Other equipment associated with drilling and fracturing includes the drilling equipment to create the well bore and the pumps required to force the water and proppant under pressure into the target formation, hydraulically fracturing the well.
Power for the hydraulic fracturing pumps usually comes from diesel engines, which release nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2
, known together as NOX) and CO during use. The final draft SGEIS estimate that theamount of NOX released per typical drilling rig diesel engine, if the engine operates continuously for a year, is 333.7 tons of NOX per year. Their estimate for a typical diesel engine-powered hydraulic fracturing pump, operating continuously for a year, is 144.1 tons of NOX per year.
These are likely overestimates for the amount of emissions that will actually be produced from a Marcellus drilling rig. See Text Box 1.