Barnett Shale

Hydraulic fracturing is the process used to fracture shale rock deposits, allowing the extraction oil and natural gas from deep below the earth’s surface. The drilling and fracturing process produces large amounts of contaminated wastewater that is pressurized and forced back into the ground deep below the earth’s surface. Over the last several years there have been many debates over the dangers of “Fracking” and the economic impact. There are a lot of concerns from environmental groups and concerned citizens, not only with the drilling and fracturing process, but with the excessive amounts of fresh water wasted in the process and the disposal of wastewater after the drilling is complete. Hydraulic fracturing poses many dangers to the earth…

SAMPLE PREPARATION: Wilcox shale and Pottsville shale samples are tested with the indentation method in this experiment. Both samples are quartz rich and silty shales which contain about 45 to 50% of quartz, 40 to 45% of clays and about 5% of plagioclase. Wilcox shale sample is from Louisiana and formed in upper Cretaceous while Pottsville shale samples are from Alabama and formed in upper Pennsylvanian. These two type of shale rocks are chosen because they are “local” rocks which was abundant…

thickest formation of surface bedrock in this area at about two hundred and fifty meters thick. This formation is a layer of shale ranging in color, mainly a…

November the 21st, I visited the Gypsum mine with my lab group: Luke Petro, Liz Morehead, and Kylie Hoef, along with several other groups. After procuring the necessary tools from the geology lab like a meter stick, rock hammer, flashlight, bottle of acid, and helmet, we set off to the mine. Located roughly 100 feet below the surface near Grand Rapids, the mine is now a storage facility owned by Michigan Natural Storage. In the mine, we measured the various rock columns to find how large the…

marine shale environment and in an alluvial fan. Sea level regression happened. The size of grain for this rock is around the size of clay. Our next stop is the most exciting as is in the time of the dinosaurs. We have travelled to the Morrison formation which is dated to be 150 million years old and the rocks have grain of sizes between clay-sized and 1mm. The Morrison formation has inconsistent lateral thickness as it has thick layers and goes down to thin layers and has tightly compressed…

Introduction Now, Australia urgently faces the resource issue. In this issue, Coal seam gas (CSG) has been focused for new resource. Australia has large reserves of CSG in high permeability reservoirs is one of the reason. By the way, CSG has been met with a mixture of praise and criticism that consideration should be made with regards to sustainability and how effect on Australian community or environment. Definition of ‘fracking’ Fracking is shorthand for the drilling of hydraulic fracturing.…

Once used only rarely to extract from deep, conventional reservoirs of fossil fuels, fracking has evolved to a widely-used intensive process to retrieve natural gas from shallow, unconventional sources, such as shale rock, tight sands, and coal beds where the resource is not easily accessible (Food and Water Watch 2). Historically, the fracking procedure involved pumping a relatively small amount of acid into a clogged hole of a reservoir in order to allow the continued flow of oil or gas.…

Shale gas and oil plays have been the focus of activity in the United States for the past 15 years. Barnett Shale successes prompted extensive commercial expansion of shale oil and gas activity (Curtis 2002; Browning et al. 2013). As the testing ground for new technologies, Barnett Shale has an extensive experimental history of various drilling and hydraulic fracture methodologies that have been successfully transferred to other shale plays (Grieser et al. 2006; Samuelson et al. 2012; Browning…

Shale of the Appalachian Basin With various depositional environments and the understanding of sea level change, the Appalachian Basin formed by the collision of tectonic plates and sediment accumulation under the Earth’s surface. The Appalachian Mountains reveal subsidence belts, faulted marine sedimentary rocks and other geologic rocks in these tectonic settings. The Basin exists in the northeastern states of North America. This large rock formation exhibits collisional tectonics with modern…

The Marcellus Shale Play is a black shale formation lying under the Appalachian Basin running from Tennessee to New York. The U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that 1,953 billion cubic feet of recoverable reserves lie beneath the shale sediment. (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2012) The EIA estimates that shale basins in the United States have a potential to produce from 500-1,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2012). Natural Gas…