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“New York Gov. David A. Paterson on Saturday vetoed legislation intended to curtail natural gas development using the technique called hydraulic fracturing until a closer review of its effects can be undertaken.
Instead, the governor issued an executive order instituting a moratorium that extends until July 1, 2011 — beyond the date specified in the legislation — and that more narrowly defines the types of drilling to be restricted.”
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“We’ve gone pretty far with our series of posts about learning particle physics through Feynman diagrams. In our last post we summarized the Feynman rules for all of the known particles of the Standard Model. Now it’s time to fess up a little about the shortcomings of the Feynman diagram approach to calculations; in doing so, we’ll learn a little more about what Feynman diagrams actually represent as well as the kinds of physics that we must work with at a machine like the LHC.”
2 thoughts on “Links for 2010-12-12”
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I worked for Halliburton for a while on a frac crew in the midwest.
There is almost zero oversight on the well locations, and the stuff being pumped into the ground is often very toxic. I can remember one compound in particular that would eat through the brass fittings on our chemical hoses.
It isn’t horribly uncommon for there to be a bad casing that gets hundreds of barrels of water and chemicals pumped through it before someone realizes it is a bad well. Until they go down hold and find the bad casing, there isn’t any way of knowing where everything ended up. Even then, there isn’t much that can be done about it, and I’m not even sure if it has to be reported to any government oversight agency.
Per the article, while I was there I can’t recall ever using proppant (sand) on a vertical well. In fact, the only vertical wells I can ever recall being on were over limestone formations. You don’t even use sand on those. You just pump acid into the ground and eat a massive hole in the limestone. When we were done, the wells were almost always on a vacuum.
Good times.