Up Before The Sun The Second Tuesday Of 2012 After A Night Of Explosions Had Me Wondering About Chesapeake Energy's Barnett Shale Fracking

Looking out my primary viewing portal on the world at the pre-dawn darkness I see no stars or rain falling. I am assuming we are still under a rain producing cloud cover in North Texas.

According to my computer temperature monitoring device it is only 39 degrees, currently, in the outer world at my location.

Today is the 2nd Tuesday of the New Year. Already almost a third of the first month of 2012 is gone.

I was exhausted by early evening, last night, which had me horizontal fairly early.

Around 3 in the morning an explosive noise woke me up. At first I thought it was thunder. The follow up explosive noises were clearly not thunder-like.

I don't know what was causing the booming. It lasted, intermittently, for a couple hours. This put me into insomniac mode.

Sometime around the 4th or 5th boom it occurred to me that this booming could have something to do with today's scheduled "Frac Job" at my neighborhood Fort Chesapeake. But, would they actually start something like that in the wee hours of the morning if it made a big noise?

Pondering the "Frac Job" got me obsessing over it in my sleepless state.

Maybe someone has an answer to what I'm obsessing about Frac-wise.

Okay, the hole gets drilled, all the way to the Barnett Shale, a couple thousand feet below the surface. Pipe lines the drilled hole. There is no way a continuous pipe can be inserted into a hole that is a couple thousand feet long.

So, is the pipe installed in sections, joined together somehow? Like the water pipes currently laying on the ground to bring Trinity River water to Fort Chesapeake?

When the drilling process reaches an aquifer, how does that work? How can a drilling process possibly get past a layer of water without polluting that water?

If the well lining is a pipe in sections, how are the joints made to be leak-proof? The pipeline that is bringing water to Fort Chesapeake from the Trinity River is definitely not leak-proof at the joints.

When today's fracking occurs, at the point where the Barnett Shale is fractured and starts producing natural gas, what happens next?

Does all that fracking water get pumped back out?

What stops the newly released natural gas from zooming up the poked hole with explosive force, like the natural gas version of the cliche oil gusher when a drilling operation strikes oil?

Today, with all this fracking going on are there going to be some extra nasty things in the air that I breathe?

Does anyone have any answers to any of these question?

I wish I could say I am going swimming now and think about something else.