If you’ve been reading or listening to the news as of late chances are that the topic of “fracking” (short for hydraulic fracturing) has come up in one form or another. On one hand you have environmentalists saying that it’s bad for the world in general and on other the other hand you have those who claim that’s it’s just what the world needs to keep us supplied with the energy we need to carry on life as we know it.

The way “fracking” has been portrayed one would also have been led to believe that it’s a relatively new process when in fact it’s been around since the mid 1940’s. It’s only been since 2005 when it started being used on a large scale basis and gained a measure of notoriety.

What the “frack” is it?

To put it simply, “fracking” is a method used to extract natural gas from deep underneath the ground using water to smash open rocks using hydraulics and then extracting the gas for use by the general public. According to the EPA, approximately 35,000 wells in the United States are “fracked” each year.

How the “frack” does it work?

Since I’m a relatively simple person I’ll try to put in terms that make sense to me. First, you dig a hole, then you pump water, sand and other “secret ingredients” down the hole at extremely high pressure. This will cause the rocks and clay formations buried deep beneath the ground to crack and the natural gas is squeezed out of them.

Maybe that sounds a bit too simple. The amount of water and sand mixture used can be up to 4 million gallons and the hole can be as deep as 10,000 feet deep. The injection rate of the fluid can be up to 4,200 gallons of fluid per minute which exerts approximately 15,000 pounds of pressure per square inch.

Secret ingredients?

No, it’s not the secret recipe for Coca-Cola or even for the Colonel's own Kentucky Fried Chicken. Besides the things most familiar to us such as water and sand a potpourri of other chemicals might be used in order to speed the fracking up. Here’s a short list of some of the ones commonly used to frack things up.

• hydrochloric acid
• petroleum distillates
• ammonium persulfate
• calcium chloride
• boric acid
• citric acid
• borate salts
• ethylene glycol – commonly used in anti-freeze

I’m no scientist or chemist but as a layman some of that stuff sounds pretty scary.

What’s your fracking problem?

The problem is that all of that fluid has to wind up somewhere. Like I said earlier, environmentalists and the like claim that many of those chemicals could seep into our water supply, contaminate it and make it unfit for consumption.

Was that an earthquake I just felt?

Maybe, maybe not. According to the USGS fracking does indeed cause minor quakes but they are so small that they don’t pose a safety concern. Other folks have a different take on the matter.

Across the pond in the United Kingdom two relatively small earthquakes were felt in the region of Lancashire in 2011. They registered 2.3 and 1.4 on the Richter scale and fracking was named as the primary suspect.

Last year, closer to home, in my adopted home state of Ohio, the city of Youngstown experienced a 2.7 magnitude quake on Christmas Eve and a 4.0 quake on New Year’s Eve. The area is a hotbed within the state for fracking.

Fracking is good for you!

Proponents of fracking claim that this is exactly the case. They argue that so much natural gas was produced that it was able to drive down prices to a ten year low during last year’s winter. They also argue that since natural gas burns cleaner than coal or oil, less carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere resulting in lower amounts of greenhouse gasses. To further their cause, they state that natural gas also releases much less sulfur dioxide, a major component of acid rain, into the atmosphere.

Frack that shit!

The other side claims that while this might be true the risk does not outweigh the rewards. They claim that the fluids used will have long term effects and that more research is required in order to allow the practice to continue. Thus far, many communities here in the States have enacted local bans or moratoriums on the practice. Worldwide, the countries of Bulgaria and France have banned the practice outright while the UK and Romania have temporarily suspended the practice until further research can be conducted.

Will the practice continue?

How the frack should I know? In the States it’s become something of a political football being kicked back and forth between supporters of the practice and those who are against it.

If I had to bet, I say that the side with the most money will eventually win the debate.

Submitted in conjunction with ScienceQuest 2013

Source

http://grist.org/basics/fracking-faq-the-science-and-technology-behind-the-natural-gas-boom/

Nature sure made some awesome, and awesomely large, predators back in the day. You had your tyrannosaurus rex, megalodon shark, your sabertooth tiger, and even your marsupial lion in Australia, complete with pouch.

Not to be outdone, birds had their own pants-shittingly scary carnivorous megafauna: the terror bird, which roamed the wilds of South America and as far north as Texas and Florida for millions of years from the middle Paleocene to the early Pleistocene, terrorizing all and sundry as the apex predator of an entire continent.

"Terror bird" is the common English name given to a Family of giant, carnivorous, flightless birds, the Phorusrhacidae. This family actually contained numerous species, some as small as only 3 feet (1 meter) tall, but the ones we are really interested in were the freaking massive ones like the 9 foot (2.7 meter) tall Titanis, or the 10 foot (3 meter) tall Kelenken, the largest bird ever known to have existed.

These birds had razor sharp beaks (Kelenken's beak alone was 1.5 feet long), and judging from the contents of their stomachs, ate everything from small rodents and lizards to horses. That's right. Horses.

Oh, and did I mention that scientists have estimated that many of these birds could run up to around 30 miles per hour? Scary.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Aves
Order: Cariamae
Family: Phorusrhacidae

In the Newtonian universe, the one most of us live in, stuff is stuff and energy, energy. In high school we write down chemical reactions without thinking twice, or at all.

We "learn" that complete combustion gets us to water and carbon dioxide.We're more concerned with balancing these equations than we are with the reality they represent.

Here's one for burning propane:

C₃H₈ + 5O₂ => 3CO₂ + 4H₂O

If you burn propane completely, you get water.

Want evidence? Grab a propane torch, light it, and sweep the flame over some cool metal--a kitchen faucet works well.
What do you see?

Yep. A flash of "fog"--go ahead, taste it. It's water.

Feeling braver?

Next time you're grilling some clams, hold your hand a bit over the fire, not so close as to fry yourself (that I even need to say as much gives me pause about our species), but close enough to feel the warmth. Your hand will "sweat" quickly.

Except it's not from you--it's water that used to be part of the coals and part of the air, molecules now rearranged into water.

I bet at least half my students can balance a combustion equation. I bet only one in a hundred grasps that water and carbon dioxide can come from scrambled up particles of propane and oxygen.

(That stuff that looks like water coming from your car's tailpipe? Yep, it's water...I once even tasted it to be sure.)

 

 

 

ScienceQuest 2013

If your goal is to lose weight quickly, laxative, diuretics, and amputations will all quickly reduce your overall mass, at least as defined by what your read on a scale.

If you want to lose fat, however, you're going to need to pass most of it through your nose and mouth. No worries, though, you'll first need to break down your globs of fat, rearrange them, and ultimately pass a few electrons onto oxygen to form water.

By the time you're done, most of your fat's mass is now carbon dioxide (the oxygen came from water during hydration reactions). The solid jiggly stuff that some folks see as a problem is released as a gas! But not from the end you might have thought....

(On the flip side, the solid stuff of trees is mostly from a gas--yep, carbon dioxide again!)

More fun with high school chemistry
ScienceQuest 2013

Oligosaccharide

Trisaccharide

Complex Carbohydrate

Fermented by bacteria

Flatulence Fuel

 

Raffinose pentahydrate; beta-DFructofuranosyl- O-alpha-D-galactopyranosyl-(1->6)-alpha- D-glucopyranoside

C18H32O16

Molecular Weight: 594.53 g/mole
Boiling Point: Decomposes. (118°C or 244.4°F)
Melting Point: 80°C (176°F)
Specific Gravity: 1.465 (Water = 1)

 

It is not the nasal appendage of the childrens' singer, Raffi, but could be the olfactory offender in some (usually the sulfurous part of the gas). Raffinose is a polymer under the classification of oligosaccharides (the oligo meaning 'few' {and rhymes with phew}). The other 'almost sugars' in this arena is stachyose (a tetrasaccharide) and  verbascose (pentasaccharide). They have beta glycosidic bonds, like the milk sugar, lactose (galactose combined with glucose...why one needs lactase), instead of alpha (like sucrose -table sugar). The flexibility of the molecular compound structure of these sugars, compared to raffinose, allows  them to have absorbency.

Call Any Vegetable, call it by name.
You've got to call one today, when you get off the train.
Call any vegetable, and the chances are good,
Yeah!
The vegetable will respond to you.  _{--Frank Zappa}

Their importance for consideration in human nutrition involves the fact that they do not digest in either the stomach or small intestine. It is also why Tofu fermented from Soybeans is more digestible. These carbohydrates, like all of them made from that favorite star, our sun, by photosynthesis, are in most every plant, for us: vegetable, five to eight percent --with varying amounts.  And, if you have eaten beans, or even broccoli, you know what happens in the large intestine, a place in which, unlike cows, we lack the digestion enzyme.  Instead it is where bacteria, a.k.a. microflora, break it down and form gas, or flatus, (not always Methane, but Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen). They have the other savory or unsavory benefit, depending how you look at it, of causing the fecal bulking effect. As mentioned in another link, Beano ^(TM) is the enzyme alpha-galactosidase that supposedly can remedy that physical and social malady. Its success is by enacting the hydrolysis of oligosaccharides into easily absorbed constituent monomers.

You'll have to have them all pulled out after the Savoy Truffle _{--The Beatles}

Scientists, especially in Japan, Korea, and Europe, are tweaking these oligosaccharides, with raffinose a main player, with Leuconostoc mesenteroides . They are part of a effort to create anti-caries enzymes because of Streptococcus mutans, as well as making a prebiotic and promoting the growth of friendly gut-bacteria like from the bacteria-derived extra-cellular polysaccharide known as insoluble glucan, or mutan (that dentists tell you is plaque --turns out to be a sugar construct). Some are trying to make other sugars from oligosaccharides with Lactobacillus gasseri, but the recombinant enzymes only convert raffinose into fructan and fructo-oligosaccharides. They use transfructosylation by Aspergillus niger also to synthesize fructose. This is an exciting but new area, as we see from this statement in an article in Microbiology

This limited knowledge of inulosucrase enzymes and lack of 3D structures hamper our efforts to understand the differences between inulo- and levansucrases.

But, with continued research they might replace fluoride with something less toxic. It can be bought in crystalline form, and used in cooking, and some hope it will sweeten without calories but will not break down. Chinese and Japanese have industrially isolated it from beans and soy. You want some?  Here are the vendors:

Finetech Industry	FT-512-69-6
Fluorochem	249701, 078860
R&D Chemicals	4257
Tokyo Chemical Industry, Ltd.	R0002

Note:

The internal link here on oligosaccharides, groups them with polysaccharides (poly = many, not a parrot) mentions that disaccharides (two sugars) are also in that classification.  disaccharides, made up of pairs of single molecules of monosaccharides, are simple carbohydrates. This becomes a problem seeing that any less than ten are not polysaccharides, but oligosaccharides. It is also not accurate because any more than two are considered complex carbohydrates. (Whereas the monosaccharides like fructose and glucose are simple carbohydrates.) To be a polysaccharide it has to be a greater number than ten of carbohydrate compounds.  

There were other sources with this subtle error, also. (I hope I have not made any, if so please let me know.)