Posted on 08/10/2018 8:10:25 AM PDT by Reeses
We’re already exceeding the 2025 limits on emissions...
There are vast oil reserves ALL OVER the world, that would benefit from the application of fracking to even existing and known petroleum and natural gas reserves. But are the structures that hold this oil and gas captive also necessary to support the overburden, and does this overburden then collapse into great gapping holes in the earth’s surface?
After all, extracting too much of the content of a vein of coal sometimes causes a great sinkhole to form, as the mine collapses. The obvious means to overcome this problem, removing the surface layers over the vein of coal, strip mining, creates a whole new set of problems of its own.
Much of this subsidence of earth has already occurred along the marshland and estuaries of the Louisiana coastline, not that sea is rising, but that the seabed is sinking.
Fracking in many ways is an extension of the gas/fluid injection technology to extract out oil and natural gas that have been around for many decades. People forget that crude oil in much of California has about the viscosity of molasses at room temperature (good luck getting California crude oil to flow out of a beaker at such a temperature!) and the predecessor to fracking—CO2 and high-pressure steam injection—was developed many decades ago to extract out California crude oil.
We’re already exceeding the 2025 limits on emissions...
...
Is that good or bad?
If the region goes to hell in a handbasket, its no longer our problem.
Middle east goes bad, Europe goes bad.
Europe goes bad, we have serious problems.
We were not nearly as intertwined with the rest of the world prior to WWII.
Now the whole world of markets are intertwined.
How do they turn the 90 degree corner from vertical to horizontal drilling?
I read an article recently that stated that the shales in the US are more suited for fracturing than most others in the world. It has to do with the amount of clay content making them brittle and more easily fractured.
It takes about 1000 ft to make turn. Simply start turn 1000 ft above target depth. So not a sudden turn but a curve that drill pipe is flexible enough to handle.
And there goes real music down the drain....
Amen to that!!!
This article is ignorant beyond the pale. FRACing was done LOOOONG before George Mitchell used it on shale in the Fort Worthless basin.
The revolution is not stimulation of reservoir rock by breaking it open under tension and filling the void with more permeable sand. The revolution is in stimulating shale and sandy / silty shale.
Fact is though that George Mitchell didn’t do it first. Companies like Dominion Resources were producing from the Devonian Shale in Appalachia for many years before the Fort Worthless Basin work was ever even a glimmer in anyone’s eye.
They gloss over directional drilling, which made multi-staged fracking of shale feasible. Without directional drilling along/within a shale seam, shale wouldn’t be worthwhile.
Will it require a special drill bit to make that gradual change of direction?
China has a shale play, but it’s twice as deep and resting under the mountains of Sichuan Province. There are others out in arid areas without easy access to water. Another factor is their geology is more fractured—fault prone.
Cool. Thanks.
Building construction and highway traffic are just as likely (i.e., not at all) to cause earthquakes as fracking.
I meant to say, the US has achieved post 2025 emission limits as of 2005 thanks to natural gas.
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