Shale Gas: A Quick Overview

The following is a good summary of how the shale is drilled and gas produced. (source)

Shale gas

Mary Kate Cannistra, Patterson Clark/The Washington Post

Shale Gas: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Whoever coined the phrase about having to sacrifice for your lunch could have been talking about energy. You name the source of energy and look into it and you'll find there are pros and cons about every one of them. We have been deluged with negative information about big bad oil companies and dirty, filthy coal. Now we're hearing about all this natural gas we can produce from shale rock in many places around the country (USA) and the world. What is the real story?

The following article is a good introduction to shale gas and how it has the potential, or even probability of changing America's energy picture. Why isn't the mainstream media paying more attention? Why are we bombarded with pictures and stories of how windmills and solar panels are the answer to our energy needs? I think the answer is in the forces that have been behind the great scandal going on over the myth of man-caused global warming. For more information on that subject, go here.
Peter


An energy answer in the shale below?
New technology opens vast stores of natural gas, and the land rush is on

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 3, 2009 (source)

The first time Chesapeake Energy tried to buy mineral rights from Diana Whitmore, a 74-year-old retired real estate broker in southern New York, it offered her $125 for every acre of land plus a 12 percent royalty on whatever natural gas it extracts.

Nearly two years later, she's still holding out. Along with hundreds of other landowners, she has joined a coalition that is negotiating with nine oil and gas companies. The latest offers in the area are running as high as $5,500 an acre with 20 percent royalties.

"It's what's really going to turn this whole place around," said her son Daniel Fitzsimmons, who has since helped form the Binghamton Conklin Gas Lease Coalition.

This corner of the state is at the forefront of an old-fashioned land rush that has implications far beyond Conklin, N.Y. Oil and gas companies are vying to stake out territory where they can tap natural gas trapped in shale rock. Just a few years ago, the industry didn't have the technology to unlock these reserves. But thanks to advances in horizontal drilling and methods of fracturing rock with high-pressure blasts of water, sand and chemicals, vast gas reserves in the United States are suddenly within reach.

As a result, said BP chief executive Tony Hayward, "the picture has changed dramatically."

"The United States is sitting on over 100 years of gas supply at the current rates of consumption," he said. Because natural gas emits half the greenhouse gases of coal, he added, that "provides the United States with a unique opportunity to address concerns about energy security and climate change."

Recoverable U.S. gas reserves could now be bigger than the immense gas reserves of Russia, some experts say. The Marcellus shale formation, stretching across swaths of Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia, has enough gas to meet the entire nation's needs for at least 14 years, according to an estimate by two Pennsylvania State University experts. Just in Broome County, N.Y., where Fitzsimmons lives, shale gas development could create $15 billion in economic activity, according to consultants hired by the county.

The country is carpeted with shale gas plays, including the Barnett in Texas, Fayetteville in Arkansas and Haynesville in Louisiana. Since 2000, gas from shale has grown from less than 1 percent of the nation's production to about 10 percent, according to the consulting firm PFC Energy, and it's picking up fast.

That's changing the energy and economic landscape from Broome County to the Gulf of Mexico. It could mean lower prices and reassurance to homeowners who heat with gas, or towns and companies with vehicle fleets running on the fuel. As winter begins, the price of natural gas is about a third of the level it was 14 months ago. Storage facilities are bursting.

With new supplies, the country will be less vulnerable to disruptions from Gulf Coast hurricanes and need to rely less on imports. Already, deliveries of liquefied natural gas from places such as Qatar, Nigeria and Trinidad are down 58 percent in 2008, idling costly U.S. terminals.

The prospect of new gas supplies at stable prices is also transforming debates over climate change. It deals another blow to proposals for new coal plants. And because gas plants can be switched on and off quickly, unlike coal and nuclear, natural gas could supplement wind and solar power facilities, whose output varies with the weather.

"Natural gas can serve as a bridge fuel to a low-carbon, sustainable energy future," said former Colorado senator Timothy Wirth, now head of the U.N. Foundation. Indeed, this year, coal use is down about 13 percent, while electricity demand has fallen only 5 percent and natural gas use has remained about steady.

But the prospect of widespread shale gas drilling is also driving wedges in the environmental community. Many environmentalists have sounded alarms about the chemicals that drillers use to fracture the rock and the danger of natural gas or other substances contaminating water supplies. A video posted on the Web shows a man in Fort Lupton, Colo., lighting a fire with the tapwater in his kitchen sink -- although it isn't clear what caused that problem.

Residents of New York City, which draws drinking supplies from a large watershed that reaches up to the Catskill Mountains, have protested, and Chesapeake Energy has voluntarily announced that it would not drill in the watershed. Gov. David A. Paterson (D) has declared a moratorium on drilling until the state's Department of Environmental Conservation issues rules, which are open for public comment. A raucous meeting in Manhattan last month ended before even a third of the people who wanted to comment got a chance to speak.

"This is probably the biggest thing to happen to the state of New York since the initial clearing by settlers," said Wes Gillingham, executive director of the Catskill Mountainkeeper.

In north Texas, some people are also wondering whether drilling in the Barnett shale is to blame for a series of barely perceptible but highly unusual earthquakes now being investigated by geologists.

Yet other environmental groups favor developing gas to displace coal. "There are legitimate concerns that need to be addressed," said Bruce Nilles, a lawyer at the Sierra Club. But, he added, new natural gas supplies could be a "game-changer" in the battle against coal plants.

Nilles said New York's 20 coal plants largely burn Appalachian coal from areas with mountaintop removal. "The status quo means continuing to destroy the oldest mountain range in the country," he said.

Credit for discovering that gas could be economically extracted from shale generally goes to George Mitchell, former head of Mitchell Energy. In the early 1980s, as the company's production was declining, Mitchell and his geologists started experimenting with "hydraulic fracturing" -- blasting underground layers of shale with a mixture of water, chemicals and sand to crack the rock and get gas flowing out of it.

"Mitchell had hired an investment banking firm in 1999 to see if anyone wanted to buy them," recalled Larry Nichols, chief executive of Devon Energy. "Devon and everyone else looked and said, 'No, that technology doesn't work.' We, like everyone else, turned up our noses."

Three years later, Devon paid $3.1 billion to acquire Mitchell. It combined hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling, which enabled a single well to turn, follow a seam of shale for up to two miles and produce much more gas. Now a quarter of the natural gas produced by Devon, a $30 billion company, comes from shale.

Historically, most of the natural gas produced in the United States came from relatively small pockets in porous rock. The oil and gas industry has been "eternally searching for relatively small traps," Nichols said. Shale, by contrast, is widespread and hard to miss. "Devon has drilled 4,000 wells in the Barnett and is planning 4,000 more, at least. And we have not drilled a dry hole," Nichols said.

The stakes are high for companies and consumers, as well as the environment. Shale gas has already added billions of dollars to the value of companies like Devon, but it unsettles people living in scenic portions of Pennsylvania and New York, which were the first places oil was discovered but which have been relatively undisturbed for decades.

Some people are just happy about the money. Fitzsimmons, for example, suffers from arthritis and has a nonverbal autistic 18-year-old son. He and his family own 185 acres. "If you're a property owner, it's amazing," he said. "Even some of the ones who are members of these organizations that are supposedly against it -- when it comes time to get a check on their property, suddenly they're all for getting the check."

Hydraulic Fracturing And Shale Gas

The gas industry needs to be honest and open about the hydraulic fracturing process. The public is understandably skeptical and the environmental media love to exxagerate and inflame people's passions by scaring them in any way they can.

This much we have learned from the battle (that continues) to expose the fraud-based myth of man-caused global warming. The gas industry must maintain the moral high ground while exposing the lies, unethical and illegal behaviour of climate "scientists" exposed in the recent Email and computer code leak from the CRU in England. See here for more information on the great global warming scandal.

Hydraulic fracturing can be and has been done safely for decades. Groundwater acquifers used by people are very well protected. There needs to be an education effort aimed at the concerned public about the basics of subsurface hydrogeology. That said, these shale gas developments and hydraulic fracturing activities need to be monitored in a honest and sensible way. Ask the people living in the Barnett Shale area of north Texas, or the Haynesville Shale Play area in northwestern Louisiana if they oppose gas development and hydraulic fracturing. You can bet they like it.
Peter

Drilling right into a heated environmental debate

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 3, 2009 (source)

Oil and gas companies have figured out how to turn shale rock into natural gas gushers, but they have also hit a deep well of anxiety about the environmental impact of drilling in some of the country's most scenic areas.

The debate revolves around a technique known as hydraulic fracturing, which unlocks natural gas by shattering shale rock with high-pressure blasts of water, chemicals and sand.

Starting up a well requires 3 million to 7 million gallons of water. Drillers mix in chemicals that environmentalists say can imperil rivers and springs. Critics say natural gas can seep into drinking supplies, too.

Large volumes of water, containing leftover chemicals and mineral waste, return to the surface once a well is complete; that water requires safe disposal or treatment. Residents fear accidents, even if firms take precautions such as using steel tanks.

Cabot Oil & Gas has been mired in two disputes. Earlier this year, residents of the Dimock, Pa., area reported evidence of natural gas in their water supplies. Inspectors from the state's Department of Environmental Protection discovered that the casings on some of Cabot's gas wells were cemented improperly, allowing contamination.

On Sept. 16, Cabot's contractors, Baker and Halliburton, spilled 7,980 gallons of fluids in Dimock. Cabot said that it included only 0.5 percent chemical lubricating "gel" and that the mixture was "not hazardous or dangerous." But the DEP suspended the company's drilling activities.

Gas exploration companies say that proper drilling techniques seal off wells with concrete and that the shale layer is a mile or more below drinking-water aquifers, providing protection. Moreover, they assert, the water pumped underground contains only a tiny percentage of chemicals. Once the rock is fractured, no further water is needed. Larry Nichols, chief executive of Devon Energy, said the water needed to "frac" a well equals what's needed to water a golf course or fill three Olympic swimming pools.

What chemicals are used isn't clear. In 2005, Congress exempted chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act and said firms need not disclose the chemicals, which are often viewed as trade secrets. This is widely known as the "Halliburton loophole," after the company whose former chief executive, Dick Cheney, was then vice president.

The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, a nonprofit group run by Florida public health advocate Theo Colborn, has identified 344 hazardous chemicals used in fracturing, including 2-butoxyethanol and formaldehyde. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) and three House members have introduced bills that would repeal the exemption.

"The environmentalists have come out with long chemical names, but most are in baking soda and things we have around our houses," Nichols said.

Some companies are voluntarily disclosing the chemicals they use. "We as an industry need to demystify [hydraulic fracturing]," Chesapeake Energy chief executive Aubrey McClendon told a conference, according to Reuters.

Oilfield services giant Schlumberger said it is developing "green" fracturing fluids. Range Resources said it has figured out how to recycle 100 percent of the waste water from drilling.

Many environmentalists aren't satisfied. "While toxic chemicals may be found in commonly used household products, they should not be in a home's drinking water," said a report by Environment America. The group's legislative director, Anna Aurilio, said, "Natural gas might be a little cleaner than coal, but drinking water is precious to us."