Performance Under Pressure

Nearly 30 years removed from George Mitchell’s first attempt to shake loose tiny, tightly packed pockets of natural gas from a sleepy quartz and calcite formation known as the Barnett in north-central Texas, the shale gas revolution, as it’s commonly called today, has officially gone global.

In the U.S., shale “plays” with names like the Marcellus, Haynesville, Fayetteville and Woodford are now operating under projections that presage the development of quadrillions of cubic feet of natural gas.

In Europe, the first-ever shale well was fractured in Poland earlier this year, with analysts there predicting an eventual payoff of more than 40 trillion cubic feet. There is also lots of shale in Sweden, South Africa and Australia. In Canada, estimates suggest there is enough shale gas in Québec to meet the province’s demand for the next 200 years.
Closer to home, the promise and potential of converting clean-burning energy resources into jobs, revenue and opportunity at an otherwise difficult time for the American economy has spurred a good deal of excitement—and with it, a good deal of scrutiny and attention. At the center is a 60-year-old, post-drilling, well-stimulation technology known as hydraulic fracturing—a practice that has been used more than 1.1 million times since its advent in the late 1940s.

However, it is a technology that has become the focal point in what has become a nationwide debate over the direction of America’s energy future.

Facturing Basics

Fundamentally, the fracturing process involves the delivery of pressurized water and sand to a target formation thousands of feet below the surface, with the water acting both as a means of creating tiny fissures in the underlying rock and as a mechanism to deliver the sand to the stratum. That sand, in turn, acts as a “propping” agent keeping those fractures open so that diffused pockets of natural gas can make their way to the wellbore.

Quite often, small percentages of common, commercially-sourced chemicals are added to the fracturing mix to control the growth of bacteria and aid the water in getting down the well. These materials typically comprise less than one percent of the total fracturing fluid, but somewhere along the way, they have become the focus of about 99 percent of the current debate.