17
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. J. Soeder, Fracking and the Environment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59121-2_2
Chapter 2
What Is Fracking?
Since this book may reach a rather wide audience, and with apologies to those readers with a technical background, it is important for everyone to understand that oil
and gas are recovered from porous rocks underground. Despite the way it is often
shown on cross-sectional diagrams, oil does not occur in underground caves or
lakes. Some man-made caverns in salt domes are used for storage of the U.S. Strategic
Petroleum Reserve, but oil and gas production itself comes out of porous rock.
Nearly everyone has seen water soak into the sand when waves wash up on a
beach. The water has gone into the empty pore spaces that are present between the
sand mineral grains (think of the spaces between billiard balls racked in a triangle).
Hydrocarbon resources occur in similar spaces in porous sedimentary rocks like
sandstone or limestone. Sometimes these pore spaces are very small, making it difficult for the fluids in them to move. Such rocks are said to be “tight,” and fracking
was invented to overcome this.
The term “fracking” originated as drillers’ slang for the process of hydraulic
fracturing, invented in 1947 by a fellow named Floyd Farris working at Stanolind
Oil and Gas in the Hugoton gas field in Grant County, Kansas (Montgomery and
Smith 2010). Hydraulic fracturing was designed to create long cracks in the rock
underground to allow oil and gas to flow more easily into a well. Farris was using
crude oil and naphtha gel as the frack fluid for his experiments. He discovered that
if he filled up a well with this liquid and then gradually increased the pressure on it,
the strength of the rock would be exceeded, and a crack would form.
Earlier methods to crack open rocks had used explosives, but these tended to just
shatter the rock near the wellbore and not penetrate very far into the formation. The
explosives method had been patented at the end of the Civil War by Colonel Edward
Roberts, who noted that artillery shells exploding in water transmitted shock waves
more efficiently than those hitting land, and would often break rocks. He used a
gunpowder “torpedo” (later dynamite) lowered into an oil well on a wireline with a
sliding weight to set off the charge (Eschner 2017). Although the treatment reportedly increased production from some wells by as much as 1200%, Roberts charged
$200 per torpedo (a princely sum in the late nineteenth century) plus 15% of the
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. J. Soeder, Fracking and the Environment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59121-2_2
Chapter 2
What Is Fracking?
Since this book may reach a rather wide audience, and with apologies to those readers with a technical background, it is important for everyone to understand that oil
and gas are recovered from porous rocks underground. Despite the way it is often
shown on cross-sectional diagrams, oil does not occur in underground caves or
lakes. Some man-made caverns in salt domes are used for storage of the U.S. Strategic
Petroleum Reserve, but oil and gas production itself comes out of porous rock.
Nearly everyone has seen water soak into the sand when waves wash up on a
beach. The water has gone into the empty pore spaces that are present between the
sand mineral grains (think of the spaces between billiard balls racked in a triangle).
Hydrocarbon resources occur in similar spaces in porous sedimentary rocks like
sandstone or limestone. Sometimes these pore spaces are very small, making it difficult for the fluids in them to move. Such rocks are said to be “tight,” and fracking
was invented to overcome this.
The term “fracking” originated as drillers’ slang for the process of hydraulic
fracturing, invented in 1947 by a fellow named Floyd Farris working at Stanolind
Oil and Gas in the Hugoton gas field in Grant County, Kansas (Montgomery and
Smith 2010). Hydraulic fracturing was designed to create long cracks in the rock
underground to allow oil and gas to flow more easily into a well. Farris was using
crude oil and naphtha gel as the frack fluid for his experiments. He discovered that
if he filled up a well with this liquid and then gradually increased the pressure on it,
the strength of the rock would be exceeded, and a crack would form.
Earlier methods to crack open rocks had used explosives, but these tended to just
shatter the rock near the wellbore and not penetrate very far into the formation. The
explosives method had been patented at the end of the Civil War by Colonel Edward
Roberts, who noted that artillery shells exploding in water transmitted shock waves
more efficiently than those hitting land, and would often break rocks. He used a
gunpowder “torpedo” (later dynamite) lowered into an oil well on a wireline with a
sliding weight to set off the charge (Eschner 2017). Although the treatment reportedly increased production from some wells by as much as 1200%, Roberts charged
$200 per torpedo (a princely sum in the late nineteenth century) plus 15% of the