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2013frackingjudges 2013frackingjudges

Jul 1, 2013
02:37

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The novelty of the proposal is a major strength. An additional strong point is that something useful will be learned from the success or the failure of the pilot project. Either way, it has the potential to expand our knowledge base in a valuable way. It would be useful to hear more about the technical feasibility of sequestering CO2 in shale wells to determine whether it is worth investing the time and money to study the issue in depth and undertake pilot projects. Additionally, one might have questions about the reasons that companies would have for agreeing to use their wells for CO2 sequestration.

2013frackingjudges 2013frackingjudges

Jul 29, 2013
02:33

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In many discussions of carbon capture and storage, there isn’t very much focus on the storage part, and it’s good that this proposal attempts to address it. A question that isn’t answered by the proposal is how much storage space is available in fracking wells compared to how much carbon we might want to store? There are other questions: might the storage capacity be full of water? Might injecting CO2 create problem of additional flowback or produced water? Also, wells can be fracked more than once, so perhaps companies wouldn’t want to use them as sequestration sites…it’s hard to assess how a company would view the choice, and the proposal revisions didn’t address this issue.

John Dowse

Jul 30, 2013
01:43

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All oil and gas operations produce producer water. An average well will produce ~2 billion cubic feet of natural gas, It will use 130,000 barrels of fracking fluids, which is 90% water, 9% sand and 1% chemicals. In the producing phase, an average well will remove 21,000 barrels of producer water which is regulated by the EPA. Typically producer water contains radioactivity at ~19,000 pCi/l which is less than the 20,000 pCi/l EPA limit for drinking water and the 30,000 pCi/l limit for non-drinking water. Producer water is usually set out in evaporation ponds. When the value of the gas extracted is less than the cost of pumping out producer water the well is closed (or refracked if it is believed that more gas is to be had but eventually the well will be entirely exhausted leaving a large water filled void). Supercritical CO2 has the density of 2/3 of water or .12 tons of CO2 per barrel of water so 100,000 barrels? of additional produced water would be replaced by 12000 tons of CO2. 2 billion cubic feet of fracked natural gas will produce 108000 tons of CO2(or basically 20,000 cu ft per ton). Therefore you would have to withdraw fracked water by 9 times to close the CO2 loop per well. The cost of this removal can't be more than a fraction of the cost of the initial well. The horizontal drilling part is supposedly a small part of the whole operation so I will guess that adding 9 times the horizontal drilling length and additional production water removal would double the production costs. Right now fracked gas is currently profitable at $4.5/1000 cubic feet commercially so a carbon tax could pay for the additional horizontal well space($9/1000 price). The maximum price for natural gas seems to be about $14/1000 cubic feet(based on Europe 2009 and California 2002).