flow-through bridge plugs, coiled-tubing perforating and fracturing, pump-down plugs, perforation operations, other uncemented isolation systems, the use of mass and magnetic flow metres to monitor additives, on-site viscometers, computer data acquisition and control, as well as data transmission using satellites.
In 2010, Schlumberger commercialized its OpenFrac fluids that do not contain anything listed on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list of priority pollutants and national drinking water contaminants. This enabled the company to evaluate non-chemicals such as bacteria control, proppant transport, and proppant flowback control. Then proppant-pack additives were introduced to stop flowback into the zone.
Schlumberger introduced its HiWAY fracing technique, a process for fracture construction that consistently delivered a step-change in fracture conductivity and used 45 per cent less proppant materials.
The frackers are also working on new water treatment systems using thermal evaporation technology, viscoelastic surfactants to recover viscosified fluids for recycling. Others are researching dry polymers, electro-coagulation technology to treat flowback or frac water, and vertical container storage systems to store proppants on-site, to name a few.
Naysayers Still Opposed
Yet opposition to fracking continues to rise. In Gallup’s 2016 international environment survey, 51 per cent of all respondents were opposed to fracing, up from 40 per cent the previous year. They are skeptical of industry’s “jargon-speak,” as they call it, and have yet to be convinced that industry is actually listening to their concerns.
Perhaps if industry told its story in terms of using the same ingredients in fracing operations as are used in women’s beauty and cosmetic products and ones the food industry stirs in its groceries, this would change minds. Or perhaps not.
