Remediating the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster

Among all the things being used to treat the oil spill in the Gulf, I have not seen much about “bioremediation”. That is the use of oil-eating microbes to convert it to something harmless.

This is a technology that I personally know could work. A few years ago, I worked for a local Waco firm in the environmental field. One of their standard responses was bioremediation.

On the internet is a video from 20 years ago, in which the State of Texas used oil-eating microbes to clean up a tanker oil spill in Galveston Bay. This is better than absorbents, because the oil is eliminated in-place, with nothing to pick up for disposal.

I researched bioremediation to see what was available, and how best to use it. There are many firms nationwide offering commercial oil-eating microbes, and these are natural, not genetically-engineered.

I am no expert, but, from that research, I did get a sense for what works and what does not. First and foremost, these microbes work best on surfaces: oil floating on water, or oil still on the surface of soils.

That means bioremediation is ineffective if (1) the oil has soaked down into the soil, or (2) has been dispersed down into the water. That first means you cannot delay treatment for oil coming ashore on a beach or wetland, and the second means that you cannot use “dispersants”, which cause the oil to break up and migrate downward into the water.

Dispersed oil is not remediated or removed, simply relocated to where it is not visible, and to where bioremediation, booms, skimmers, and absorbents are all ineffective. In other words, dispersants act to make the damage to the environment worse, in part by hiding it!

Now, the EPA told BP to use a different dispersant, not to stop using dispersants at all. In effect, the EPA advocates using what it considers to be a “proper” dispersant, which actually makes the problem worse, but in an “acceptable” way!

My research says that the physical state of the microbes, and the additives included with them in the commercial products, do make a significant difference to effectiveness. But those issues are well-understood, so they should not hold back the application of oil-eating microbes to the open-water Gulf, or to any shoreline areas contaminated by oil.

I think I like bioremediation best, because the oil really is “destroyed” in-situ by being converted to microbe waste products, in turn non-toxic to the rest of the ecosystem. It is also self-limiting: once the oil is gone, the microbes die for lack of food.

No mess to pick up afterward, it seems to happens over days-to-months-not-years, and it’s cheap. You can spray it from an airplane or a boat. It makes good common sense.

So, I have two very serious unanswered questions:

(1)Why were we not doing this the first week of this crisis?

(2) How come the EPA did not demand this?

Plenty of Blame to Go Around for the Disaster in the Gulf

The oil rig explosion has led to the greatest environmental disaster this nation has ever suffered. Crude oil now stretches almost halfway across the Gulf of Mexico. Over one month into this, we still have two or three months to go before a relief well can be drilled. The fishing industries, and all the beach-related tourism industries, will very likely be destroyed. How long? People are still finding tar balls on Texas beaches from the Ixtoc-1 blowout off Yucatan in 1979. The current disaster is far larger: the livelihoods of millions could be destroyed for a generation or more. This is not the first American oil well drilled beyond where human divers can go. This is just the first one to “go bad”. Offshore drilling at any depth requires a permit from the Minerals Management Service (MMS). One requirement is a report explaining what the company proposes to do about any conceivable accident, and why the government should believe that they can do it. From what I have read and seen, BP’s 582-page report was not worth the paper: I think everyone now knows they are actually “making this up as they go”. Clearly, they did not take very seriously their disaster-management responsibility. MMS was specifically charged with verifying the adequacy of these disaster plans. Clearly, they failed. But, beyond that failure, why should we believe in the adequacy of any of the disaster plans submitted by any oil company? I am not happy with federal emergency responses, either. This is not the fault of the President and his administration (current or previous), but it is the fault of the massively slow career bureaucracy. Case in point: delaying construction of off-shore sand berms, because they might have some undefined future ill effect. We already know that the oil coming ashore unhindered will most definitely have a disastrous effect. Absolutely brain dead stupid! An order from the President could have broken this bureaucratic logjam, because they work for him. Neither this President, nor the previous one, issued the critical command when the time was right. So, here is my specific list of suggestions to keep this from happening again: 1. Remove both the liability limits and the statute of limitations. Faced with the true costs, they will pay more attention to safety, prevention, and preparedness. 2. Use two blowout preventers on each well, as the Europeans do in the North Sea. The compounded probability of containing the accident is much higher. 3. For wells beyond the reach of human divers, require that the main well and a relief well be drilled at the same time. If the worst happens, the relief well could be completed in days, not months. 4. Spend federal money now developing sand berms, better absorbents, and better boom technology, so that emergency response in the future is much more effective and a lot faster. 5. Issue executive orders immediately to get these bureaucratic agencies moving very much more quickly, perhaps even anticipating these disasters. No more Katrinas.

It really was the North Koreans who sank the South Korean ship

The latest reports indicate that a torpedo fired from a North Korean submarine sank a South Korean ship with a loss 46 sailors. Whatever else one might say, that was an unprovoked attack, which has (so far) led to no reprisal against the perpetrators. This was the largest cost in lives for a single incident, since the original 1950-1953 Korean War. That war was never resolved by a treaty, only halted by an armistice. While diplomats always dither, I suggest that this incident demands real action, because of its egregious nature, and the magnitude of the death toll. The problem is provocative action by units of the North Korean navy, committed upon the high seas. So, the solution is that no units of the North Korean navy should be allowed upon the high seas, until their government changes its idiotic ways. I rather doubt that the UN security council would ever do anything substantive. They have almost never acted responsibly, not since that original Korean war. So, it is the South Koreans and their allies that must act, on their own. My suggestion: allow no North Korean naval vessel passage on the high seas, until the North Korean government acknowledges the sinking it perpetrated, and promises massive policy change. Period. No room to maneuver, no room to "save face". The penalty is sink-on-sight. Then, the South Koreans and their allies must actually carry out this threat. The North Koreans will inevitably challenge such a declaration, and they must suffer for it. Sinking surface ships is fairly easy; sinking submarines is more challenging. So, I think a US navy battle group or two must be committed to this, and they must be free to sink whatever they see. No questions asked. Once they get their noses rubbed in it, I think the North Koreans may steer a different, less objectionable, diplomatic course. This will be true in spite of the megalomaniac idiot they have for a dictator, because he depends upon the North Korean military to stay in power. While extremist, those generals are not fools. We will have to hurt them to achieve this result, though. We must be prepared to do exactly what I propose: sink the bastards. No half measures. No mercy.

On Really Bad Drivers

I see some really idiotic behavior on the roads around here all the time. I never see anyone pulled over and ticketed for it, either. Some of the worst offenders seem to be rather rich and priviledged, too. Others are obviously "new grads" from the local driving school, which makes me wonder what that school actually teaches.

These behaviors include ignoring yield signs (including the implied yield on a freeway entrance ramp), cutting people off, following too close, high-speed weaving, pulling out without looking first, passing in no-passing zones, failing to dim headlights, and running red lights and stop signs. These are all basically "being in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing" offenses.

In addition, I see slow traffic not keeping right, vehicles wandering all over the road out of their lanes, and drivers way too distracted by cell phones to even be on the road at all. That last one is already illegal under the old "failure to keep a proper lookout" law; so we don't need a new law about cell phones. We just need to enforce the one we already have.

Trouble is, the only real enforcement I see going on is speed and parking tickets (and precious few of those). I don't know if that is because it's just so easy to sit and wait for the radar alarm go off, or if it's because the lawyers and judges have so screwed up the court process that only speed and parking tickets "stick" anymore. (If it is the lawyers, then maybe Shakespeare was right.)

In Texas, under most conditions on the highway, it is "being in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing" that causes the accidents, not speeding itself. Speed merely sets the level of damage as the accident occurs. It's only in residential areas, city streets, parking lots, and rainy, foggy, or icy weather that speed itself is a prime cause of the accidents.

So, if we were serious about reducing highway traffic accidents, we would be demanding that our police ticket the egregious behaviors (that I listed above) as higher priorities over speeding. I simply don't see that going on. As for residential areas and parking lots, that is where speed causes a lot of the accidents, and that is where speeding tickets need the higher priority.

What kind of body count does it take to get these priorities straight? Isn't 40,000 a year enough?

Space Recommendations

Those who know me, know that I have been a fan of space exploration since boyhood. Long ago, I even worked professionally in the satellite launch business.

Remaining connected to that dream, I have come to believe that such exploration is important to us now, for the same reason that it was important to the empires of old. The most effective explorers and colonizers were also those with the greatest wealth, power, and longevity.

Those most effective explorers and colonizers understood the proper roles of government and enterprise in that joint effort. Unfortunately, our space program has never used that model, although the Augustine Commission has recommended something similar.

Back then, government provided exploration and new technology developments, because business would not invest in them. Business would utilize those results to create colonies, organize trading networks, and develop other profitable activities, something government (almost by definition) does not know how to do.

Space exploration, particularly manned exploration, requires certain things to be successful. For the transition to commercial exploitation, these things must be not just feasible, but economically practical. We have not been able to achieve that in 53 years of flying chemical rockets into space, so clearly, something new must be tried.

One of the most important things is reliable access to Earth orbit, and it has to be inexpensive to be commercially practical. We are losing the ability to launch big payloads with the retirement of the space shuttle, although some commercial rockets appear almost ready to take up that role.

We have never, ever had an inexpensive launch method, and we have had no way to reach the moon (much less beyond) since the last of the big Saturn-5 boosters flew long ago. It takes a government program to create a booster that big, because there is no commercial need for it until long after it already exists.

A technology I would suggest is the integral rocket-ramjet (a 1970’s missile technology), as a strap-on booster capable of separate fly-back and landing. The higher performance of the ramjet can be traded both for more throw weight, and for the extra structural “beef” necessary for effective re-usability.

To go anywhere beyond the moon is a voyage measured in months or years, not days. That raises the issue of providing effective crew survivability: protection from medical damage from zero-gravity exposures beyond about 400 days, protection from lethal solar and cosmic radiation, sufficient habitat volume, long-term life support, and much more powerful deep space propulsion (if for no other reason than just to cut down flight times).

Devotees of science fiction already know that spinning can substitute for gravity. The unanswered technical questions are how fast a spin can new tolerate, how much gravity is enough, and how much head-to-toe variation in “gravity” can we tolerate?

Sounds like a worthy government project to me. After 49 years of manned spaceflight, I have to ask why we have not already answered these questions. Doing these experiments is certainly long overdue.

Protection from radiation requires heavy shielding, and perhaps shorter flight times to reduce exposure risks. Both point to a need for vastly more powerful deep-space propulsion capabilities.

A much larger habitat space, and a self-sustaining long-term life support capability, are things we can do right now, but they are bigger and heavier than anything we have ever flown before. This also points toward a need for very powerful deep space propulsion.

Powerful propulsion is not just higher efficiency, it is also a very high acceleration capability. Ion and plasma devices typically have the efficiency, but not the thrust. The rockets we have built up to now have the thrust, but not the efficiency.

Something new and different is obviously required, and I would suggest a couple of nuclear approaches. One is the nuclear thermal rocket for shorter interplanetary voyages with smaller payloads, and the other is nuclear explosion propulsion for the really long-range and heavy-payload stuff.

We actually pursued nuclear rockets under NASA/AEC Project “Rover” from about 1959-1972, but gave it up when President Nixon killed the Apollo moon program (and by extension the Mars mission planned for the 1980’s). USAF actually pursued the explosion drive under Project “Orion” 1959-1965, but it died for lack of funding when all space program activities were transferred to NASA in 1965.

Both would have worked then, and still could today. The safest place to “play” with stuff like this is the airless, waterless, uninhabited moon so very near; almost as if God put it there for that very purpose. Sounds like a good government project to me, and it is long overdue.

Doing significant things in space will require at least two additional capabilities. These are the ability to refuel in space from one vehicle to another, and the capability to do fine assembly and repair work in vacuum and zero-gee, something prevented by the clumsy Michelin-man space suits available to us now.

Refueling looks to me like relatively straightforward component and procedure development work. Doing fine work while space-suited is going to require a major, fundamental change.

Perhaps the initial form of the breakthrough already exists in the form of the mechanical counter-pressure suit. This is an update of the old USAF “partial pressure” suits of the 1950’s with better design criteria and far better materials. It has existed since the late 1960’s, but has been “forgotten to death”.

I found this technology on an internet site, complete with a video and four supporting documents. Two of those documents date from live-subject tests in the late 1960’s, including one in a hard vacuum. See for yourself at www.elasticspacesuit.com

The test subject was wearing an oxygen helmet and breathing bag, plus 3-4 layers of what amounted to nothing but porous pantyhose material. He cooled very effectively by sweating directly into vacuum. Exposure time appeared to be measured in hours, if not essentially unlimited.

This subject had great agility and freedom of movement, and his entire rig weighed only 85 pounds. His easily-removable gloves were less cumbersome than the cowhide work gloves I use in my shop. Data I found elsewhere indicated a man could doff these gloves and work barehanded in space for up to 10 minutes before re-donning them!

This is the sort of mobility and dexterity breakthrough we have needed in manned spaceflight for decades. And it existed decades ago, but was never used. Sounds like another good government project to me, and one long overdue.

Update 10-11-13:  See also 1-21-11 "Fundamental Design Criteria for Alternative Spacesuit Approaches".

If significant progress were made on all the fronts I listed above, the effects could be as astounding as the original moon shot effort. This would include enabling the initial commercialization of some space travel.

How to "Fix" Bad Government

My friend John Vickrey, up in Norman, Oklahoma, recently sent an email decrying the firing of teachers in the Kansas City schools as scapegoats for bad government having ruined those schools long ago. John and I used to teach together at Bosqueville High, near Waco, Texas (a school nationally recognized for excellence for the third time). He is a sincere and dedicated teacher. This kind of thing really disturbs him. It should disturb us all.

The text below is my recommendation for how to fix bad-government problems. This actually has application to any issue you want, not just public education. For most of the ills in American public life, the root cause is greedy, self-serving politicians not doing the jobs we elected them to do.

The cure for it is easier and more certain than any new laws or grassroots-proposed Constitutional amendments. Why would the guilty lawmakers change the law of the land in a way that might send themselves to jail? Read on .....

Text of my reply to John:

As you and I both know, it does not require a lot of money to provide a good education. You just have to ignore all the fads and most of the bureaucrats, and just do what worked for the last couple of centuries. I'm speaking of Bosqueville, of course.

All the government-driven top-down interference is the fault of elected officials who value politics above public duty, at all levels from the local school board to DC. The way to fix it requires that we get rid of the perpetrators of this evil, and that in turn requires two changes on the part of voters, and fairly simple ones at that.

(1) Vote for no incumbent unless you can personally verify that he did more good than harm while in office. Few do. But it usually takes more than a term to put down deep roots into the corruption system. If you don't know, vote "no". Period. This isn't party, this means all of them. Throw the bastards out.

(2) Communicate with your representation in writing, and often. Tell them what you expect them to do, and what you will do if they don't: which is to vote them out. And then follow through and do it (item (1) again). Throw the bastards out.

Do these two simple things, and you will (eventually) have decent government again. Fail, and you will continue to fester in response to the idiocy perpetrated upon us by the cesspits that are our Congress, our Legislatures, our city councils, etc. Throw the bastards out.

It is either that, or armed revolution in the streets. I prefer to fix it at the ballot box; far less mess to clean up. Throw the bastards out.

Again, this is independent of party, or any specific issue. Do not class me as a "tea party" type. I do not agree with most of them on a lot of issues. I have been advocating this "fix" since long before there ever was a "tea party" movement at all. Throw the bastards out.

Now, is there clarity about what I advocate that everyone do? (Throw the bastards out.)

Drill here, drill now, pay less?

I receive a lot of e-mail forwards about a giant untapped American “oil formation”, usually under the name “Bakken", but there are several others. Every one of these forwards is really a political message: "why don't the Democrats and environmentalists get out of the way and let us drill this?" Some of these forwards claim that the message is true per snopes.com. The only thing here that is true (and verified by snopes or anyone else) is that this formation really does exist. The rest is a pack of lies.

What’s left out in each and every one of these forwards is the easily-verifiable fact that this great domestic “resource” is all but unrecoverable. Some of these forwards claim a new “breakthrough” (never actually described) makes recovering this resource cheap and easy, but that’s just a lie. These forwards were created by Republican political hacks to stir up political unrest, and it is just pure political BS, no two ways about it.

Here’s the actual truth, in 6 points, about “unrecovered domestic oil”:

(1) The Bakken formation has been long known. It is one of several named rock formations contained with a geologic region called the Williston Basin. This region stretches through parts of Wyoming, both Dakotas, Montana, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Its theoretically-immense resource volume has been long known. The oil folks have been trying unsuccessfully since 1953 to recover useful product from the US portion of it. No significant return has ever been obtained. Not ever! There have been no technological breakthroughs that would enable its economic recovery, and that’s not for lack of trying. This is not and never will be drillable oil, period.

(2) One of the oldest names is the most descriptive: "oil shales". The volume of this “oil resource” is miniscule compared to the volume of the rock in the formation, because shale rock porosity is inherently a tiny percentage. The volume of “oil resource” is actually quite large, simply because this formation is so geographically immense. Shale is a porous rock of virtually zero permeability, precisely because the pores are not interconnected. That is just the nature of shale. Further, the "oil" in these pores is closer to a tar than an actual liquid oil. So, because this tar is virtually solid, down-hole fracturing (supposedly the “technological breakthrough”) does not work! That situation is quite unlike the down-hole fracturing-based recovery of the inherently very mobile gas of the Barnett Shale here in Texas. But, even so, we actually recover only a tiny fraction of that entire gas resource, from only those pores right along the fracturing cracks.

(3) The only known way, after over half a century of concerted effort, to recover significant quantities of "oil" from oil shales is deep strip mining, on a scale that makes mountaintop-removal mining for coal look like potting house plants. Think about digging a hole the size of Lake Superior. And then you have to truck immense volumes of rock out of that hole to be crushed and cooked, in order to recover the very tiny percentage of that volume that is the tar. This is all very capital-, labor-, and energy-intensive. Once you do recover the tar, you have to thermally-crack it (another capital-, labor-, and energy-intensive process) before it will even feed into a conventional distillation tower. Think $4/gallon gasoline was bad? It will be $40-400-4000/gallon gasoline from this stuff, if not even higher.

(4) The northwest end of this zone in Alberta is tar sands, not tar shale. While still not drillable, that is a different “beast”. It's already in production, and its products are a big portion of those we import here in the US. These tar sands must be strip mined, but are much nearer the surface. The tar is washed from the sand by a steam process. But there is a downside: no one knows how to clean up the immense volumes of wastewater from this process, and it is dangerous enough they keep it locked away in ponds behind armed guards. Since the clean-up method is unknown, its cost is not included in the price of the products; therefore these products are artificially under-priced. One of these days, that bill will come due. To date, the fast-growing volume of that untreatable wastewater exceeds the volume of Lake Erie.

(5) The claimed "breakthrough" is down-hole fracturing, a old concept whose actual commercial employment is more recent. It works with inherently-mobile gas. The used fracturing liquid has to be pumped down a suitable disposal well, for it is not safe to release on the surface. (That down-hole disposal of fracturing fluids is the source of all the little earthquakes along the Barnett Shale zone, by the way.) Fracturing doesn't work very well with thick, viscous, but still-liquid oil. It does not work at all with tar, period. The only economic application of down-hole fracturing is gas formations like the Barnett Shale. You have to combine this with steam injection to recover liquid oil, which not very economic, and creates a lot more wastewater to dispose. It does not work at all, steam or no, with tar shales. There simply is no technological “breakthrough” that would make “the Bakken” (or any other of these rock units) “drillable”. It is not likely there ever will be one. This resource is not recoverable at any price we might afford.

(6) It is an observed fact that without exception all finds of drillable oil made in recent decades have been of decreasing size and decreasing frequency. This includes the reserves off California, the reserves in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the new find in the deepwater Gulf, and the new find in the Atlantic off Brazil. Further, there has been little, if any, indication of oil off our Atlantic coast (some exploration actually has already been done there).

You might as well face the truth: we will not be able to "drill our way" out of this. “Drill, baby, drill” and “drill here, drill now, pay less” make convenient and catchy political slogans, but they have no truth at all, as is common in politics.

Cellulosic ethanol (which is ethanol-not-from-food) has already hit the streets at $2.00/gallon. Brazilian sugar cane ethanol is near $1.00/gallon, if you junk the import tariff. The trick now is to build industry capacity. Not very far behind is diesel and jet fuel from algae, and even a synthetic biomass gasoline. I think these renewables (that we can never run out of!!!) hold a lot more promise than some fool's errand trying to dig thinly-spread tar out of immense volumes of deep, hard rock.

Many of the countries who own much of the world’s remaining oil are the sponsors of the very groups we Americans are fighting. Oil and terrorism are their only exports. These terrorism operations cost a lot of oil revenues to run. Why not actually win this war by denying the enemy our oil dollars? Use something else!

Update 1-3-15:

The recent explosion of US “fracking” technology (hydraulic fracturing plus horizontal-turn drilling) has modified the picture of oil prices versus recessions.  Unexpectedly,  the US has become a leading producer of crude oils for the world market.  Plus,  there has been an associated massive production increase and price drop in natural gas.

OPEC has chosen to take the income “hit” and not cut back their production in response.  Their reasoning is twofold:  (1) fear of loss of market share,  and (2) hope that low oil prices will curtail US “fracking” recoveries.  We will see how that plays-out.

Oil prices are now such (at around $55/barrel) that US regular gasoline prices are nearing $2.00/gal for the first time in a very long time.  This is very close to the price one would expect for a truly competitive commodity,  based on 1958 gasoline prices in the US,  and the inflation factor since then. 

It is no coincidence that the exceedingly-weak US “Great Recession” recovery has suddenly picked up steam.  The timing of the acceleration in our economic recovery versus the precipitous drop in oil prices is quite damning.  There can be no doubt that higher-than-competitive-commodity oil prices damage economies.  Oil prices are a superposition of the competitive commodity price,  overlain by an erratic increase from speculation,  and further overlain quite often by punitive price levels when OPEC is politically unhappy with the west.  That’s been the history. 

This economic improvement we are experiencing will persist as long as oil,  gas,  and fuel prices remain low.  (Government policies have almost nothing to do with this,  from either party.)  How long that improvement continues depends in part upon US “fracking” and in part upon OPEC.  Continued US “fracking” in the short term may depend upon adequate prices.  In the long term,  we need some solutions to some rather intractable problems to continue our big-time “fracking” activities. 

The long-term problems with “fracking” have to do with (1) contamination of groundwater with combustible natural gas,  (2) induced earthquake activity,  (3) lack of suitable freshwater supply to support the demand for “fracking”,  and (4) safety problems with the transport of the volatile crude that “fracking” inherently produces. 

Groundwater Contamination

Groundwater contamination is geology-dependent.  In Texas,  the rock layers lie relatively flat,  and are relatively undistorted and unfractured.  This is because the rocks are largely old sea bottom that was never subjected to mountain-building.  We Texans haven’t seen any significant contamination of ground water by methane freed from shale.  The exceptions trace to improperly-built wells whose casings leak.

This isn’t true in the shales being tapped in the Appalachians,  or in the shales being tapped in the eastern Rockies.  There the freed gas has multiple paths to reach the surface besides the well,  no matter how well-built it might have been.  Those paths are the vast multitudes of fractures in the highly-contorted rocks that subject to mountain-building in eons past.  That mountain-building may have ceased long ago,  but those cracks last forever. 

This is why there are persistent reports of kitchen water taps bursting into flames or exploding,  from those very same regions of the country.   It’s very unwise to “frack” for gas in that kind of geology.

Induced Earthquake Activity

This does not seem to trace to the original “fracking” activity.  Instead it traces rather reliably to massive injections of “fracking” wastewater down disposal wells.  Wherever the injection quantities are large in a given well,  the frequent earthquakes cluster in that same region.  Most are pretty weak,  under Richter magnitude 3,  some have approached magnitude 4. 

There is nothing in our experience to suggest that magnitude 4 is the maximum we will see.  No one can rule out large quakes.   The risk is with us as long as there are massive amounts of “fracking” wastewater to dispose of,  in these wells.  As long as we never re-use “frack” water,  we will have this massive disposal problem,  and it will induce earthquakes. 

Lack of Freshwater Supply to Support “Fracking”

It takes immense amounts of fresh water to “frack” a single well.  None of this is ever re-used,  nor it is technologically-possible to decontaminate water used in that way.  The additives vary from company to company,  but all use either sand or glass beads,  and usually a little diesel fuel.  Used “frack” water comes back at near 10 times the salinity of sea water,  and is contaminated by heavy metals,  and by radioactive minerals,  in addition to the additives.  Only the sand or glass beads get left behind:  they hold the newly-fractured cracks in the rocks open,  so that natural gas and volatile crudes can percolate out. 

The problem is lack of enough freshwater supplies.  In most areas of interest,  there is not enough fresh water available to support both people and “fracking”,  especially with the drought in recent years.  This assessment completely excludes the demand increases due to population growth.  That’s even worse.

This problem will persist as long as fresh water is used for “fracking”,  and will be much,  much worse as long as “frack” water is not reused.  The solution is to start with sea water,  not fresh water,  and then to re-use it.  This will require some R&D to develop a new additive package that works in salty water to carry sand or glass beads,  even in brines 10 times more salty than sea water. 

Nobody wants to pay for that R&D. 

Transport Safety with Volatile “Frack” Crudes

What “fracking” frees best from shales is natural gas,  which is inherently very mobile.  Some shales (by no means all of them) contain condensed-phase hydrocarbons volatile enough to percolate out after hydraulic fracturing,  albeit more slowly than natural gas.  Typically,  these resemble a light,  runny winter diesel fuel,  or even a kerosene,  in physical properties.  More commonly,  shale contains very immobile condensed hydrocarbons resembling tar.  These cannot be recovered by “fracking” at all. 

The shales in south Texas,  and some of the shales and adjacent dolomites in the Wyoming region actually do yield light,  volatile crudes.  The problem is what to transport them in.  There are not enough pipelines to do that job.  Pipelines are safer than rail transport,  all the spills and fires notwithstanding. 

The problem is that we are transporting these relatively-volatile materials in rail tank cars intended for normal (heavy) crude oils,  specifically DOT 111 tank cars.  Normal crudes are relatively-nonvolatile and rather hard to ignite in accidents.  DOT 111 cars puncture or leak frequently in derail accidents,  but this isn’t that serious a problem as long as the contents are non-volatile.  These shale-“frack” light crude materials resemble nothing so much as No. 1 winter diesel,  which is illegal to ship in DOT 111 cars,  precisely since it is too volatile. 

The problem is that no one wants to pay for expanding the fleet of tougher-rated tank cars.  So,  many outfits routinely mis-classify “frack” light crudes as non-volatile crudes,  in order to “legally” use the abundant but inadequate DOT-111 cars.  We’ve already seen the result of this kind of bottom line-only thinking,  in a series of rather serious rail fire-and-explosion disasters,  the most deadly (so far) in Lac Megantic,  Quebec. 

Volatile shale-“fracked” crudes simply should not be shipped in vulnerable DOT 111 cars,  period.  It is demonstrably too dangerous. 

Conclusions

“Fracking” shales for natural gas and light crudes has had a very beneficial effect on the US economy and its export-import picture.  We should continue this activity as a reliable bridge to things in the near future that are even better. 

But,  we must address the four problem areas I just outlined.  And I also just told you what the solutions are.  The problem is,  as always,  who pays.   What is the value of a human life?  What is the value of a livable environment?  It’s not an either-or decision,  it’s striking the appropriate balance!