The AP is reporting:
Companies prospecting for oil off California's coast have used
hydraulic fracturing on at least a dozen occasions to force open cracks
beneath the seabed, and now regulators are investigating whether the
practice should require a separate permit and be subject to stricter
environmental review.
While debate has raged over fracking on land, prompting efforts to
ban or severely restrict it, offshore fracking has occurred with little
attention in sensitive coastal waters where for decades new oil leases
have been prohibited.
Hundreds of pages of federal documents released by the government to
The Associated Press and advocacy groups through the Freedom of
Information Act show regulators have permitted fracking in the Pacific
Ocean at least 12 times since the late 1990s, and have recently approved
a new project.
The targets are the vast oil fields in the Santa Barbara Channel,
site of a 1969 spill that spewed more than 3 million gallons of crude
oil into the ocean, spoiled miles of beaches and killed thousands of
birds and other wildlife. The disaster prompted a moratorium on new
drill leases and inspired federal clean water laws and the modern
environmental movement.
Companies are doing the offshore fracking — which involves pumping
hundreds of thousands of gallons of salt water, sand and chemicals into
undersea shale and sand formations — to stimulate old existing wells
into new oil production.
I thought they used fresh water in on-shore fracking. It is interesting that they use salt water for fracking off-shore.
No comments:
Post a Comment