Types of Mining and Fracking
Thomas Wilkinson and Austin Rich
Types of Mining
- Surface
- Subsurface
Surface Mining
Strip Mining
- When strip mining the top layer of the soil which is called the overburden
- Very effective where the minirals that you are mining for are near the surface
- The first thing that has to be done is all of the trees and bushes have to be removed from the area where the mining will happen
Open Pit Mining
- An excavation or cut made down into Earth's surface
- Usually used in coal mining
- All planing has to account for environmental protection
- reclamation plains have to be made
Mountain Top Removal
- Mainly used to extract coal from a mountain
- extracted by removing the over burden (parts of the top of the mountain)
Subsurface Mining
Slope Mining
A form of mining through a tunnel that is diagonal to reach the location where the coal or other minerals are located.
Drift Mining
A form of mining that uses a horizontal tunnel tho reach the minerals that are being mined
Shaft Mining
A form of mining that uses a vertical or near vertical tunnel or passage way to reach minerals that are being mined
Differences Beteween Subsurface and Surface Mining
Subsurface mining is all forms of mining that happens under the Earth's surface, while surface mining happens on Earth's surface.
Fracking
- The process of drilling and injecting fluid into the ground at a very high pressure to crack rock to get to and extract natural gas
- Each site requires about 400 Semi trucks to move materials to and from the site
- Each job requires between 1 and 8 million gallons of water
- Once the water gets to the fracking site the water is mixed with sand and other chemicals to create 40,000 gallons of chemicles are used per fracturing
- 600 chemicles are used in the fracking fluid
- 10,000 feet down the fluid is pressure injected through a drill pipeline in the ground
- a well can be fracked 18 times
- 500,000 active gas wells are active in the U.S.
Environmental Affects of all types of mining
- Fracking releaces harmful VOC's or volotile inorganic orginism
- Surface and Shbsurface Mining creates a lot of waist and damages the environment
- Subsurface mining releases harmul gases to the surface that can only be found underground