The water is the overwhelming majority constituent in the frac fluid used to hydraulically fracture the shale and let the gas out of pores which normally are not interconnected. The fractures induced are propped open by a proppant, usually washed and graded sand or ceramic grains. That preserves the cracks in the shale, and provides a pathway for the gas and/or oil to come out of the rock when the pressure required to induce the fractures is let off.
Water, inexpensive, non-compressible, and with a good ability to mix thickening agents to help carry the proppants has been the fluid of choice. There are even companies which reclaim produced frac water for re-use.
The attack angle that fracking contaminates aquifers persists in the pop press, but there are no examples of such contamination in tens of thousands of wells. Even studies which went in and tested water wells before any drilling or fracking in the area found there is some natural, preexisting contamination in aquifers which is related to the underlying geology or other surface sources. I personally know of at least one oil field in Nevada which was found because the springs in the area which were used to water livestock had trace amounts of oil in the water. Drilling in the area led to wells which produced up to 10,000 barrels of oil a day. (Blackburn Field, Eureka County, NV)
The complaints about the land have been greatly defused as well, especially with pad drilling, where horizontal wells can tap oil from under twelve square miles from a single grouped location on the surface (about 5-10 acres). The reduction in footprint from 6 to eight surface locations to one, from multiple lease roads to a single access, and a single access for production infrastructure preserves the natural lay of the land far better than older methods. Waste is hauled out to disposal facilities. As much as can be re-used or reclaimed as far as materials go, is, generally, and often at tremendous cost savings.
So what is left is the air.
With drilling outpacing the emplacement of the pipelines and construction of gas processing facilities, raw gas produced with oil is often flared off at the wellsite until the feeder pipeline can be built, while the oil is separated and stored in tanks on location until trucks haul it away. Flaring gas seems to be the angle of attack at present, considering others have failed. That gas would have to be processed before use, something which is best done with the economy of scale a gas processing plant has at present. It can't be simply vented (too hazardous), and it can't just be stored because the component gases liquefy at different temperatures and pressures, so flaring is the option of choice until someone devises a way to convert the gas into a useable and storable by-product on site, something that can be hauled out by truck until the pipeline is built.
Generators have been suggested, but then the temporary infrastructure to handle the electricity must be put in, and that would be subject to much the same sort of time delays as a feeder pipeline.
It isn't difficult, considering the stumbling blocks the administration has put in the way of development, to see why they think it takes 10 years (or more) to get oil from drilling the well to the refinery. Not so, really.
Consider I worked one of the first Bakken wells in the latest round of drilling only 13 years ago, over in Montana. Within five years, we'd doubled Montana's oil production, and in another eight years, North Dakota's production passed Oklahoma, Louisiana, California, and Alaska to become the second largest producer of oil in the US, only second to Texas, putting an additional half million barrels of oil daily (above previous production) into the system.
During that time period, Natural Gas production skyrocketed (especially elsewhere) using similar technology, dropping heating costs for millions of families. Only the War on Coal (cleaner than ever before) will cause those prices to rise, as power plants are shut down or converted to natural gas and supplies are diverted to generate electricity, all for the sake of making "renewable" electricity sources economically competitive to justify the billions this administration has diverted from the public coffers to solar and wind energy companies (likely corruption thinly masked).
Only the people in our Federal Government could take what should be a time of prosperity and the rebuilding of our economy and production (manufacturing) infrastructure and turn it into a jihad against American prosperity, and they are doing one heck of a job.
Informative. Thanks!
Don’t you think Obama will want to get in on this opportunity? As long as Big Government can control it, anyway. There’s too much opportunity there for him and I suspicion that he’s already on the prowl to make it happen. Thanks for the interesting backstory.