Shale Gas and Fracking: The Science Behind the Controversy

Shale Gas and Fracking

The Science Behind the Controversy

Michael Stephenson

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. The Fuss about Shale

The Game Changer

The Flip Side

Back to the Facts?

Chapter 2. Shale, Shale Everywhere

How Shale Forms

Working Out How Much Gas There Is

Resource and Reserve

North America

It All Seems So Simple

Chapter 3. To Frack or Not to Frack?

Fracking in Action

How Do Engineers Know Where the Fractures Go?

Sweet Spots

Chapter 4. Gas in Our Water?

Fracking and Groundwater

The Mystery of the Flaming Tap

So Is It Safe or Not?

Chapter 5. Did the Earth Move?

Faults and Earthquakes

Water Disposal and Earthquakes

What Is the Risk?

Chapter 6. The Shale Gas Factory

What Does It Mean for Me?

Nuisance or Real Danger?

Chapter 7. Shale Gas and Climate

So Should Shale Gas Be Left in the Ground?

Does Shale Gas Have a Place in Modern Energy?

Chapter 8. Keeping Watch

Who Owns the Gas?

Social Licence

Monitoring for Change

Improving the Quality of the Debate

Chapter 9. The Science behind the Controversy

The Value of Applied Science

Glossary

Index

Copyright

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Dedication

To Jack and Fred

Preface

In 1821, William Hart dug – with pick and shovel  —  a 27-foot deep gas well in the village of Fredonia, Chautauqua County, New York, within a few miles of the shore of Lake Erie. The well provided the light of two good candles, but by 1825 it supplied enough natural gas for lights in two stores, two shops, and a grist mill. The pipeline to transport the gas was made from hollowed-out logs connected together with tar and rags. In 1850, the well was deepened to 50  feet and produced enough gas to light 200 burners. So the Fredonia Gas Light Company, North America’s first gas company, was born and so was shale gas  —  though no one would have guessed the transformation that shale gas would bring almost 175  years later.

Shale gas has changed America. Within 20  years it could be providing half of the United States’ domestic gas and may be being exported in a liquefied form. Shale will turn the US from energy importer to exporter, and it’s likely to revitalise industry, bring hundreds or thousands of jobs, and attract back companies that long ago left America in search of cheap manufacturing costs. The questions on investors’ and technologists’ minds are: Will shale gas take hold outside the United States? Will technology developed in the gas fields of Texas and Pennsylvania work elsewhere – under the farmland of Europe and the steppes of Asia?

But shale gas has a darker underside. Many people believe it could be damaging the environment and diverting attention away from the need to reduce carbon emissions and ditch fossil fuels. Shale gas and hydraulic fracturing produce opinions that are clearly very polarised and politicised. So people are looking for unbiased information: investors  —  because they want to know if shale gas might be a safe bet; policy makers and regulators  —  because they want to know how to manage and control shale gas. The public is interested too, particularly those that live in prospective areas for shale gas.

But information is often thinly disguised propaganda for one or an other side of the debate. The companies that perfected the technique of hydraulic fracturing are often seen as less-than-transparent about how they make it work and their assurances that it’s safe seem hollow to people who live close to fracking rigs. The environmental pressure groups serve up nightmare scenarios of earthquakes, volcanoes, and subsiding land  —  and creeping disease in animals and humans.

One source of information that does matter is published science, which through the process of peer review, can be said to be independent. In this book I will review and explain some of the key studies that form the background to the debate and explain the wider science and geological processes that are involved. I will look at how the amount of gas in shale is assessed, the basics of its formation, and the reasons why it’s concentrated in certain places.

But shale gas is part of a wider problem to do with our use of the underground. People worry about extraction of coal bed methane, the underground storage of gas, and the disposal of nuclear waste or CO2 in carbon capture and storage in the same way as they do about shale. We need to see the underground as part of the environment, just as we do the land, the sea, and the atmosphere. We also need to monitor and manage the underground as well as we do the surface. Part of this book will discuss how we might do this.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ruth O’Dell for reading the manuscript and pointing out geologists’ assumptions about the non-geological world. Thanks also to Mike Ellis, Andrew Bloodworth, David Kerridge, Rob Ward and Alex Stewart for reading parts of the manuscript. Ed Hough, John Ludden, Bob Gatliff, Nick Riley and members of the BGS shale gas team supplied lots of advice and information in the last two years, as did Toni Harvey. Even with all this expert help, however, any errors are entirely my own.

Chapter 1

The Fuss about Shale

When I was a student of geology in the 1980s, shale was just the useless stuff that you drilled through to get to the good stuff – rocks like limestone and sandstone that might contain oil and gas. But there’s been a huge change in the world of oil and gas: the rise of unconventional hydrocarbons. I remember looking up a definition of the phrase ‘unconventional hydrocarbons’ a few years ago and getting the rather unhelpful ‘…hydrocarbons produced in a way that is not conventional…’ but in fact this isn’t so far from the truth. ‘Unconventionals’ as they are called in the industry are rather new and they involve getting oil and gas from rock layers where we couldn’t get them before – or from rock layers which we never thought would yield hydrocarbons. Shale gas is the best example and it has transformed the energy landscape in the United States. Shale gas will provide half of US domestic gas production before long. US refineries are configuring themselves for gas and oil from shale. Energy is so cheap that manufacturing costs in the US are as low as some parts of China. But there’s a huge fuss surrounding shale – rarely has a technique in the oil and gas industry attracted so much attention. The discussions are remarkably polarised with some people passionately supporting shale gas because of its ability to generate wealth, and others doubting that its extraction can be done safely and consistently with our wishes to reduce climate-changing carbon dioxide. In this chapter I’ll examine the reasons for the controversy and set the scene for the rest of this book, looking at the science behind the issues.

Keywords

Earthquakes; Energy; Fracking; Hydraulic fracturing; Pollution; Shale gas; Unconventional hydrocarbons

Contents

The Game Changer 2

Outside the United States 9

The Flip Side 16

In Europe… 19

Back to the Facts? 20

Bibliography 21

The reason why there’s such a fuss about shale gas is simple. First it might provide cheap energy and change the geopolitics of energy forever. But the flip side is the fear that ‘hydraulic fracturing’ (nicknamed ‘fracking’) – which is the method of getting most of the gas out – might be damaging the environment. Let’s examine the fuss on both sides. What’s being said about shale gas as a ‘game changer’ and the environmental effects of its exploitation?

The Game Changer

The United States is the only country in the world that has a sizeable shale gas industry and it’s to that country that we’ll have to turn to see the effects.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent US energy and statistics gathering organisation, has looked at US shale development and shale gas resources worldwide. The EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2011 analysis of shale was the first in-depth report on how shale gas started in the US and how it might develop until 2035. The chart that stood out in the report is reproduced below (Fig. 1.1), showing US natural gas production. The startling thing it shows is the sudden rise of shale gas from almost nothing in 2000. In 2011 the EIA predicted that shale gas would make up almost half of US natural gas production by 2035. In more recent editions of the EIA Annual Energy Outlook, this forecast hasn’t changed much. It means that an entirely new energy source will have risen from obscurity to dominance within 35  years.

Figure 1.1  US natural gas production, 1990–2035 (trillion cubic feet per year). From the EIA’s (2011) Annual Energy Outlook.

The most recent forecasts in the EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2014 indicate further startling changes. The abundance of probably cheap shale gas is affecting the way that electricity is generated in the US, and the balance of imports and exports of natural gas.

A quick look at Fig. 1.2 (left) shows that electricity generated by coal will remain the same or will slightly decline while gas-fired electricity generation will markedly increase. Many people predict that this will make the US less carbon-intensive than it would have been without shale gas, if nuclear-generated electricity isn’t displaced by shale gas. In fact the US can already point back to the years 2006–2011 reporting that CO2 from fossil fuel consumption declined by 430  million tons (or 7.7%), a greater reduction in CO2 emissions than any other major country – largely due to the use of shale gas in electricity generation. This is because shale gas burns cleaner than coal.

The right-hand graph shows something that’s probably even more game-changing. The forecast shows how exports of US natural gas might grow, both from pipelines to Mexico and Alaska but also as liquefied natural gas (LNG) to anyone who will buy it. Much of this exported gas is likely to be shale gas. In fact the US has already moved from being one of the world’s largest importers of gas to being self-sufficient in less than a decade.

How did all this happen? Though shale gas didn’t really get going until about 2005, gas has been extracted from shale at shallow depths for over a century in the US. In 1821 a shallow well in the Dunkirk shale in Chautauqua County New York yielded methane that was supplied to the local town of Fredonia. The gas is methane with a molecule consisting of a carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms (CH4) – so it’s exactly like gas that comes from sandstone and limestone, where we’re used to getting it.

Following this well’s success, shallow shale wells were drilled along the Lake Erie shoreline and eventually several shale gas fields were established. Shale gas was discovered in western Kentucky in 1863 and in West Virginia in the 1920s. At the time, the wells drilled were shallow and vertical, simply penetrating the shale without fracking, and feeding gas slowly to be used in local heating and lighting. This was far from the industrial shale gas development we see today but it was a start. Shale gas was really only a curiosity, making very little impact on US energy and running along in the background while its more lucrative cousin, conventional oil and gas, got going. In the years of the American industrial revolution, energy consumption was dominated by oil and gas from American and foreign sandstone and limestone rocks – and American coal – rather than shale (Fig. 1.3).

In the 1970s that changed