Let's just say "Microbial injectate".
From Not Hot Air:
Eric Vaughan, Well Services Director of Cuadrilla always has an interesting story or four to tell based on many years experience of drilling and fracking around the world. I wish he had shared this one with us sooner.
Eric gave a presentation at Shale World in Manchester this week to educate the audience about some key points. Firstly, drilling is not fracking. Few people understand not only that drilling only takes a few weeks, but that fracking takes only a few hours. He then went on to say that fracking has been going on in the UK for years, with at least 200 wells already drilled and fracked on shore, and many more in the North Sea, which hasn't disappeared down any earthquake induced sink hole in the meantime.
So despite the media induced hysteria about how the "controversial" fracking in Balcombe would never be acceptable to the heartland of Tory Britain, a narrative that informs investors in City of London skyscrapers in their decisions over where to park your hard earned pensions, we can now show you a well, called the Lidsey oil field, still producing oil 22 years later (so much for declining uneconomic wells) 30 miles to the southwest near Chichester. With the fun of Google Maps and Street View, even the Google Car made it to the gate:
50°49'20.71"N 0°39'37.14"W
First lesson: So much for the Europe is too crowded for shale theory.
This is what the Google Car found. Not particularly pretty, but no worse so than buildings used all over by other exploiters of the earth, people more commonly known as farmers. There's one next door.
The site is Lidsey Oil Field today which with a sister site produces 85 barrels a day of production, which at $250K a month is none too shabby for someplace that doesn't look as if too much effort is involved.
Where the effort was, involved Eric back in 1991, when they fracked a well that had been drilled in 1987. Yes, reader they fracked it. This was 22 years ago and who has heard since of the Bognor earthquake, destruction of the local tourist industry or agriculture, poisoned water supply or flaming taps.
Now this may be 22 years too late, but Eric has come clean about the fracking mixture. This is one of those stories that sound unbelievable but Eric somehow came up with proof as this picture Eric has dug up, of the site from September 1991 shows:
What's going on here is the mixing of the frac fluid in the tanks before the truck in the rear pumps it. They are attempting to increase production from a well drilled to a depth of 3,470 feet that started production in May 1987, and produced 1666 barrels in a 31 day flow test in 1989, uneconomic in the days of $15 oil. They shut in and tried again in 1991.
But what's the secret sauce in the chemicals in the sinister looking brown tubs?
Here one needs a knowledge of petrochemistry that is lost on me, but this is from the abstract from the scientific paper on the site:
Compared with conventional hydrochloric acid treatments, microbial acid fracturing in carbonate reservoirs offers the technical benefits of a greatly increased fracture length coupled with the employment of non-corrosive, nonhazardous and environmentally friendly feedstocks
...MORE
...Sadly, we don't have a picture of the other side of the containers from 1991, but we can see that although brown has since been replaced by white plastic, the size of the tubs is still the same. Available from your local food wholesaler:
Yuck! How gross is that?
