Hydraulic Fracturing Continually Being Improved

The fact that hydraulic fracturing is becoming more efficient should be no surprise.  Unencumbered free enterprise and competition always leads to better results.
Peter

COLUMN-Smart fracking will cut costs and save environment: Kemp

Thu Jul 5, 2012 11:29am EDT

source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/05/column-kemp-fracking-efficiency-idUSL6E8I5A9S20120705

By John Kemp

LONDON, July 5 (Reuters) - Pressure to respond to falling oil and gas prices by cutting operating costs, coupled with the need to reduce the social and environmental footprint on host communities, will force fracking firms to employ a more targeted approach to drilling wells and hydraulic fracturing in future.

More than a million fracturing operations have been conducted in the United States since 1947, according to the U.S. National Petroleum Council, yet in many ways the technology is still immature.

In many instances, fracturing remains an expensive, brute force exercise that wastes resources while causing unnecessary disruption to affected communities.

The relative inefficiency of current fracking approaches was highlighted by Paal Kibsgaard, chief executive of oilfield services company Schlumberger, in a speech back in March .

Too many wells are being drilled into parts of shale formations that have poor production potential, Kibsgaard said.  (This is why all wells should be geosteered...Peter)

The horizontal section of wells are often being fracked at regular intervals along the entire length even though significant parts of the laterals have limited or no production potential because the geology is not favourable.  (Yes, geologists play a vital role....  Peter)

And in many cases the amount of horsepower and water being applied in each fracking operation is excessive. Massive fracturing networks are being created that extend more than can be propped open with frack sand, and where the unpropped part offers little or no contribution to production.



FINDING SWEET SPOT

In a recent report, researchers for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) concluded that "production from the most productive wells in an area is commonly more than 100 times larger than from the poorest productive wells."

For gas wells drilled into the Haynesville Sabine Platform, which lies under parts of eastern Texas and Louisiana, the most productive are expected to yield 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas over their lifetime. But expected ultimate recovery (EUR) from the median well is just 2 billion cubic feet, and at the low end some wells will yield just 20 million cubic feet, according to the USGS.

In the case of oil wells drilled into heart of the Eastern Expulsion Threshold of North Dakota's Bakken Formation, which is the most productive part of the whole area, the best wells are expected to yield as much as 5 million barrels, but the median expected is just 120,000, and some of the worst wells may yield as little as 2,000.  (Doing it right separates the winners from the losers.....Peter)



MINIMISING TRAFFIC

Indiscriminate drilling and fracking imposes enormous unnecessary disruption on local communities and is hugely expensive for drilling firms.

For a gas well "each hydraulic fracturing stage pumps around 300,000 gallons of water and up to 200 tons of sand down a well" according to Rick Carr and Sam Pearson of Deloitte Consulting in an article published in "Oil and Gas Journal" ("Unconventional drilling requires managing transportation logistics" June 4).

"A typical development in the Marcellus region can result in 20,000 to 30,000 truckload movements per (drilling) rig per year. Compound these requirements by the fact that there are a total of 138 rigs operating in Marcellus and it becomes easy to understand how transportation is such a concern. Similarly, an estimated 270 rigs are now active in the Eagle Ford, and capacity constraints are becoming a concern" they write.

Carr and Pearson emphasise the importance of careful logistics management to minimise disruption and reduce costs.

According to Deloitte's Wellsite Logistics Model, four wells drilled from a single pad can involve 1,200 truckloads of water for the fracturing and over 800 truckloads of gravel, with more truck movements for equipment and other supplies.

Moving a single rig can involve "50-60 truckloads of large, heavy equipment over a 10-mile distance over a six-day period, while fluid hauls involve the constant movement of more than 200 loads of fresh and produced water each day".



INTELLIGENT FRACKING

Careful management can minimise traffic, but the most effective way to cut costs and disruption is to avoid drilling unnecessary wells in low productivity areas, and avoid unnecessary fracturing stages in parts of laterals that have little or no chance of yielding gas, condensates or crude.

"The combination of optimised well location, well path and completion design is the key in achieving more with less, in terms of production, recovery and costs" according to Schlumberger's Kibsgaard.  (Just in case anyone wonders why engineers and geoscientists are in such high demand.....Peter)

Schlumberger cites one completion in the Marcellus where the client achieved 40 percent higher production, in part by fracking only the intervals around the best quality shale rather than spreading them evenly over the horizontal length.

Schlumberger hopes its UniQ seismic surveying system, with improved imaging quality, "will help better predict the variations in shale reservoir quality" and permit better targeting.

Rather than be in the business of providing vast amounts of horsepower, which Schlumberger sees becoming commoditised, the firm wants to focus on technology like imaging and specialist fracking fluids, where it will continue to have more market "leverage".

With natural gas prices under intense pressure in North America, and at least some analysts predicting oil prices have peaked for the time being, other production and services companies seem set to follow Schlumberger in following a more sophisticated system.

The focus is shifting from brute-forcing fracking to a more targeted and technology-intensive approach that seeks to minimise waste and costs, while boosting output per well, thereby doing more with less, and reducing the damaging effects on the environment and local residents.



References:

(1) "Kibsgaard speaks at 40th annual Howard Weil energy conference" March 26, 2012:

(2) "Variability of distributions of well-scale estimated ultimate recovery for continuous (unconventional) oil and gas resources in the United States" USGS, 2012:

D-Day, Of Sand, Beaches, Rocks, Geology, And Men And Women Who Love Them

Such bittersweet memories.  On this day in 1944 the ground invasion of France and the long-awaited liberation of Europe began.  France would be freed of Nazi (socialist) domination forever, right?

But this is a tribute to those who sacrificed.  My own father Andy Smith, came across Omaha beach, not on D-Day, but later, as a young infantry Lieutenant with the 41st Armored Infantry Regiment, part of  the 2nd Armored Division.  His unit was the first to enter liberated Paris but a short time later, in August of 1944, the first into Germany, and stopped the German advance during the Battle of the Bulge.

And then there are bittersweet memories of (for me) beaches and sand, from Lake Michigan, to the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Keys, the Mediterranean.......so many beaches, so much sand, so little time.  But then there is geology, and the study of sand, and rocks.  No living sedimentary, stratigraphic, or sedimentology geologist will not have known, read, or studied with Dr. Earle McBride of the University of Texas, wonderfully highlighted in the following article.  Every geologist who has looked at sand grains under a microscope will appreciate and relate to the following story.

I owe so much to my father, Mr. McBride, sand, and geology.  As with the Earth, what goes around comes around, and life goes on.  The sun rises and the sun sets, the tide goes out and the tide comes in, and rocks tell the story to those who learn to listen.  Today let's say a quiet "thank you" and remember.
Peter

Tiny remnants of war found in Omaha Beach sand

By Corrie MacLaggan | Reuters – 20 hrs ago

 

 

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  A glass bead with divots and scratches …
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  LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks), landing …
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  Current-day Omaha Beach in France …
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  Earle McBride is pictured by his …
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  US Army soldiers recover the remains …
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  Shrapnel grains and an iron bead, …
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  American troops watch activity …
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  LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks), landing …
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2nd Armored Infantry Division Patch

Andy Smith, athlete, soldier, coach, teacher.... Redstone, Colorado, 1986

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - When Texas geologist Earle McBride visited Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, in 1988, four decades after D-Day, the visible remnants of the Allied Forces' invasion there had long ago vanished.

But he and a colleague would later discover the history of the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy's beaches - which marked a turning point in World War Two - lingered in the sand in the form of tiny pieces of shrapnel only visible under a microscope.

It wasn't a discovery that McBride and colleague Dane Picard of Utah set out to make during their tourist visit to Omaha Beach, where U.S. forces suffered their greatest casualties in the assault against heavily fortified German defenses.

"We didn't think about, ‘Hey, there should be shrapnel here?'" said McBride, 80, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas who retired in 2005 but still goes to his office five hours a day to study rocks.

But the geologists did what long ago became their habit when they visit a beach anywhere in the world: they put a bit of sand in a plastic bag and took it home.

McBride didn't fully analyze the sample for more than two decades. Finally, in retirement, he made a slide of the sand by using blue-dyed epoxy to bind the grains together.

On a recent day in his tiny office at the Austin university where he taught for 46 years, McBride showed a visitor what he found. Under a microscope, rounded grains - quartz, feldspar, clam and oyster shells - were visible, along with jagged-edged grains.

"You see how angular that grain is?" he asked. "It's an anomaly - if it had the same origin and history, it should have been well-rounded, too."

A different light source on the microscope revealed that the jagged-edged grains had a metallic sheen and a rust-colored coating, and when McBride held a magnet to some of the sand, the angular grains proved to be magnetic.

McBride suspected the jagged grains were shrapnel, and he used a scanning electron microscope to verify his hunch. It showed the grains were iron with a bit of oxygen from rust.

He also found the sand included small spherical iron and glass beads, which he and Picard believe were formed by munitions explosions in the air and sand.

"It's a detective story," McBride said. "Sand has an exciting history."

He said it's not surprising that shrapnel was left on the beach. Rather the surprise is that it remained there decades later, long after the wrecked ships, tanks and aircraft were gone.

But the shrapnel won't be in the sand forever, he and Picard wrote in Earth Magazine last year.

"The combination of chemical corrosion and abrasion will likely destroy the grains in a century or so, leaving only the memorials and people's memories to recall the extent of devastation suffered by those directly engaged in World War II," they wrote.

The research by McBride and Picard - a professor emeritus at the University of Utah - was published in the September 2011 edition of The Sedimentary Record, a scholarly journal.

"It was a great approach," said Xavier Janson, a research scientist at the University of Texas and an editor of the Record. "It was using a geological tool that you usually use to understand where sand grains come from, but instead, it was used to understand what happened on this beach."

For McBride, the discovery is an example of why he still finds passion in his lifelong work studying sedimentary rocks, the ones most commonly found on the earth's surface.

The latest project on his desk is a 450-million-year-old rock from Utah roughly the size of a softball; he's trying to reconstruct the history of how it formed and where its grains originated.

The earth is old, McBride said, and "all I can do is work on one little chunk of the history of sandstones. As we say, so many rocks, so little time."

(Reporting By Corrie MacLaggan; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Eric Walsh)

source of article: http://news.yahoo.com/tiny-remnants-war-found-omaha-beach-sand-165332327.html#