Subterranean Lines

A fracking well at the surface. Photo: Eugene Richards/National Geographic

A fracking well at the surface.
Photo: Eugene Richards/National Geographic

The bulk of the fracking boom currently underway in the United States is not only in one of the least populated and remote states, North Dakota (population 724,000 – and it’s only that large because of the fracking boom and all the new workers there), but it also takes place mostly underground. Sure, there are the ominous towers of gas flames and the torn up ground at the extraction points, but the real action takes place so far beneath the topsoil layer as to render it abstract.

The gap between what fracking looks like from above, and what it looks like from below, reminds me of Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s drawings in The Little Prince. What everyone initially takes to be a sketch of hat is actually a rendering of something completely different, namely, an elephant inside a snake.

From The Little Prince By: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

From The Little Prince
By: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We humans are creatures of visual dependence. Or rather, what we can see tends to make the most conscious impression upon us, ahead of the more subtle senses of sound, taste, smell and touch.

And often, what is out of sight is truly out of mind. If we can’t see it, we have a hard time even thinking about it.

Well locations around New Town, N.D. Source: Fractracker

Well locations around New Town, N.D.
Source: Fractracker

These various maps and renderings of fracking in North Dakota attempt to make the underground activity more tangible, to show us the elephant inside the hat.

Underground fracking lines, drawn from the well, with horizontal underground lines marking the extent of each well. New Town, North Dakota, from Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota. Source: Mason Inman/Wired

Underground fracking lines, drawn from the well, with horizontal underground lines marking the extent of each well. New Town, North Dakota, from Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota.
Source: Mason Inman/Wired

According to Mason Inman over at Map Labs, who created the map above, “Each well travels down about two miles, then turns horizontally and snakes through the rock formation for another two miles. There were 8,406 of these Bakken wells, as of North Dakota’s latest count. If you lined them all up—including their vertical and horizontal parts—they’d loop all the way around the Earth.”

The New York Times took the added step of inverting the wells as if they were above ground, the long vertical drills standing like slender trunks one or two miles high, with only one or two branches of equal length suspended in the air, a high forest of activity.

The area around New Town, North Dakota, from What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground Source: Gregor Aisch/NYT

The area around New Town, North Dakota, from What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground
Source: Gregor Aisch/NYT

 

The Whale in the Water

The Dutch painting here, by Hendrick van Anthonissen, has led a double life.

In its original form, it showed an object of fascination: a freshly stranded whale at during the mid-17th century. There was a widespread public interest in these large creatures around this time, which saw an expanding Dutch whaling industry and widespread use of whale blubber as an oil source.

View of Scheveningen Sands (1641) Artist: Hendrick van Anthonissen via The History Blog

View of Scheveningen Sands (1641)
Artist: Hendrick van Anthonissen via The History Blog

Sometime during the 19th century, the painting was transformed into a quiet beach scene, the dead animal/fuel source painted over, perhaps because the painting’s owner didn’t like the whale but liked the beach, or because whales had lost some of their allure as an exotic beast and source of energy, and had been reduced to just another material resource for everything from buggy whips to corset stays. And oil.

The whale-less version. Source: The History Blog

The whale-less version.
Source: The History Blog

Whale oil was once our favorite oil for lighting the dark nights. This was long before we used other kinds of oil to power our modern world.

Lately, there have been so many articles recently about hydraulic fracturing – fracking – for gas and shale oil.

One says the debate over fracking is over – because the fracking side won.

Another says the UK government wants to grant land access to fracking companies (i.e. oil and gas companies) to exploit land 300 m (985 ft) beneath the surface, and suggests a payment of £20,000 per well to those living on the surface. Here’s one that announces a 96% reduction in the estimate of oil and gas reserves that could be exploited in California, even as optimistic California oil companies and politicians ignore the study and continue to position themselves for a new oil rush.

And here’s an article that says even North Dakota, an epicenter of fracking enthusiasm, is considering some limitations when it comes to issuing drilling permits in historical sites, parks or areas of particular beauty.

Drilling rig on the Pinedale Anticline, Wyoming. Photo: Linda Baker

Drilling rig on the Pinedale Anticline, Wyoming..
If this were a painting, it would be easy enough to imagine wanting to view the landscape minus the rig.
Photo: Linda Baker

Lost in this entire discussion, for the moment, is whether the pursuit of and massive investment in oil and gas is a reasonable course of action when compared to the same kind of investment in renewable energy sources.

Sure, natural gas emits less CO2 – but a recent U.S. Department of Energy report indicates that the reduced carbon dioxide emissions for the so-called ‘cleaner’ fossil-fuel are outweighed by much higher emissions of other, more harmful greenhouse gases such as methane over the life cycle of liquefied natural gas.

Whoever varnished over the whale in the van Anthonissen painting decided it was no longer an appetizing sight, and preferred to have groups of passers-by gazing out at a calm sea untroubled by an unsightly cetacean, symbol of a major source of wealth, oil, employment and commerce.

I see the discussion over the use of fossil fuels disappearing in the same way as the whale in the water – simply varnished over in favor of a more pleasant view: That of easy energy, jobs, tax income and wealth from fossil fuels, without any unsightly environmental or human costs.

 

Leaping Forward

The diminutive planthopper (Issus coleoptratus) is the only creature we know of besides ourselves that uses intermeshed gears for heavy, synchronized lifting. The gears, which look like a comic book model of miniature technology, form the ratchet joint between the planthopper’s back legs.

Gear-like joint of the planthopper (Issus coleoptratus) Photo: Matthew Burrows/National Geographic

Gear-like joint of the planthopper (Issus coleoptratus)
Photo: Matthew Burrows/National Geographic

They create a smooth response where the insect’s developing system is still incapable of carrying through the complex coordination required when the hopper wants to make one of its signature great leaps from one point to another. The tiny planthopper can jump a meter (3 feet) in a single bound.

The gears are only present while the animal is immature, for while the planthopper’s body is learning to leap forward, it puts such a strain on the joint that the tiny gear teeth tend to break off completely. No worry, the insect is still growing, and with each new molt it emerges with shiny, intact gears, regenerated for further leaps.

Once adult, the hopper develops a system altogether more mature and reliable, without all the breakables.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a final report this week stating that if humans can’t manage to collectively confront the issue of climate change immediately and on a massive scale, we may find ourselves in need of an as-yet-to-be-invented sucking technology to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and put them – where? Underground where we got them? Into outer space?

Abandoned coal mine gear. Photo: Sascha Burkard/123rf

Abandoned coal mine gear.
Photo: Sascha Burkard/123rf

Meanwhile, technologies for better ways to frack natural gas, extract oil from shale, dig deeper to find hidden oil reserves are developing apace.

We’re still in a developmental phases of our progress, still breaking the gear teeth when we want to make great leaps from one point to another.

Maybe the next sloughing phase will see us shed this immature skin, refine and improve our gears and coordination, and take a longer leap forward to where we put our collective minds towards solutions that won’t leave us without a safe place to land.

Planthopper (Issus coleoptratus) Photo: Matthew Burrows/National Geographic

Planthopper (Issus coleoptratus)
Photo: Matthew Burrows/National Geographic

Views: Below, Surface, Above

Bakken Formation Image: Bakken Decision Support System (BDSS)

Bakken Formation
Image: Bakken Decision Support System (BDSS)

The image above shows a schematic of the Bakken Formation,, which lies along the U.S.-Canadian border, beneath the prairies of North Dakota and Montana. It is considered to be the largest reserve of oil in the lower 48 U.S. states.

North Dakota separates property ownership of land surface from ‘bottomland’, what lies beneath the surface. This has become a lucrative form of land ownership over the past few years as new fracking projects have turned vast tracts of prairie and farmland into a new oil heartland, sometimes over the vehement objections of farmers who bought land without realizing they didn’t really own more than a plow’s depth of dirt.

Farmland above the Bakken Formation. Source: LandandFarm

Farmland above the Bakken Formation.
Source: LandandFarm

And now that heartland has its first major oil spill, which already counts as one of the largest onshore spills in U.S. history. 20,600 barrels – equivalent to 865,200 gallons (3.2 million liters) – were belatedly discovered bubbling up from a faulty ageing pipeline on an area the size of 7 football fields within a remote wheat farm.

The pipeline company, Tesoro Logistics, has thus far succeeded in cleaning up around 5% of the spill. The company claims that neither surface nor groundwater was affected in any way, nor will there be any adverse effect on the environment. In any case, according to the farmer who owns the land, the fields will be unusable as farmland for the foreseeable future.

An image of the Bakken Shale area, the large glow on the upper left, by night. The lights are from the fracking and oil extraction sites. Image: NASA via jad.blog

An image of the Bakken Shale area, the large glow on the upper left, by night.
The lights there are from fracking and oil extraction activites, while the other bright clusters are cities.
Image: NASA via jad.blog

More:

Excellent National Geographic article on the development of North Dakota oil and its impact on the economy, people and land – The New Oil Landscape by Edwin Dobb

 

Sweet Poison

What’s nectar to some is poison to others.

Natural-gas wells on public land in the Jonah Field of western Wyoming. Fracking is routine for most gas wells drilled now in the U.S.  Photo: EcoFlight via SkyTruth

Natural-gas wells on public land in the Jonah Field of western Wyoming. Fracking is routine for most gas wells drilled now in the U.S.
Credit: EcoFlight via SkyTruth

Fracking, an extraction technique that involves injecting water mixed with chemicals into wells to break apart shale formations that cover pockets of oil or natural gas.

Gelling agents, acids, friction reducers, surfactants and many other chemicals are pumped into the ground to break up rock formations and release natural gas. Many of these chemicals are known carcinogens and volatile organic compounds. After returning to the surface, the “produced” water is placed in evaporation ponds and dispersed into the air. Fracking fluid is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act and drilling companies are not required to disclose all the chemicals they use. Credit: EcoFlight

Gelling agents, acids, friction reducers, surfactants and many other chemicals are pumped into the ground to break up rock formations and release natural gas. Many of these chemicals are known carcinogens and volatile organic compounds. After returning to the surface, the “produced” water is placed in evaporation ponds and dispersed into the air. Fracking fluid is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act and drilling companies are not required to disclose all the chemicals they use.
Credit: EcoFlight

Fracking: Praised as an economic and energy boon, condemned as a toxic threat.

Overspray of drilling slurry at hydro-fracking drill site. This by-product from mining operations includes rock debris, drill bit lubricants and possibly residual radioactive material. The overspray at the top is a violation and a danger to any bodies of water downhill. Dimock, Pennsylvania. Credit: Islandbreath

Overspray of drilling slurry at hydro-fracking drill site. This by-product from mining operations includes rock debris, drill bit lubricants and possibly residual radioactive material. The overspray at the top is a violation and a danger to any bodies of water downhill. Dimock, Pennsylvania.
Credit: via Islandbreath

All the images here hold a certain terrible beauty.

Even with this apparent nectar to energy worries and economic security, since when has nectar ever shown more staying power than poison?