The hydraulic fracturing debate made its way to Lubbock last week, with City Council District 1 representative Victor Hernandez raising concerns about leasing mineral rights to companies to ultimately use the land for the resource-extraction process.
Hydraulic fracturing — commonly known as fracing or fracking — is the process of creating and expanding a fracture thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface to extract natural gas, oil and other substances.
The process uses water, generally mixed with a variety of proppants — used to keep the fracture open — and other chemicals to fracture the rock and extract resources.
“I’m really hesitant about using water for anything other than to sustain life, and fracking operations doesn’t meet that criteria in my book,” said Hernandez, the only council member who voted against the contract the March 6 meeting.
Four Sevens Exploration Company LTD, leased the mineral rights from the city for 6,261.94 acres in the area for $2.19 million.
Wastewater got $1.03 million, solid waste got $433,139 and the airport got $729,915.
Mayor Tom Martin said the land leased is referred to as the sewer farm east of town.
Additionally, the city is entitled to 25 percent of all royalties from any endeavors Four Sevens embarks on, according to city documents.
Hernandez said his primary two concerns rested with reports of seismic activity linked to fracking and also the enormous use of water for the operations.
Water use, pollution and earthquakes are the three issues most people tend to have with fracking, said Mohamed Soliman, chairperson of Texas Tech’s department of engineering.
Recent reports of pollution in drinking water and earthquakes around fracking sites have occurred nationwide, although there is no conclusive link to hydraulic fracturing.
The Environmental Protection Agency is working on a study to determine the impact of fracking on drinking water, and it should release preliminary findings later this year and a full study by 2014, according to its website.
But hydraulic fracturing, as well as an exploration into its potential side effects, is not new.
“We have been doing hydraulic fracturing in the United States for a very long time. When I started working in the industry in ’70s, it was normal,” Soliman said.
The city’s lease with Four Sevens specifically forbids the company from using “ground water, fresh, brackish or otherwise, or surface water, from the Leased Premises.”
A Four Sevens contract from November proposed buying treated wastewater from the city for the fracking.
Nothing has been finalized, said city Chief Operating Officer Marsha Reed, but the use of the city’s wastewater would have no effect on the city’s drinking water.
Only one other energy company, Xcel Energy, currently buys treated water, Reed said, and it is for cooling one of its power plants.
The proposed contract, which Reed said was purely preliminary, would require 10 million gallons of water per month for two wells.
Soliman said this kind of volume is normal for fracking operations.
“All kind of work is being done to minimize the amount of water, but (Tech) as well as many companies are looking at the issue,” he said.
Davis Ford, adjunct professor at the University of Texas in environmental engineering, has given lectures about hydraulic fracturing across the nation. He said drinking water has been the most commonly used source of water for fracking operations.
Soliman said treated wastewater can be used, but companies must account for any potential bacteria coming from it and add the necessary chemicals.
Ford, a Lubbock native and rancher, said he has no problem with fracking going on in West Texas.
He said the potential revenue oil and natural gas bring in, in comparison with its water consumption, dwarfs that of irrigation.
“But you can’t eat oil and gas, you can eat maize and wheat and corn, but we have this dilemma there that the water provides a lot of revenue for fracking and not as much in irrigation,” Ford said.
Links from fracking to contaminated water is also unfounded, Ford and Soliman reported.
The fracking process generally occurs between 6,000 and 12,000 feet below the Earth’s surface, Ford said, well beyond groundwater.
Both Soliman and Ford said contamination generally occurs, in isolated incidents, because of shoddy case construction at the top of the well.
“Potential environmental concerns on fracking up in the Panhandle, per se, would be spills from trucks bringing in the fracking material, just spills, surface spills or what we call the surface casing which goes about 100 feet below the drinking water aquifer and the cementing, so that’s all the shallow stuff,” Ford said. “That’s where the potential is for any contamination for drinking or even irrigation groundwater.”
Scott Tinker, state geologist of Texas and director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas, echoed both Ford and Soliman.
“There have been a few cases documented in parts of the country, and even in Texas, that show bad surface casing jobs that (showed gas) could leak through that surface casing. It’s not part of the hydraulic fracturing, but it’s a local phenomenon,” Tinker said.
Injecting the millions of gallons of liquid has probably caused some tremors around fracking sites, Tinker said, but proving actual causation is difficult.
“There’s certainly a correlation of things, and so interpretation was (earthquakes were) likely associated with (fracking), and in fact that makes sense,” Tinker said. “That’s happened before. You get next to some of these larger faults and inject them with a lot of fluid and you can cause movement. Earthquakes are caused by movement in the earth.”
Soliman said earthquakes related to fracking are normally inevitable, and the fracking procedure is just the tipping point, causing the movement early.
Tinker said earthquakes up to a 4.5 magnitude have been reported around areas of hydraulic fracturing. That kind of magnitude can generally be felt on the surface, but is not going to cause structural damage.
“Most of them go unnoticed. So we hear earthquakes and we kind of have visions in our mind of San Francisco and buildings falling down,” Tinker said, noting that this is not the case.
“I think what needs to be done is the injection area needs to be studied carefully and studied a little more thoroughly around these major injection wells and then avoid big faults.”
The future of
fracking in the U.S.
Fracturing in the United States, Ford said, is one of the best ways to get off dependence of foreign energy.
“I’m very pro-fracking; it’s changing the world,” he said. “The United States is right in the lead…. I think it’s so critical for our national defense and our GDP because we import about 50 percent of our oil and gas, primarily from the Middle East,” Ford said. “So I think it’s in the country’s interest, in an environmentally safe way, to really expand on this.”
Soliman said fracturing is an extremely expensive process, the result of many hours of research.
Companies do not just poke holes in the ground; they want to get economic results, he said.
“If you are going to seek any kind of independence form foreign sources of oil, … you’ve got to produce that shale (from fracking natural gas). It’s going to be produced sooner or later, frankly.”
Tinker said natural gas is an extremely versatile fuel for industrial, residential and commercial heating and cooling, and for electricity.
“If we don’t develop our natural gas resources for electricity, for example, we will then use coal and nuclear (energy),” he said. “Those are the only three large industrial base load fuels. So you have to be pretty thoughtful when you think about, again nothing’s perfect. … They all have very positive upsides — available, affordable, reliable – and they all have downside. So I think what people aren’t always aware of is kind of the total picture.”
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