Turning Drilling Waste Into Clean Energy

摘要

Every barrel of oil removed from the earth, whether from fracking or conventional drilling, involves at least 7 gallons of scalding-hot water. The water comes out of the wells and is also sent back down into them, sometimes with sand and chemicals, to dislodge petroleum. Each year, U.S. drillers churn 25 billion gallons of H_2O through their wells, mostly taken from reserves found deep underground, according to estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy. If the water were fed through plants designed to extract the heat to create power, the result would equal the output of three coal-fired plants running around the clock, without the carbon emissions.