Lets get fracking!

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Today my colleague Marianne and I, as
part of the Karroo Shale Gas Community Forum will discuss fracking as we aim to clearup some of the current misconceptions associated with the topic.

The process involves: the drilling of a vertical well which eventually becomes horizontal.
Water, sand and chemicals are then injected and this pressure causes the shale to
break thus forming the fractures. These are kept open by the sand so that the gas can
flow up the well to the surface. The water mixture is then collected and sent off for
treatment or it can be reinjected to dispose of it.
One of the major concerns about implementing fracking is that it could ruin the beautiful
wide open spaces of your Karoo. This is a typical fracking site set-up. Wells are usually
built in clusters on a site so as minimize the processs physical footprint and a single
well can access between 5 and 15 horizontal wells underground. One could further
argue that that is all well and good but what about all the roads the process will need?
Many have already been built for the first stage of the Karoo Square Kilometer array
project. So the infrastructure is already there, great. This is how the square kilometer
array is predicted to look, a much greater surface impact than several fracturing sites.
Hardly as scary as the media and green movement has lead you to believe!

The Karoo is very dry and fracking needs water so naturally you must be concerned
about your water supply but how much water does fracking actually need? Maarten J.
de Wit of the NMMU reports that a horizontal well would need a maximum of 20 million
liters of water to fracture which does sound like a lot. So lets put this number in
perspective. The Vaal dam contains 25 trillion liters of water so 6000 wells could be
fractured with only half a percent of the Vaal dams water. According to an irrigation firm
a golf course goes through 20 million liters of water in about ten days. In South Africa
there are 430 golf courses and these consume enough water a year to fracture 15 000
wells. Fracking technology has also improved such that now water with two times the
salt content of seawater can be used. Companies like Shell have stated that they would
use seawater, bring in water by truck use the deep brack-water sources in the Karoo
and the re-use of fracking water so you do not have to worry about these companies
using your drinking water.
Water contamination has been used by the media and green agencies to try to scare
people about fracking. They have said that the chemicals will leak into your drinking
water but this is very unlikely for two reasons 1.The wells are lined with several casings,
see figure 6, so leaks are very unlikely but as a precaution these wells would be

continually checked to ensure they are no leaks. 2. The chance of the fluid and gas
moving up through the fractures to the drinking water is impossible as the fractures
grow up to about 150 m so there is about a 1200 m distance between the top of the
fractures and the drinking water. The most likely way that fracking could contaminate
your water supply is through surface spills. This, however, applies to many industries.
Like the dairy industry for example. A milk truck spill into a river will destroy it, take all
the oxygen out and kill the fish and other organisms so do we accept that accidents
happen and put safety measures in place to try to prevent them or do we ban the dairy
farming industry ?

References
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