What is Pneumatic Soil Fracturing?
The term “pneumatic soil fracturing” is generally used to speak of two different things. The first way is the way we use it here on the EarthBuster website, where it refers to the use of compressed air to break up compacted soil near the surface of the earth—that is, in the top few feet of the ground.
To complicate matters, the term “pneumatic soil fracturing” is also used in the oil and natural gas industry to refer to doing the same thing on a much larger scale and at much greater depths. In this case, the term often appears along with “hydraulic soil fracturing” (“fracking”, for short), which uses fluids, instead of air, to achieve a similar result in order to make it easier to get gas and oil out of the Earth. Technically, the term “pneumatic soil fracturing” should not be used for gas and oil applications because the average depth of soil around the Earth is just over one meter. That is, soil only runs a few feet deep, where oil and gas wells can run thousands of feet deep. (Here’s a short video on soil depth, for those who are interested.) Therefore, they’re not working in the soil, but in rock. So it would be more accurate not to use the word “soil” for that.
The EarthBuster Deep Soil Decompactor is so named because it reaches up to 6 feet deep into the soil to loosen (or “decompact” the ground up to that depth. It’s typical uses are in agriculture, puddle remediation, and septic field remediation. This sort of pneumatic soil fracturing is completely safe and “green”, in that it does not involve the injection of any chemicals or toxins into the earth. Only air is injected.
We should say that we are aware of another pneumatic soil fracturing process that injects polystyrene beads (basically, bean bag chair filler) into the soil of septic drain fields. As far as we have understood the explanations, the foam pellets are injected to keep the pathways that are created by the fracturing “open”, so that they won’t get clogged up. What we’ve never understood, however, is just how stuffing bean bag pellets into pathways keeps them from getting clogged up. Rather, it seems that it would do exactly the opposite—making it impossible for essentials like water, nutrients, and air to pass through such passages unimpeded. We know that foam pellets do not allow water, air, and nutrients to pass through them, so we’re still scratching our heads on that one.
The contradiction of clogging up the passageways in order to keep them unclogged aside, however, there’s the even more troubling fact that polystyrene is a known toxin that takes about 500 years to break down. (You can read about that at Wikipedia.) Its use would render any soil non-organic, and would make it nearly impossible to return a soil to an organic state, requiring that it be removed and replaced with fresh organic soil.
The EarthBuster device does not inject polystyrene or any other clogger, filler, or toxin into your soil. Nor does it need to! The EarthBuster works great the all-natural way, using only air to loosen and aerate your soil! When septic systems treated with the EarthBuster device several years ago are still up and running, it makes it obvious that there was no need to pump toxins into those soils at all.
Be sure also to read our EarthBuster Science page, where we keep scientific papers about how well it works.
