Is hydrofracturing useful?

Dear Friends. In my area there is a plenty amount of ground water is present. But 3 bore wells for the same area has gone dry. The experts suggested us to go for hydro-fracturing and quoting a very high amount. I wanted to ask is this process useful and worth spending money on that?

4 Answers

1. f you have a dry or low producing well, hydro-fracturing is your answer! With an existing well or when drilling a new one, Hydro-Fracturing can increase your water flow by expanding natural-occuring cracks in the rock with high pressure water. These cracks, which many times are in abundance around the well bore, can show a significant increase in well output after the hydro-fracturing process has been applied.

2. Hydro-fracturing is a new approach to revitalise bore wells to improve its yield, by injecting water at high pressure in the failed bore wells to break up fissures, clean away mud and other impurities, thus bringing it in contact with adjacent water bearing bodies, and thereby yield water. This method can be applied in situations, where even after scientific location of bore well points in hard rock areas, some bore wells yield poor discharge or fail to yield water totally, and thus save on the cost of drilling a new bore well.

3. Why the wells have gone dry? May be its a result of over-lifting of water. Hydrofracturing is a good way to retap the water. Hydrofracturing is a well development process that involves injecting water under high pressure into a bedrock formation via the well. This is intended to increase the size and extent of existing bedrock fractures, pumping water into those fractures at pressures as high as 3000 psi and flow rates as high as 85 gallons per minute, this cleans out the fractures and allows them to interconnect with nearby water bearing fractures. Water can then flow back thru these fractures and into the well at a faster rate than before. thou its a expensive method but if there is plenty amount of water available in the aquifer I suggest you should go for it. Rather constructing new wells.

4. My suggestion is to do a detailed study indicating the productivity of the aquifer and its capacity to yield new water. All aquifers have certain capacity to deliver water which depends on the aquifer's recharge capacity. In other words - as we draw more water from a given aquifer with wells (especially if the aquifer is confined) than what aquifer natural recharge rate is, than slowly the water level in the aquifer will go down and some wells may dray up for this reason. If the rate of aquifer withdrawal is higher than the rate of recharge, hydro-fracturing is not likely to help.