In 2013, much to the joy of the British government and the fracking industry, the British Geological Survey (BGS) declared that there was likely to be between 24 and 68 trillion m³ (TCM) of gas available to fracking ventures in the Carboniferous Bowland Shale, the most promising target in Britain. That is equivalent to up to about 90 years’ supply at the current UK demand for natural gas.  The BGS estimate was based on its huge archives of subsurface geology, including that of the Bowland Shale; they know where the rock is present and how much there is. But their calculations of potential gas reserves used data on the gas content of shales in the US where fracking has been booming for quite a while. Fracking depends on creating myriad cracks in a shale so that gas can escape what is an otherwise impermeable material.

How much gas might be available from a shale depends on its content of solid hydrocarbons (kerogen) and whether it has thermally matured and produced gas that remains locked within the rock. So a shale may be very rich in kerogen, but if it has not been heated to ‘maturity’ during burial it may contain no gas at all, and is therefore worthless for fracking. Likewise, a shale from which the gas has leaked away over millions of years. A reliable means of checking has only recently emerged. High-pressure water pyrolysis (HPWP) mimics the way in which oil and gas are generated during deep burial and then expelled as once deep rock is slowly uplifted (Whitelaw, P. et al. 2019. Shale gas reserve evaluation by laboratory pyrolysis and gas holding capacity consistent with field data. Nature Communications, v. 10, article 3659; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11653-4). The authors from the University of Nottingham, BGS and a geochemical consulting company show that two samples of the Bowland Shale are much less promising than originally thought. Based on the HPWP results, it seems that the Bowland Shale as a whole may have gas reserves of only around 0.6 TCM of gas that may be recoverable from the estimated 4 TCM of gas that may reside in the shale formation as a whole. This is ‘considerably below 10 years supply at the current [UK] consumption’.

Unsurprisingly, the most prominent of the fracking companies, Cuadrilla, have dismissed the findings brusquely, despite having published analyses of other samples that consistent with results in this paper. Opinion in broader petroleum circles is that the only way of truly putting a number to potential reserves is to drill and frack many wells … The British government may well have a collective red face only a week after indicating that they were prepared to review regulation of fracking, which currently forces operations to stop if it causes seismic events above magnitude 0.5 on the Richter scale. A spokesperson for Greenpeace UK said that, ‘Fracking is our first post-truth industry, where there is no product, no profit and no prospect of either.’

See also: McGrath, M. 2019. Fracking: UK shale reserves may be smaller than previously estimated. (BBC News 20 August); Ambrose, J. 2019. Government’s shift to relax shale gas fracking safeguards condemned (Guardian 15 August); Fracking in the UK; will it happen? (Earth-logs June 2014)