Advantages Of Oil And Gas Investor Brookshire Salt Dome

By Jerri Perry

These are great days to invest money in black gold. We are not even at the apex of a shale oil and gas boom and already the United States has surpassed Russia as the No One supplier of oil in the world. There are good reasons and many ways to become an oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome or one of thousands of potential drilling sites.

New technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have made it possible to access vast stores of fossil fuels that were previously unavailable. Coaxing the black sticky stuff and the lighter gas fractions of liquid petroleum requires a different approach from drilling a conventional oil well. First, fluids are injected thousands of feet into the Earth's crust via perforations in horizontal pipelines.

A mixture of sand, water and a handful of chemicals are then injected into the well to keep the fractures open, allowing the trapped gas and oil to flow through the pipe to the surface. A single frac project can require as much as tens of millions of gallons of frac water. Multiply that by an anticipated tens of thousands of fracking projects and the volume of water is nothing short of astounding.

Simply managing the high volumes of frac water from the source to the drill site, through processing tanks and into the rock, and handling back flow and produced water has meant that new technologies have been forced to evolve rapidly. Produced water is that which is originally in the rock formation before any frac water has been injected. It comes up with the frac backflow when the fracturing phase of the job is complete.

Produced water can amount to as much as eight times the volume of water that is injected into the rock to induce fracturing. Some of this used water is placed into specially constructed rapid evaporation tanks to minimize the volume that has to be piped or trucked from the site to its final destination to be recycled or disposed of. Some of it is treated and recycled to be reused again in another fracking project.

What cannot be disposed of in one of these means is injected into disposal wells. It is this "produced" water injected into the disposal wells, and not the fracturing process, that has people understandably concerned about the generation of earthquakes. Scientists at the US Geological Survey in Pasadena have been studying what are colloquially known as "frackquakes" in Oklahoma.

The Survey has confirmed that there is a close temporal relationship between the injection of water into disposal wells and the occurrence of these frackquakes. The public is also understandably worried about another, separate, problem with hydraulic fracturing. This is the potential for contamination of public water supplies with mud, sand and toxic fracking chemicals.

Oil and gas investor Brookshire Salt Dome and other productive shale formations have been of huge benefit to the country. The continental United States are sitting on enough fuel to comfortably supply our needs for the next 90 years. Side benefits will be the development of new frac water management and recycling technologies which will be beneficial in their own right.

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