BillHustonBlog: Fracking fluid volumes/mass

Fracking fluids per well per frack are between
5,000 to 100,000 gallons by volume
or 21 tons to 416 tons by mass

This assumes a frack is between 1-5 million gallons of water*

and the chemicals form between 0.5% to 2% of the final solution.

(* Source: http://blog.skytruth.org/2012/09/water-water-everywhere-20-months-of.html )

Visually:

1-18 130 BBL Dragon Tanker trucks by volume
0.5x to 4x 100 ton hopper train cars by mass

What started me thinking about this again:

Heard my friend Chip's voice-over on this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8qr1sZB0HM#t=2m40s

The source is this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEB_Wwe-uBM#t=6m14s

He says that 0.5% per frack is 5,000 gallons.
This assumes the volume of the fracking fluid is 1M gal.

This might be true in Colorado, but in PA it's more like 4.3M gallons per frack.
Also, these data are several years old now.

Since they are going out on longer laterals now,
it could be more like 5M+ gallons today.

So it turns out 5,000 gal is really a lower bound.

It could go up to 100,000 gallons

if a frack is 5M gallons at 2% chemicals.

Also 0.5% is conservative. Industry claims frack fluids can be up to 2% chemicals.

So 5,000 gallons pf chemicals per frack is really a lower-bound,
Whereas 25,000 gallons per well (0.5% of 5M gallons)
is probably more nominal for a PA well (actually a lower bound).
and it could be as high as 100,000 gallons of chemicals per frack.
(2% of 5M gallons).

Also, is it percent by volume or percent by mass?

The frackers don't say. So another way of estimating chemicals is like this.

1 gal of water = 8.32487 lbs.
1,000,000 gallons of water = 8,324,870 lbs.

0.5% of 1M gallons = 8,324,870 lbs.* 0.005 = 41,624 lbs = 21 tons (lower bound Colorado well)
2% of 1M gallons = 8,324,870 lbs.* 0.02 = 166,497 lbs = 84 tons (upper bound Colorado well)
0.5% of 5M gallons = 8,324,870 lbs.* 0.005 * 5 = 208,122 lbs = 104 tons (lower bound for PA well)
2% of 5M gallons = 8,324,870 lbs.* 0.02 * 5 = 832,487 lbs = 416 tons (upper bound PA well)