Like Fracking? You'll Love 'Super Fracking'
A few excerpts:
“I want to crack the rock across as much of the reservoir as I can,” says David A. Pursell, a former fracking engineer who’s now an analyst at Tudor Pickering Holt in Houston. “That’s the Holy Grail.”
Baker Hughes has set its sights on creating “super cracks,” a method of blasting deeper into dense rock to create wider channels. The aim of the technology, branded as DirectConnect, is to better concentrate the pressure of fracking fluids to reach oil or gas farther from the well bore, which existing methods fail to do as effectively.
Seismologists and academics doubt that fracking itself has caused the quakes. “The fracturing process is not causing the problems that are perceived by the public,” says David B. Burnett, director of technology at Texas A&M University’s Energy Institute. He also says the wider or deeper fractures that result from super fracking won’t create bigger environmental problems. “No change in fracturing technology would change that,” he says.
It seems fracking companies are upping the ante and going all in.
