Why the fracking they're doing now in the oil and gas business cannot be controlled. [View all]

The first uncontrolled blowout of a petrochemical basin is occurring in the tar sands of Canada right now.

Toxic goo is coming to the surface and they describe it as 26,000 barrels so far, but that means it is ONE MILLION gallons so far. The industry keeps saying that this is a proven technology, but it's not.

I was in the wellhead business for more than a decade in a management position, and what these people are doing is totally unconscionable.

The reason they don't know how to stop it is because it cannot be stopped.

Think of petro products as being contained in a pinata. You could make a little hole in the pinata, put a pipe in it and empty the pinata that way, which is how conventional wellbore technology has worked for about 150 years.

Or you could pump high pressure into the pinata and make the pipe flow faster. This is what conventional fracking did - loosened the immediate (several dozen feet) area around a perforated borehole. That's been done for 50 or so years.

Now put in so much pressure that the pinata explodes. How will you contain it? You won't. When 100% of the candy is on the ground, it will stop.

That's precisely what today's greedy buggers have done - they've overpressured these formations without knowing exactly where and what is being fractured. This current insult will not quit until all the pressure in the entire formation is exhausted, because the product is not coming through the borehole, but through actual cracks in the ground all the way down to where the petrochemicals are.

Hopefully, this will bankrupt these companies so that this uncontrolled and uncontrollable technique stops.