Hi all. Just a short note today to mention a theme I’ve recently been seeing… it involves the applicability of the word “fracking” to mean all shale gas development activities. I think we can be more specific. Today, I’m offering a suggestion on how to more carefully use “fracking” (or “fracing” for industry purists).
Before they frack, they must site the wellpad, excavate, drill verticals, drill horizontals, cement the casings, then perforate, then frack.
First off, from a non-neutral third-party dog’s eye view, I notice that “fracking” is used as a handy catch-all phrase by media and Joe Human quite often. The generalization of “fracking” has often been used to include site preparation, directional (horizontal) drilling, cementing the casings, perforating the casings and the shale, slickwater hydraulic fracturing, and the related production activities.
That’s really the only point I have today. Sometimes, it’s handy to do this– and even the industry does it when it suits them to do so. I think it’s important to be as specific as we can, when we can. People need to realize that the problems with shale gas development have been evidenced from start to finish, and that they encompass much more than just the process of hydraulic fracturing itself.
ada.mae.compton 
How true, the problem is really all oil and gas drilling. Just like the proponents state that fracking has been used for 50 years, when in reality the slickwater horizontal drilled hydrofracturing is only a couple of years old!
Tomorrow do go on and describe the production activity’s average 3% leakage rate, and the lovely cuttings ladened with heavy metals and other radioactive NORM brought up and exposed to our environment/mud fest complete with open water pits to vent BTEX and those KFC (Kill First, Comment-later) secret recipes flowing back. Then maybe for another blog you can describe the in-production phase description of all the onsite equipment and storage tanks, glycol dehydrators, onsite compressors, (needing infra-red cameras to expose those leakages) and all the maintanence involved such as… weekly? dumping into the wells of corrision and scaling inhibitors etc…nitro lifts, work0ver, re-frack (re-frac), clean out, pressure tests, daily water evacuation- injection disposals that involes so much truck fracking traffic that has diesel laden spewing 30,000 lb? trucks tearing up our highways to dispose of all that toxic, unusable water waste (or evaporate it like they do in Ft Worth without scrubbers) and hope the casings on those injection well sites hold til eternity. Then explain to your readers how all this goes on while mother nature freaks the storms that threaten all this infrastucture need to support “fracking” like….gathering lines, bumper stations, pipelines, compressor stations, processing stations. Did I miss anything?
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I prefer “hydraulic slick-water fracking” The “slick-water” part is used in more technical writing, is in fact how they now do it b/c they used to use chemicals before they discovered water laced with chemicals works better, and is a better descriptor.
Indeed, it is important to get that slickwater in there!
I laughed the first time I saw ducks sitting in a water pit… then as fast as the mind works… I frowned and shook my head in disgust.
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