Yes, water is water. The cost would be more shipping it in from some place else and I'm not talking just monetarily. It's not like all five to ten Great Lakes worth of water is going to be used. People act like there's this giant bubble of carbon and if someone pokes a hole anywhere around the bubble, all of the carbon escapes. If that were the case the bubble was already burst. What scientists are doing is they're looking for the "missing carbon." All the terrains of the world absorb carbon. Each terrain holds a different amount of carbon on their own. When they add it all together their estimates conclude that there's a certain amount of carbon that cannot be accounted for. That's what they're looking for. It's not all in this one desert or in any one place on Earth. The find suggest some of this missing carbon is found underneath large deserts around the world. So tapping into that water in this one desert isn't going to end the world. And since it's not potable for human consumption and farm use and given the amount of water they're estimating is there, it would be negligible using it for fracking.
If the water was desalinated as Equation suggested and refined further, it would then be fit for human consumption and in this I was thinking of a project bigger than San Diegos Carlsbad project. The result could see a oilfield many times the size of North Dakota's Bakkens field , with associated industries we may even see the creation of a new city housing tens of thousands.
Such a development does not come without its problems and i think North Dakotas Bakken area may provide a useful guide of problems encountered.
So while the water first pumped down the hole to crack rock formations and release the underground oil and natural gas typically totals 2 million gallons (7.5 million liters) per well, each of North Dakota's wells is daily drinking down an average of more than 600 gallons (2,300 liters) in maintenance water, according to recent calculations by North Dakota's Department of Mineral Resources (
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Why do North Dakota's wells have such a difficult-to-quench thirst? The naturally high salinity of the Bakken play's groundwater is the reason, according to Suggs.
"As they're producing the oil, they're also bringing up that water," Suggs said. "The salt precipitates in the well bore. It can restrict the flow of oil, and cause the pumping equipment to have problems as well."
That salt has to be flushed out by pumping fresh water down into the well bore, and then sucking it back up through the same tubing normally used for oil. "The salt basically dissolves in the water, .............
In 2012, the Bakken oil industry used about 5.5 billion gallons (209 billion liters) of water—more than the amount used by the 110,000 inhabitants of Fargo, the state's biggest city. When the Bakken is fully developed in the next 10 to 20 years, the oil and gas play's 40,000 to 45,000 wells may need to consume roughly double that amount—as much as 10.2 billion gallons per year (28 million gallons each day)-in maintenance water to keep the oil flowing,
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