Economic and applied geology

How rich are deep-sea resources?

Published on April 20, 2018 by zooks777Leave a comment

My first task as a Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the British Open University, from 1971 onward, was to write teaching materials about the economics, formation and geological setting of metal resources. Much of the content was about the full range of ‘conventional’ metal ores, but something being publicised as having huge potential intrigued me. This concerned manganese-rich nodules (with the aesthetic appeal of unwashed potatoes) and crusts found sitting on top of sediments of the abyssal ocean floor, at depths between 3 to 5 kilometres. While manganese is by no means a rare element and occurs in vast ore reserves on the continents, the nodules contain unusually high concentrations of other, more valuable metals, such as copper, nickel, zinc, cobalt and lead. Some contained more than 3% of Cu, Ni and Co combined, above the ‘grades’ of economic deposits of ores of the individual metals on land. This was the source of their potential: simple, albeit very deep dredging of the nodules would provide multi-metal ore of very high profitability. Moreover, the nodules are in truly vast tonnages (about 10 kg m^-2) and continually grow by precipitation from seawater in the underlying sediments at a few millimetres per million years – they are renewable resources.

A variety of reasons, not the least of which was the vexatious question of ownership of sea-floor resources far from land, have meant that commercial operations have yet to begin. However, spiralling prices for metals on the world market together with depletion of on-shore, high-grade reserves are beginning to make the opportunity of nodule mining irresistible. Fifteen companies, with licence areas issued by the intergovernmental International Seabed Authority of around 75 000 km² each, are now engaged in economic assessment of one of the most remote swathes of the Pacific abyssal plains (Peacock, T. & Alford M.H. 2018. Is deep-sea mining worth it? Scientific American, v. 318(5) (May 2018 issue), p. 63-67). There are several controversial issues surrounding deep-sea mining. First, dredging, like beam trawling disturbs and destroys ocean-floor ecosystems and turns bottom water turbid, the very fine grain size of sediments resulting in settling being very slow ( about 1 mm s^-1). Second, preliminary ore processing on board dredging vessels results in plumes of turbid and metal-rich slurry in the wakes, threatening surface and mid-water ecosystems. Such plumes will rapidly spread far from operational areas in surface current systems, eventually to smother pristine areas of ocean floor. Re-examination of areas of experimental dredging from 30 years ago have revealed that they are still sterile of lifeforms larger than 50 micrometres. Added to these effects, onshore processing will produce large amounts of waste – about 75% of the volume of dredged nodules. Conventional mines eventually backfill their excavations, but with nodule mining disposal would be an environmental nightmare.

Japanese sea-floor mining machine. (credit: Japan Times)

Economically, it seems that nodule dredging is potentially highly profitable. To break even requires lifting about a million metric tons, which would yield of the order of 37 000 t of Ni, 32 000 t of Cu, 6000 t of Co and 750 000 t manganese. If all 15 companies begin extraction, production at these levels will have a downward effect on world metal prices, tending to undercut production from conventional mines. One little-considered issue is that the ‘blend’ of metals from nodules will not match the industrial demand for each of them, further destabilising markets. Added to mining of the abyssal plains, plans are well advanced for multi-metal mining of massive sulfide deposits forming at hydrothermal vents or ‘black smokers’ along mid-ocean ridge systems, in which gold figures strongly. Only a few Pacific island states have resisted the ‘promise’ of such operations. Japanese companies are already mining the seabed off Okinawa within their own offshore waters and seemingly are producing zinc equivalent to the country’s annual consumption as well as gold, copper and lead.

‘Big data’ on water resources

Published on December 18, 2016 by zooks777Leave a comment

Two petabytes (2×10¹⁵) is a colossal number which happens to approximate how much data has been collected in geocoded form by the Landsat Thematic Mapper and its successors since it was first launched in 1984. In tangible form these would occupy about half a million DVDs, weighing in at about 8 metric tonnes; ‘daunting’ comes nowhere near describing the effort needed to visually interpret this unique set of multi-date imagery. Using the Google Earth Engine, the free cloud-computing platform for big sets of image data which hosts all Landsat data and much else (but not yet the equally daunting ASTER data – roughly a million 136 Mb scenes) the 32 years-worth has been analysed for its content of hydrological information by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy, with assistance from Google Switzerland. Using the various spectral characteristics of water in the visible and infrared region, the team has been able to assess the position on the continents of surface water bodies larger than 900 m², both permanent and ephemeral, and how the various categories have changed in the last 32 years (Pekel, J.-F. et al. 2016. High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes. Nature, v. 540, p. 418-422; doi:10.1038/nature20584). The results are conveniently and freely available in their entirety at the Global Surface Water Explorer, an unparalleled and easy-to-use opportunity for water resource managers, wetland ecologists and geographers in general.

Among the revelations are sites and areas that have been subject to gains and losses in water availability, the extents of new and vanished permanent and seasonal water bodies and the conversion of one to the other. A global summary gives a net disappearance of 90 thousand km² of permanent water bodies, about the area of Lake Superior, but exceeded by new permanent bodies totalling 184 thousand km². There has been a net increase in permanent water on all continents except Oceania with a loss one percent (note that Antarctica and land north of the Arctic Circle were not analysed). More than 70 % of the losses are in the semi-arid Middle East and Central Asia (Iran, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan), due mainly to overuse of irrigation, dam construction and long-term drought. Much of the increase in water occurrence stems from reservoir construction, but climate change may have played a part through increased precipitation and melting of high-altitude snow and ice, as in Tibet.

The Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan has suffered dramatic loss of standing and seasonal water cover due to overuse of water for irrigation from the two main rivers, the Amu (Oxus) and Syr, that flow into it. Note the key to the colours that represent different categories of changes in surface water. (Credit: Global Surface Water Explorer)

Many of the lakes in the northern Tibetan Plateau have grown in size during the last 32 years, mainly due to increased precipitation and snow melt. (Credit: Global Surface Water Explorer)

There are limitation to the accuracy of the various categories of change, one being the persistence of cloud cover in humid climates, another being the sometimes haphazard scheduling of Landsat Data capture (in some case that has depended on US Government interest in different areas of the world).

More detail on using remote sensing in exploration for and evaluation of water resources can be found here.

Free course on remote sensing for water exploration

Published on September 26, 2016 by zooks7771 Comment

250 million people who live in the drylands of Africa and Asia face a shortage of water for their entire lives. Hundreds of millions more in less drought-prone regions of the ‘Third World’ have to cope repeatedly with reduced supplies. A rapid and effective assessment of how to alleviate the shortfall of safe water is therefore vital. In arid and semi-arid areas surface water storage is subject to a greater rate of evaporation than precipitation, so groundwater, hidden beneath the land surface, provides a better alternative. Rainwater is also lost by flowing away far more quickly than in areas with substantial vegetation. Harvesting that otherwise lost resource and diverting it to storage secure from evaporation – ideally by using it to recharge groundwater – is an equally important but less-used strategy. Securing a sustainable water supply for all peoples is the most important objective that geoscientists can address.

In practice, to assure good quality water supplies to a community in the form of productive wells, surface water harvesting schemes or planning the recharge of exploited aquifers requires skill, a great deal of work and considerable financial resources. Yet in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and arid areas of Asia knowing where to focus effort and increase the chances of it being fruitful is one the biggest hurdles to overcome. Such reconnaissance – highlighting the most probable localities on geological and hydrological grounds, and screening out those least likely to yield water for drinking and hygiene – depends on details of the geology and topography of the terrain in which needy communities are situated. For most of the Afro-Asian dryland belt adequate geological and topographic maps are in as short supply as potable water itself. Remote sensing combined with an understanding of groundwater storage and surface-water harvesting is a powerful tool for bridging that knowledge gap, and is routinely used successfully in areas blessed with abundances of experienced geoscientists, money and engineering infrastructure. Again, most of the Afro-Asian dryland belt is poorly endowed in these respects.

Having long ago written a textbook on general remote sensing for geoscientists, now out of print (Image Interpretation in Geology (3^rd edition): 2001. Nelson Thorne/Blackwell Science), I decided to re-issue revised parts of it framed in the specific context of water exploration in arid and semi-arid terrains, and to add practical case studies and exercises based on a free version of professional image processing and desktop mapping software. Some of the most geologically revealing remotely sensed image data – those from the Landsat series of satellites and the joint US-Japan ASTER system carried by Terra, one of NASA’a Earth Observing System satellites – are now easily and freely available for the whole of the Earth’s land surface. Given basic familiarity with theory and practicalities, a computer and appropriate software together with a moderately fast internet connection there is nothing to stop any geoscientist, university geology student or engineer working in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector from becoming a proficient, self-contained practitioner in water reconnaissance. Water Exploration: Remote Sensing Approaches has that aim. Online access to the theoretical parts is free, and a DVD that combines theory, software, exemplary data and several exercises that teach the use of image processing/desktop mapping software is available at cost of reproduction and postage.

If you visit the website, find what you see potentially useful and wish to know more, contact me through the Comments form at the H2Oexplore homepage.

Fracking unlikely in Europe

Published on March 6, 2016 by zooks777Leave a comment

These days, leading British politicians burdened with power have a tendency to show outwardly that they are, if little else, earnest. When busy with economic and industrial policy they wear tailored day-glo hi-viz suits and shiny new hard hats. During the great 2015 floods of Northern England, their garb was off the peg North Face gear and green wellington boots. And, of course, for social policy a hoodie is de rigueur. Rosy-cheeked Prime Minister David Cameron has been extremely earnest about fracking for shale gas for several years, and in the petroleum industry the appropriate signal of a leading politician’s enthusiasm is to wear a rigger’s blue jumpsuit; ‘We’re going all out for shale’ Cameron has said. Given the explosive success of shale-gas exploitation in North America over the last decade that’s not very surprising, but do not expect to see him looking earnestly at an exploration rig again any time soon.

Cameron’s excitement began when in 2011 the Advanced Resources Institute (ARI) in Washington DC released the results of its consultancy for the US Department of Energy on global shale-gas prospects. The star prospect in Europe was Poland, well endowed with subsurface shales, which according to ARI, had more than 5 trillion cubic metres of technically recoverable reserves, enough to satisfy Polish consumption for more than 300 years. In 2013, ARI suggested 17 trillion m³ beneath Britain, albeit only 0.7 trillion that was amenable to fracking (about a decade’s worth of British gas consumption). But still the hype was maintained. An article in the 3 March 2016 issue of Nature (Inman, M. 2016. Can fracking power Europe. Nature, v. 531, p. 22-24) tempers enthusiasm a great deal more.

The Polish Geological Institute revised the country’s reserves down to a tenth of ARI’s estimate. After an initial frenzy of interest following the ARI report, when exploration licences covered a third of Poland, during 2013 and 2014 major companies relinquished licences for fracking en masse. Their exploratory activities had been disappointing because of the depth of burial (2-5 km compared with 1-2 km in the US) and unfavourably high clay content and strength of the target shales. The less thrilling ARI prospects for Britain did not excite major petroleum players at all, what interest there is being from ‘juniors’ such as Cuadrilla. The British Geological Survey, which has huge archives of geological information, both surface and subsurface, has assessed the three main British shale-gas ‘plays’ and comes up with a reserve figure of between 24 and 68 trillion m³. But that high figure is based on the situation in mid-west North American shale-gas fields, where the geology is a great deal simpler than here. In Britain, orogenies at the end of the Carboniferous and the outermost ripples of that which formed the Alps in late Mesozoic and Palaeogene times created far more deformation than beneath the central plains of North America. Widespread faults, even though few in Britain have large displacements, pose two sets of problems. As the minor earthquakes set off by fracking in the tectonically simple Fylde area of western Lancashire indicate, pumping fluids into faulted rock can release pent-up elastic strain. But such leakage into faults and smaller fractures may also cause the injection pressure to fall, making the fracking process less efficient.

https://i0.wp.com/www.agentsofchangefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/4596344953.jpg — Fracking information sheet from the British Geological Survey

Inman reports that fracking is now moribund throughout Europe, partly because of the disappointing results and also because environmental concerns for densely populated regions have spurred widespread moratoria, including those in three of Britain’s four nations; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The only current European fracking activity is in England, conducted by a handful of junior companies. A stumbling block in England actually lies with the quality of subsurface data for what has been described at the most close examined geology in the world. Since the early 1980s there has been a succession of onshore licensing rounds for oil and conventional gas, the 14^th of which is still active. The early ones were accompanied by a great deal of seismic reflection surveying, mainly using the truck mounted ‘Vibroseis’ method where the ground is mechanically thumped rather than subject to explosive shot firing that is favoured in sparsely populated areas. According to BGS, the guardians of the onshore seismic exploration repository, compared with the onshore seismic data available in North America that for Britain is ‘sparse, and fairly poor’.

Paris Agreement 2015: Carbon Capture and Storage

Published on December 15, 2015 by zooks7771 Comment

Anyone viewing news that covered the adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate change on 11 December 2015 would have seen clear evidence of the reality of the old saw, ‘There was dancing in the streets’. Not since the premature celebration of the landing of the Philae spacecraft on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko 11 months before has there been such public abandonment of normal human restraint. In the case of ‘little Philae’ the object of celebration sputtered out three days after landing, albeit with the collection of some data. Paris 2015 is a great deal more important: the very health of our planet and its biosphere hangs on its successful implementation. At 32 pages long, by UN standards the document agreed to by all 196 UN Member States is pretty succinct considering everything it is supposed to convey to its signatories and the human race at large.

The Bagger 288 bucket wheel reclaimer moves from one lignite mine to another in Germany.

One central and, by most scientific criteria, the most important technology needed as a stopgap before the longed-for adoption of carbon-free energy generation does not figure in the diplomatic screed: carbon capture and storage (CCS) is not mentioned once. Indeed, only 10 Member States have included it in their pledge or ‘intended nationally determined contribution’ (INDC) – Bahrain, Canada, China, Egypt, Iran, Malawi, Norway, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Only three of them are notable users of coal-fired power stations for which CCS is most urgent. An article in the January 2016 issue of Scientific American offers an explanation of what seems to be a certain diplomatic timidity about this highly publicized stop-gap measure (Biello, D. 2016. The carbon capture fallacy. Scientific American, v. 314(1) 55-61). David Biello emphasizes the urgency of CCS from more industries than fossil fuel power plants, cement manufacture being a an example. He focuses on the economics and logistics of one of very few CCS facilities that may be on track for commissioning (33 have been shut down or cancelled worldwide since 2010).

The Kemper power station in Mississippi, USA is the most advanced in the US, as it has to be to burn the strip-mined, wet, brown coal or lignite that is its sole fuel. The chemistry it deploys is quite simple but technologically complex and expensive. So Kemper survives only because it aims to sell the captured CO₂ to a petroleum company so that it can be pumped into oil fields to increase dwindling production. However, its extraction costs US$1.50 per tonne, while naturally occurring, underground CO₂ costs US$0.50 to pump out. Moreover, Kemper’s power output at US$11 000 per kW of generating capacity is three times more expensive than that for a typical coal-fired boiler. Mississippi Power is lucky, in that it only needs to pipe the gas 100 km to its ‘partner’ oil field; a pretty small one producing about 5 000 barrels per day. Some coal plants are near oil fields, but the majority are not. To cap it all, only about a third of the CO₂production is likely to remain in long-term underground storage.

Because Kemper has, predictably, hit the financial buffers (almost US$4 billion over budget) to avoid bankruptcy it has raised electricity prices to its customers by 18%. Without the projected revenue from its partnered oil field it would go belly up. Even in the happy event of financial break-even, in carbon terms it would be subsidising the oilfield to produce…CO₂! But the sting in the tail of Biello’s account of this ‘flagship’ project is that the plant is currently neither burning coal nor capturing carbon: it uses natural gas…

A new explanation for banded iron formations (BIFs)

Published on March 27, 2015 by zooks7771 Comment

The main source for iron and steel has for more than half a century been Precambrian rock characterised by intricate interlayering of silica- and iron oxide-rich sediments known as banded iron formations or BIFs. They always appear in what were shallow-water parts of Precambrian sedimentary basins. Although much the same kind of material turns up in sequences from 3.8 to 0.6 Ga, by far the largest accumulations date from 2.6 to 1.8 Ga, epitomised by the vast BIFs of the Palaeoproterozoic Hamersley Basin in Western Australia. This peak of iron-ore deposition brackets the time (~2.4 Ga) when world-wide evidence suggests that the Earth’s atmosphere first acquired tangible amounts of free oxygen: the so-called ‘Great Oxidation Event’. Yet the preservation of such enormous amounts of oxidised iron compounds in BIFs is paradoxical for two reasons: the amount of freely available atmospheric oxygen at their acme was far lower than today; had the oceans contained much oxygen, dissolved ions of reduced Fe-2 would not have been able to pervade seawater as they had to for BIFs to have accumulated in shallow water. Iron-rich ocean water demands that its chemical state was highly reducing.

Oblique view of an open pit mine in banded iron formation at Mount Tom Price, Hamersley region Western Australia (Credit Google earth)

The paradox of highly oxidised sediments being deposited when oceans were highly reduced was resolved, or seemed to have been, in the late 20^th century. It involved a hypothesis that reduced, Fe-rich water entered shallow, restricted basins where photosynthetic organisms – probably cyanobacteria – produced localised enrichments in dissolved oxygen so that the iron precipitated to form BIFs. Later work revealed oddities that seemed to suggest some direct role for the organisms themselves, a contradictory role for the co-dominant silica-rich cherty layers and even that another kind of bacteria that does not produce oxygen directly may have deposited oxidised iron minerals. Much of the research focussed on the Hamersley BIF deposits, and it comes as no surprise that another twist in the BIF saga has recently emerged from the same, enormous repository of evidence (Rasmussen, B. et al. 2015. Precipitation of iron silicate nanoparticles in early Precambrian oceans marks Earth’s first iron age. Geology, v. 43, p. 303-306).

The cherty laminations have received a great deal less attention than the iron oxides. It turns out that they are heaving with minute particles of iron silicate. These are mainly the minerals stilpnomelane [K(Fe,Mg)₈(Si, Al)₁₂(O, OH)₂₇] and greenalite [(Fe)_2–3Si₂O₅(OH)₄] that account for up to 10% of the chert. They suggest that ferruginous, silica-enriched seawater continually precipitated a mixture of iron silicate and silica, with cyclical increases in the amount of iron-silicate. Being such a tiny size the nanoparticles would have had a very high surface area relative to their mass and would therefore have been highly reactive. The authors suggest that the present mineralogy of BIFs, which includes iron carbonates and, in some cases, sulfides as well as oxides may have resulted from post-depositional mineral reactions. Much the same features occur in 3.46 Ga Archaean BIFs at Marble Bar in Western Australia that are almost a billion years older that the Hamersley deposits, suggesting that a direct biological role in BIF formation may not have been necessary.

More on BIFs and the Great Oxidation Event

Bicentenary of the first national geological map

Published on January 25, 2015 by zooks7773 Comments

It’s good to know that the geosciences have had revolutionising developments to match those of the rest of science. Forget the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, which of course was ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life’ when the Brits were saved from defeat by the timely arrival of the Prussians: This year we can celebrate one that literally put geology on the map, kicked-off the systematic exploration for every kind of physical resource, thereby putting a great deal of money in the pockets of coal, petroleum and metal moguls and making geology a career rather than a pastime. In 1815 William Smith published A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland, which despite the title was a map showing the basic geology and structure of the whole of England and Wales: the first ever map showing accurately the distribution of rocks for an entire country. The original, at 2.6 by 1.8 m, dominates the main staircase at Burlington House, the home of the Geological Society of London.

William Smith's A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland (1815) — William Smith’s A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland (1815)

Tom Sharpe has nicely summarized the key facts surrounding Smith’s masterpiece (Sharpe, T. 2015. The birth of the geological map. Science, v. 347, p. 230-232). One feature that I certainly did not know was that the colour scheme for the different stratigraphic units was based on the dominant colour of the rocks themselves, such as purples for the abundant slates of the Lower Palaeozoic, brown and red for the Old- and New Red Sandstone, greys and blacks for the Coal Measures and green for the Greensand, which until quite recently remained widely used to signify Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian; Devonian and Permian; Upper Carboniferous and Cretaceous.

Although celebrated today, Smith’s map was panned by the gentlemen geologists of the Geol Soc, who attempted to do a better job, but failed ignominiously. William Smith was not a leisured chap of the Enlightenment, but worked for a living surveying coal mines, navigating canals and draining fens. Despite their antipathy, the Fellows of the Geological Society of London knew a good earner when they saw one and plagiarized Smith’s work and undercut his regular price for his map. As a result he ended up in a London debtors’ prison. Even on the day of his release in 1819, bailiffs seized his house and its contents. The Geol Soc eventually did honour Smith with its Wollaston Medal in 1831, its then president Adam Sedgwick dubbing him ‘the Father of English Geology’: by that time geology had become a profession…

Serious groundwater depletion in western US

Published on August 15, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

The 2300 km long Colorado River whose catchment covers most of Arizona and parts of the states of Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming is one of the world’s most harvested surface water resources. So much so that barely a trickle now ends up in Baja California where the huge river once flowed into the sea. The lower reaches of the river system cross arid lands and it is the water source for several major cities and areas of intensive agriculture, serving as many as 40 million people and 16 thousand km² of irrigated fields. It has been nicknamed the US Nile because of its economic importance, but Egypt’s Nile has far less pressure put on it, although its exit flow to the Mediterranean is also hugely reduced from its former peak volume. The water crisis affecting the Colorado River and the areas that it serves has peaked during the 14-year drought over its lower reaches. To ease conditions in the former wet lands of Mexico near the river’s outlet 2014 saw deliberate major releases from giant reservoirs higher in the Colorado’s course.

English: New map of the Colorado River watersh... — The Colorado River Basin (credit: Wikipedia)

Surface abstraction is not the only drain on water resources of the Colorado River basin: groundwater pumping from the sediments beneath has grown enormously for both irrigation and urban use. That it is possible to play golf at many courses in the desert and to see monstrous musical fountains in Las Vegas is down largely to groundwater exploitation. There have been concerns about depletion of underground reserves once abstraction outpaced natural recharge by infiltration of rainfall and snow melt, but highlighting the magnitude of the problem required a rather dramatic discovery: so much water has been lost from aquifers that the missing mass has reduced the Earth’s gravitational field over the south-west US (Castle, S.L. et al. 2014. Groundwater depletion during drought threatens future water security of the Colorado River Basin. Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1002/2014GL061055).

The evidence comes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), jointly funded by NASA and Germany’s DLR and launched in March 2002. GRACE uses two satellites that follow the same orbit with a spacing of 220 km between them. Range finders on each measure their separation distance, and so their ups and downs as gravity varies, with far greater accuracy than any other method. Measuring the Earth’s entire gravitational field at their orbital height takes about a month. Groundwater depletion beneath the Gangetic Plains of northern India, to the tune of 109 km³, was detected in 2009 and the same approach has been applied to the Colorado Basin for nine years between 2004 and 2013. It shows that during this part of one of the longest droughts in the history of the south-west US 50 km³ have been lost from beneath, as a rate of about 5.5 km³ per year. Though the total is half the loss from beneath northern India, it should be remembered that more than ten times as many people depend on the Ganges Basin. Moreover, there is no monsoon recharge in the south-western states.

Fracking in the UK; will it happen?

Published on June 3, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

Whether or not one has read the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein, there can be little doubt that one of his most famous quotations can be applied to much of the furore over hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of hydrocarbon-rich shale in south-eastern Britain: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent’ (more pithily expressed by Mark Twain as ‘Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt’). A press release by the British Geological Survey in late May 2014 caused egg to appear on the shirts of both erstwhile ‘frackmeister’ David Cameron (British Prime Minister) and anti-fracking protestors in Sussex. While there are oil shales beneath the Weald, these Jurassic rocks have never reached temperatures sufficient to generate any significant gas reserves (see: Upfront, New Scientist, 31 May 2014 issue, p. 6). Yet BGS estimate the oil shales to contain a total of 4.4 billion barrels of oil. That might sound a lot, but the experience of shale fracking companies in the US is that, at best, only about 5% can be recovered and, in cases that are geologically similar to the Weald, as little as 1% might be expected. Between 44 and 220 million barrels is between two and six months’ worth of British oil consumption; and that is only if the entire Wealden shales are fracked.

Areas where petroleum-rich shales occur at the surface in Britain. (credit: British Geological Survey)

Why would any commercial exploration company, such as Cuadrilla, go to the trouble of drilling wells, even of an ‘exploratory nature’, for such meager potential returns? Well, when there is sufficient hype, and the British Government has gushed in this context for a few years, bigger fish tend to bite and cash flows improve. For instance, Centrica the owner of British Gas forked out $160 million to Cuadrilla in June 2013 for a quarter share in the well-publicised licence area near Blackpool in Lancashire; the grub stake to allow Cuadrilla to continue exploration in exchange for 25% of any profit should commercial quantities of shale-gas be produced.

Sedimentary rock sequences further north in Britain whose geological evolution buried oil shales more deeply are potential gas producers through fracking; an example is the Carboniferous Bowland Shale beneath the Elswick gasfield in west Lancashire, targeted by Cuadrilla. Far greater potential may be present in a large tract of the Pennine hills and lowlands that flank them where the Bowland Shale occurs at depth.

Few people realize just how much detail is known about what lies beneath their homes apart from maps of surface geology. That is partly thanks to BGS being the world’s oldest geological survey (founded in 1835) and partly the sheer number of non-survey geologists who have prowled over Britain for 200 years or more and published their findings. Legally, any excavation, be it an underground mine, a borehole or even the footings for a building, must be reported to BGS along with whatever geological information came to light as a result. The sheer rarity of outcropping rock in Britain is obvious to everyone: a legacy of repeated glaciation that left a veneer of jumbled debris over much of the land below 500m that lies north of the northern outskirts of the London megalopolis. Only highland areas where glacial erosion shifted mullock to lower terrains have more than about 5% of the surface occupied by bare rock. Of all the data lodged with BGS by far the most important for rock type and structure at depth are surveys that used seismic waves generated by vibrating plates deployed on specialized trucks. These and the cables that connected hundreds of detectors were seen along major and minor roads in many parts of Britain during the 1980s during several rounds of licenced onshore exploration for conventional petroleum resources. That the strange vehicles carried signs saying Highway Maintenance lulled most people apart from professional geologists as regards their actual purpose. Over 75 thousand kilometers of seismic sections that penetrated thousands of metres into the Earth now reside in the UK Onshore Geophysical Library (an Interactive Map at UKOGL allows you to see details of these surveys, current areas licenced for exploration and the locations of various petroleum wells).

Seismic survey lines in northern England (green lines) from the interactive map at the UK Onshore Geophysical Library

Such is the detail of geological knowledge that estimates of any oil and gas, conventional or otherwise, residing beneath many areas of Britain are a lot more reliable than in other parts of the world which do not already have or once had a vibrant petroleum industry. So you can take it that when the BGS says there is such and such a potential for oil or gas beneath this or that stretch of rural Britain they are pretty close to the truth. Yet it is their raw estimates that are most often publicized; that is, the total possible volumes. Any caveats are often ignored in the publicity and hype that follows such an announcement. BGS recently announced that as much as 38 trillion cubic metres of gas may reside in British shales, much in the north of England. There followed a frenzy of optimism from Government sources that this 40 years’ worth of shale gas would remove at a stroke Britain’s exposure to the world market of natural gas, currently dominated by Russia, and herald a rosy economic future to follow the present austerity similar to the successes of shale-gas in North America. Equally, there has been fear of all kinds of catastrophe from fracking on our ‘tight little island’ especially amongst those lucky enough not to live in urban wastelands. What was ignored by both tendencies was reality. In the US, fracking experience shows that only 10% at most of the gas in a fractured shale can be got out; even the mighty Marcellus Shale of the NE US underlying an area as big as Britain can only supply 6 years of total US gas demand. Britain’s entire shale-gas endowment would serve only 4 years of British gas demand.

To tap just the gas in the upper part of the Bowland basin would require 33 thousand fracking wells in northern Britain. Between 1902 and 2013 only 19 onshore petroleum wells were drilled here in an average year. To make any significant contribution to British energy markets would require 100 per annum at a minimum. Yet, in the US, the flow rate from fracked wells drops to a mere zephyr within 3 years. Fracking on a large scale may well never happen in Britain, such are the largely unstated caveats. But the current hype is fruitful for speculation that it will, and that can make a lot of cash sucked in by the prospect – without any production whatsoever.

Carbon Briefing: UK shale gas resource (carbonbrief.org)
Carbon Briefing: the what, where, and how much of UK shale oil (carbonbrief.org)
The cost of fracking Britain (bbc.co.uk)
Fracking company wants UK drilling laws relaxed (itv.com)

Fresh offshore groundwater resources

Published on December 8, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

There are paradoxes with groundwater: while over-use of coastal aquifers may draw in seawater to become undrinkable, on reef islands with no surface water adequate supplies may be had from fresh groundwater ‘floating’ on deeper, denser salt water. Seemingly even more odd, there are places several kilometres off some coastlines where freshwater rises in large volumes to the surface from springs on the sea floor.

Despite this and the fact that onshore aquifers extend far out to sea on continental shelves, hydrogeologists have paid scant attention to the potential water supplies that they might offer. Indeed, around the Persian Gulf where many submarine fresh springs are known petrodollars have poured into desalination rather than cheaper drilling and pipelines to the aquifers feeding the springs.

Reviewing the known potential of offshore groundwater, which occurs seawards of most continental shores, Vincent Post of Flinders University, Australia and colleagues from Holland, the US and Britain, consider that the global potential might be as high as half a million cubic kilometres (Post, V.E.A. et al. 2013. Offshore fresh groundwater reserves as a global phenomenon. Nature , v. 504, p. 71-78), around one tenth that of shallow (<750 m deep) groundwater onshore . It should be noted that the maximum safe level of salts dissolved in drinking water is about 1 gram per litre, and double that for irrigation water. The best prospects are where aquifers are trapped beneath impermeable sedimentary layers that prevent downward contamination by salt water.

The key to explaining such huge reserves is dating the water. In those places where that has been done the water is older than the Holocene (i.e. > 11 ka), which suggests infiltration when sea level was as much as 130 m lower than in interglacial periods, due to storage of evaporated seawater in major ice sheets. That would have exposed vast areas of what is now the sea floor to recharge. Modelling downward diffusion of seawater as sea level rose suggests that interglacials have too short to fully flush fresh water from the now submarine aquifers. Nevertheless, recharge is not continual, so that exploiting the resource is akin to ‘mining’ water. Yet the potential may prove essential in some coastal regions, and the authors caution against contamination by human activities offshore, such as exploration drilling for petroleum and carbon dioxide sequestration.

The review points out that submarine hydrogeology is one of the last great challenges in analysis of sedimentary basins.

Huge Fresh Groundwater Reserves Found beneath Ocean Floor (sci-news.com)

Electricity from ‘black smokers’

Published on September 13, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

Occasionally, journals not usually associated with mainstream geosciences publish something startling, but easily missed. Nature of 12 September 2013 alerted me to just such an oddity. It seems that the chemistry of sea-floor hydrothermal vents potentially can generate electrical power (Yamamoto, M. et al. 2013. Generation of electricity and illumination by an environmental fuel cell in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Angewandte Chemie, online DOI: 10.1002/ange.201302704).

The team from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the Riken Centre for Sustainable Resource Science and the University of Tokyo used a submersible ROV to suspend a fuel cell based on a platinum cathode and iridium anode in hydrothermal vents that emerge from the Okinawa Trough off southern Japan at a depth of over 1 km. It recorded a tiny, but significant power generation of a few milliwatts.

The fluids issuing from the vents are at over 300°C while seawater is around 4°C, creating a very high thermal gradient. More importantly, the fluid-seawater interface is also a boundary between geochemically very different conditions. The fluids are highly acidic (pH 4.8) compared with the slight alkalinity of seawater, and contain high concentrations of hydrogen and hydrogen sulfide but undetectable oxygen (sea water is slightly oxygenated).

The fuel cell was designed so that iridium in the anode speeds up the oxidation of H₂S at the geochemical interface which yields the electrons necessary in electrical currents. The experiment neatly signified its success by lighting up three light-emitting diodes.

Does this herald entirely new means of renewable power generation? Perhaps, if the fuel cell is scaled-up enormously. Yet, the very basis of oxidation and reduction is expressed by the mnemonic OILRIG (Oxidation Is Loss Reduction Is Gain – of electrons) and any potential redox reaction in nature has potential, even plants can be electricity producers. In fact all fuel cells exploit oxidation reactions of one kind or another.

Scientists Generate Electricity Using Human Brain! (techandfacts.com)

Review of fracking issues

Published on May 31, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

The release and exploitation of natural gas from shales using the unconventional means of in situ hydraulic fracturing – ‘fracking’ – has had plenty of bad press, including some hammering in Earth Pages. Now, what seems to be a balanced academic review has appeared on-line in Science magazine (Vidic, R.D. et al. 2013. Impact of shale gas development on regional water quality. Science, v. 340, DOI: 10.1126/science.1235009). The review focuses on hazards to groundwater resources from a variety of environmental effects, primarily gas migration, contaminant transport through induced and natural fractures, wastewater discharge, and accidental spills.

English: Protests against shale gas drilling i... — Protests against shale gas drilling in Bulgaria (credit: Wikipedia)

Much attention has centred on faulty seals put in place to stop gas escaping from drill targets. Yet fewer than 3% of seals are said to have proved problematic, with some finger-pointing at natural gas leakage from the hydrocarbon-rich shales. After all, there are plenty of natural fractures and completely ‘tight’ stratigraphic sequences are rare. in fact toxic effects of natural gas leakage on surface vegetation have been widely used as exploration indicators for conventional petroleum. The review does point out that there are so few pre-drilling studies of natural leakage that this controversy – including widely publicised blazing household water supplies – can not yet be resolved. Obviously more independent monitoring of areas above prospective shales are essential; but who will fund them? The one well-documented before-and-after study, from 48 water wells in Pennsylvania, USA, showed no change, though it seems that monitoring after fracking was short-lived.

The chemically-charged water used to induce the hydrofracturing obviously leaves an unmistakable mark when leaks occur, and there have been cases of considerable environmental release. The fluids are indeed a wicked brew of acids, organic thickeners, biocides, alkalis and inorganic surfactants, to name but a few infredients. To some extent re-use of such fluids, which are costly, ought to mitigate risks. However, once a shale-gas field is fully developed, large volumes of the fracking fluids remain in the subsurface and may leak into shallow groundwater sources. But what pathways do these fluids follow when they are pumped into shales under very high pressure? The review warns of the lesson of toxic fluid leakage from underground coal mines.

The University of Pittsburgh team who compiled the review usefully outline why shale gas is both profitable and feasible. They deal with what methane does in an environmental chemistry sense. It isn’t a solvent, so carries no other materials such as toxic ions, but its interaction with bacteria creates reducing conditions. A now well-known hazard of subsurface reduction is dissolution of iron hydroxide, naturally an important component of many rocks, that can adsorb a great range of dangerous ions at potentially high concentrations, including those involving arsenic. Reductive dissolution lets such ions loose into natural waters, even at shallow depths. Yet methane is emitted by a host of sources other than hydrocarbon-rich shale: landfill; swamps; other bacterial action; conventional petroleum fields both active and abandoned; and even deep water boreholes themselves. A recent study of groundwater geochemistry in relation to fracking in Arkansas, USA (Warner, N.R. et al. 2013. Geochemical and isotopic variations in shallow groundwater in areas of the Fayetteville shale development, north-central Arkansas. Applied Geochemistry, v. 33, doi/10.1016/j.apgeochem.2013.04.013) does address changes in groundwater chemistry, but not for all the ions cited by the WHO as potential hazards.

Whereas the mechanisms involved in vertical and lateral migration of subsurface fluids are well understood there is little knowledge of natural structural features such as deep jointing, fractures and fault fragmentation that control actual migration from area to area. The use of natural seepage as an exploration guide was largely abandoned when many studies showing apparently high-priority targets proved to be far removed from the actual source of the moving fluids. The most easily investigated route for leakage is the actual ‘plumbing’ that fracking uses. This is held together by cement that high pressures can disrupt before it sets, resulting in leaks. A lot depends on ‘due diligence’ deployed by the contractors, whose regulation can leave a lot to be desired. Vidic and colleagues devote most space to the matter of wastewater and deep formation water, yet make little if any case for routine geochemical monitoring of domestic groundwater supplies in shale-gas fields. Much is directed at the industry itself rather than independent surveys.

German brewers worry fracking will compromise beer quality (cbc.ca)
What the frack do we know? Not much, it turns out (grist.org) Somewhat-over-the top video clip
Shale Gas Fracking Has No Impact on Groundwater in Arkansas, Study Concludes (dailyfusion.net)
Fracking can be done safely, but will it be? (news.yahoo.com)

Resource snippets

Published on April 3, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

Wasted natural gas

Much attention has centred on fracking shales to release otherwise locked-in gas, while production of liquid petroleum by the same kind of process is also increasing with little publicity, especially in the US. From a purely economic standpoint wells that yield oil and gas from fractured shale might seem to be quite a boon. Well, they probably are, if the gas can be sold. One of the biggest shale-oil targets is the Late Devonian to Early Carboniferous Bakken Shale in the Williston Basin that stretches across 360 thousand km^2‑ beneath parts of the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana in the US and Saskatchewan in Canada. This shale is the source rock for most of the conventional oil production from the Williston basin since the 1940s. At the start of the 21^st century direct production of oil from the Bakken began in North Dakota, unleashing a major drilling boom and a ten-fold increase in land-leases for production. The state is now the second largest US oil producer after Alaska warranting a major feature National Geographic. Trouble is North Dakota is not well served by pipelines of any kind and oil is shipped by rail, much as it was in the early days of the US oil industry.

The natural gas released by fracking is simply wasted, partly by flaring at the wellhead but an unknown volume of pure methane is simply vented to the atmosphere. At rough 25 times the greenhouse warming capacity of CO₂ the perverted economics of waste methane is, unsurprisingly, becoming scandalous and increasingly dangerous. Such is the magnitude of shale-gas production in the US the price of natural gas has fallen dramatically so that from the Williston Basin simply carries no profit and therefore has nowhere to go except up in flames or directly to the air. The US Environmental Protection Agency apparently can do little to halt the venting. British onshore source rocks, such as the Upper Jurassic Kimmeridge Shale, which has a hydrocarbon content up to 70% and is regarded as the most important rock in Europe being the source for much of the petroleum beneath the North Sea and other oil provinces, are likely targets for fracking now the UK government has given the go-ahead in a new ‘dash for gas’. Chances are it may become a dash for onshore shale-oil .

Manganese nodules finally tagged for production

Almost 40 years ago my desk was almost buried under tomes of information about dull black nodules looking like blighted potatoes as I worked on the now abandoned Level-2 Open University course on The Earth’s Physical Resources. Made mainly out of manganese and iron minerals they also contain ore-grade amounts of nickel, copper and cobalt together with other metals. Were they beneath the crust they would be mined eagerly, but such manganese nodules litter vast areas at the surface of the oceans’ abyssal plains. Such was their potential that around half a billion dollars was spent on oceanographic and geochemical surveys to map the richest nodule fields. Part of the attraction at a time when the non-renewable nature of conventional metal deposits was touted as a threat to civilisation as we know it, as in The Limits to Growth, was that the nodules were zoned and clearly growing: they appear to be renewable metal resources.

Mining them is likely to be hugely costly: they will have to be dredged or sucked-up from the deep ocean basins; intricate metallurgical methods are needed to separate and smelt the paying metals and the risks of deep-sea pollution are obvious. As with shale gas, the UK Tory premier David Cameron has leapt onto Lockheed Martin UK’s announcement that it is finally profitable to get at the nodules, in the manner of the proverbial ‘rat up a drainpipe’. Cameron believes that the venture to harvest one of the most metalliferous patches on the east Pacific floor off Mexico may rake the UK’s economic potatoes out of the fire to the tune of US$60 billion over the next 30 years. Lockheed Martin is an appropriate leader in this scramble having designed some of the equipment aboard a ship financed by Howard Hughes, the 50 thousand tonne Glomar Explorer. A curious vessel, the Glomar Explorer was widely publicised in the mid-70s as the flagship for a manganese nodule pilot project. In fact it was built to snaffle a Soviet submarine (K-129) and its contents of codebooks, technical equipment and nuclear missiles that sank to the abyssal plains in the Pacific about 2500 km to the north-west of Hawaii. It did grapple the submarine, some cryptographic equipment, a couple of nuclear tipped torpedoes and six of the dead crew members. It is still operational, but as an ultra-deep water drill rig.

We will have to wait to see if nodule mining is a ‘go-er’, and very little information has emerged about methodology. The target metal is probably nickel with its importance in rechargeable batteries, plus rare-earth metals that are in notoriously short supply. Whether or not raking, dredging or sucking-up the nodules will have insupportable environmental impact depends on the amount of on-board processing; the nodules themselves are pretty much insoluble. Extracting and separating the metals will probably involve some kind of solution chemistry rather than the beneficiation common in most on-shore metal mines. Such hydrometallurgy has considerable potential for pollution, unless the raw nodules are shipped to shoreline facilities, at a hefty cost. One thing occurred to me while writing about manganese nodules as a major resource was that their blends of metals would not match the proportions actually required in commerce. On a grand scale their exploitation could well play havoc with currently booming metal prices and drive on-shore mining to the wall. But, to be frank, I think this is a bit of tropical sea-bed bubble fraught with legal tangles connected with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

UK firm joins ocean mineral rush (bbc.co.uk)
New subsea mining concepts developed | Mining Australia (oceansnrg.com)
Fracking, North Dakota and U.S. Economic Explosion (247wallst.com)
The Great Fracking Fraud (theburningplatform.com)

Geochemistry and economic history

Published on March 22, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

At first reading this item’s title might seem to convey nonsense, yet there is an interesting relationship between these two very different disciplines. It concerns the pillaging of South and Central America by conquistadors who followed Columbus’s pioneering route across the North Atlantic in 1492. Aside from glory their motive was profit, and that was most conveniently concentrated in the form of gold and silver, to be found in abundance among the native people of what came to be known as the Americas. Once such plunder declined silver ores were soon discovered in Peru and Mexico, thereby maintaining the supply. Bullion or plate – so named from the fact that precious metal was most often transported in the form of sheets – was the major cargo of the great treasure ships in the period from 1515 to 1650. It is remembered in such geographic names as the Rio de la Plata separating modern Argentina and Uruguay.

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski shooting "... — Klaus Kinski, well into his role as an insane conquistador, disputes the script with director Werner Herzog while shooting “Aguirre, The Wrath Of God” (credit: Flickr p373)

It might seem that when such a vast amount of loot entered Europe the buying power of silver in particular would have fallen to result in inflation in the price of basic commodities, much as printing paper money may have that result nowadays. Indeed, over those roughly 150 years prices increased by as much as five times. Another factor was a tendency for silver supply to be augmented simply by debasing newly minted currency with other metals. Yet another is that over the same period China adopted silver as a money commodity increasing demand and so spurring exploration and advances in metallurgical extraction from new ores. Furthermore, the entire fabric of economy in Europe began to shift as feudalism began to be supplanted by capitalism at the close of Medieval times. The sheer complexity of competing factors has made the so-called ‘Price Revolution’ of the 16^th and 17^th centuries a thorny issue for economic historians. This is where geochemists found that they had a ‘shout’ in what Thomas Carlisle dubbed the ‘dismal science’.

Silver ores also contain lead and copper, which inevitably contaminate silver metal extracted from them. Depending on the processes involved in mineralisation the abundances of both metals vary from mine to mine. More tellingly, so do the relative proportions of the different Pb and Cu isotopes, Pb isotopes reflecting the age of the rocks in which ores are found. Inherited by coinage, the isotopes can be used to assess provenance of coins (Desaulty, A.-M. & Albarede, F. 2013. Copper, lead and silver isotopes solve a major economic conundrum of Tudor and early Stuart Europe. Geology, v. 41, p. 135-138), while the dates embossed on coins at the mint potential chart the course of the bullion trade. Desaulty and Albarede show that silver from the vast Potosí mine in modern Bolivia opened by conquistadors barely shows up in British coinage of the period, which is dominated with Mexican isotopic signatures as well as those from European mines. The latter account almost exclusively for the coinage of the late Medieval period. The conclusion is that the huge potential of Potosí served the needs of Spanish entrepreneurs though a trans-Pacific Spanish trade in which Bolivian silver bought goods from China, including gold. Spanish coins, on the other hand, show little of either Bolivian or Mexican silver, suggesting that Spanish world trade may well have used American bullion directly to purchase goods throughout its sphere of influence centred on the Philippines, while Mexican silver engaged in European trade and also found its way into the British economy by way of the slave trade.

Although Desaulty and Albarede claim to have solved a ‘conundrum’ it seems more likely that their revelations will make historians of post-Medieval economics scratch their heads even more.

Global groundwater depth

Published on March 11, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

The single most vital resource for human survival is clean, fresh drinking water. For a large proportion of the world’s population that right is not guaranteed, with harrowing consequences especially for children under 5-years old. Without careful processing surface water can only rarely be assumed fit to drink, especially in areas with dense populations of people, livestock or wildlife. Groundwater, on the other hand, has generally passed through aerated upper soil layers before it ended up below the water table in an aquifer. In that passage it is filtered and subject to various oxidising processes, both chemical and organic, that renders it a great deal more free of pathogens than standing or running surface water. Remarkably, a common mineral in any oxidised soil horizon is goethite, an iron hydroxide, which is capable of adsorbing a variety of potentially damaging ions. So, of all fresh water that stored beneath the surface is the safest for people to drink.

By its very nature groundwater is hidden and requires both geological exploration and the drilling or digging of wells before it can become a resource. Areas underlain by simple stratiform sediments or lava flows present far less of a challenge than do geological settings with complex structures or that are dominated by ancient crystalline basement rocks. Time and again, however, crises in water supply arise from drought or sudden displacements of populations a great deal faster than the pace of groundwater exploration or development needed to cope with shortages. Were the potential for subsurface supplies known beforehand relief would be both quicker and more effective than it is at present.

Image of simulated depth to water table for Africa (Courtesy of Y. Fan, Rutgers University, USA)

Thanks to three geoscientists from Rutgers University, USA and the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, (Fan, Y et al. 2013. Global patterns of groundwater table depth. Science, v. 339, p. 940-943) a start has been made in quantifying the availability of groundwater worldwide. They have modelled how the likely depth of the water table may vary beneath the inhabited continents. As a first input they digitised over 1.5 million published records of water table depths. Of course, that left huge gaps, even in economically highly developed areas. There is also bias in hydrogeological data towards shallow depths as most human settlements are above easily accessible groundwater.

To fill in the gaps and assess the deeper reaches of groundwater Fan et al. adapted an existing model that assumes groundwater depth to be forced by climate, topography and ultimately by sea-level. It is based on algorithms that predict groundwater flow after its infiltration from the surface. Such an approach leaves out drawdown by human interference and is at a spatial resolution that removes local complexities. The influence of terrain relies on the near-global elevation data acquired by NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) in February 2000, resampled to approximately 1 km spatial resolution, supplemented by the less accurate Japan/US ASTER GDEM produced photogrammetrically from stereo- image pairs. Other input data are assumptions about variation in hydraulic conductivity, which is reduced to a steady decrease with depth, models of infiltration from the surface based on global rainfall and evapotranspiration patterns and those of surface drainage and slopes. No attempt was made to input geological information

The results have been adjusted using actual water-table depths as a means of calibration across climate zones on all inhabited continents. The article itself is not accessible without a Science subscription, but the supplementary materials that detail how the work was done are available to the public, and include remarkably detailed maps of simulated water table depths for all continents except Antarctica. The detail is much influenced by terrain to create textures that override climate, which might suggests that the results flatter to deceive. Yet the modelling does result in valleys and broad basins of unconsolidated sediment showing shallower depths that tallies with the tendency for less infiltration where slopes are steep and run-off faster. The fact that the degree of fit between model and known hydrogeology is high does suggest that at the regional scale the maps are very useful points of departure for more detailed work that brings in lithological and structural information.

Hug a Hydrogeologist: It’s National Groundwater Awareness Week, 10-16 March! (aquadoc.typepad.com)
30 Facts About The Coming Water Crisis That Will Change The Lives Of Every Person On The Planet (landandlivestock.wordpress.com)

Porphyry deposits and the fracking mechanism

Published on January 19, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

brothers in arms — Porphyry sculpture of two of the four co-emperors of the late Roman Empire – the Tetrarchy (credit: mhobl via Flickr)

For about a century a style of mineral deposit that develops in and around shallow, silicic magma chambers has dominated world supplies of copper, molybdenum and, more rarely, tin. They are also enriched in other valuable elements, including gold and silver, which makes these deposits even more attractive to mine. Hosting them are fine-grained diorites and granodiorites that typically contain large crystals of quartz and feldspar set in the finer material. Technically such rocks are called porphyries; well not so technical because the name derives from many porphyries having a colour much valued by Egyptian and especially Roman sculptors and architects – a reddish purple close to that on the hem of an nobleman’s toga. The dye comes from the ‘purple’ fish – the marine mollusc Murex brandaris – which the ancient Greeks referred to as porphura. In Rome, ‘The Purple’ were the nobs, and today they are the cardinals. The connection is coincidental, the best and most enduring rocks for sculpting and making pyramids are of this kind, but happen to be purple. Of course, there are igneous rocks with the eponymous texture but different colours, but stonemasons in the ancient world never bothered to give them a special name

The porphyritic texture signifies to virtually every geologist a magmatic history in which an igneous magma resided deep in the crust slowly crystallizing large mineral grains. Then, for one reason or another, it was blurted towards the surface. Porphyry copper and molybdenum deposits have a disturbingly phallic shape; a tall, rough cylinder capped by a bell-shaped zone of mineralisation. And they are pretty big, the largest at Bingham Canyon in Utah, USA once having been ~2.5 km tall and 0.5 km wide, with a 2 km, bell-shaped zone of mineralisation affecting the intrusion and its surrounding country rock.

Bingham Canyon Mine — The world’s largest open-pit mine in the porphyry copper deposit at Bingham Canyon Utah (credit: Wikipedia)

Porphyry ores are not much for the rock aficionado to shout about and they are characterized by very low grades of ore, the metal-sulfide ore minerals and any gold being barely visible. They are economic because there is a great deal of rock with copper and molybdenum contents often less than 0.5%, and economic gold values less than a part per million (0.03 troy oz t^-1). The bulk and the diversity of metals make mining porphyry deposits profitable. The ore minerals occur in tiny cracks that pervade the deposits forming a ‘stockwork’. That is where this style of mineralisation has a link with fracking shales to release their gas content. Stockworks are produced by very high-pressure steam that explosively fractures every cubic metre of the orebody. Crystallisation of sulfides and barren minerals keeps the fractures open until the system runs out of steam and mineralising fluids. Modelling of the thermodynamics associated with porphyry intrusions now suggests that once pressure and temperature stabilise at the requisite levels the hydraulic fracturing becomes self-sustaining (Weis, P. et al. 2012. Porphyry-copper ore shells form at stable pressure-temperature fronts within dynamic fluid plumes. Science, v. 338, p. 1613-1616). The key is the ‘fracking’ and as ‘shells’ with the right conditions migrate through the upper part of the intrusive system groundwater is drawn in to the freshly permeable rock to dissolve, transport and, where chemical conditions permit, to precipitate metals in the cracks. The modelling suggests a fundamental process that extends from plutonic systems, through volcanic edifices, hydrothermal processes in shallower rocks and active geothermal systems that vent to the surface.

Stockwork in copper-molybdenum porphyry deposit in Mexico (credit: Sundance Minerals)

In many respects the universality of hydraulic fracturing associated with increased heat flow, which itself can affect the crust repeatedly, may be the key to the concept of ‘metallogenic provinces’. These are large areas in which economic mineralisation of many styles but with much the same ‘blend’ of metals seems to have formed again and again during crustal evolution. Such provinces emerged from exploration and mining to present explorationists with the old adage, ‘To find an elephant go to elephant country’. Now there may be a theoretical basis on which new discoveries may be made.

Fracking leaks

Published on January 9, 2013 by zooks7774 Comments

The start of 2013 saw a massive puff from the British government for development of shale gas, Premier David Cameron crying ‘Britain must be at the heart of the shale gas revolution’. Fearful of the rapidly growing shift from Britain’s natural-gas self reliance to dependence on the Gulf, Russia and Norway the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition gave the green light for ‘frack drilling’ to restart. This followed a pause following seismicity in the Blackpool area that attended Cuadrilla’s exploratory drilling into the gas-rich Carboniferous Bowland Shale thereabouts. There is also a nice sweetener for the new industry in the form of tax breaks.

London Mayor Boris Johnson, a possible contender for Tory leadership, seems pleased. And perhaps he should be, as the Lib-Con coalition will be tested because the junior partners depend electorally, to some extent, on ‘green’ credentials. The Lib-Dem Energy Minister, Ed Davey, seemingly favours an automatic halt to drilling should there be seismicity greater than 0.5 on the Richter scale; an energy level less than experienced every day in London from its Underground trains. Political commentators have forecast that green issues may exacerbate tensions within the coalition in the second half of its scheduled 5-year term, especially as the electorate seems set to reduce the Liberal Democrat partners to irrelevance in future elections.

Natural gas’s biggest ‘green’ plus is that being a hydrocarbon its burning releases considerably less CO₂ than does its coal energy equivalent, the hydrogen content becoming water vapour. Yet the dominant gas is methane, which has a far larger greenhouse effect than the CO₂ released by its burning. To avoid that presenting increased atmospheric warming, extracting natural gas needs to avoid leakage. Unfortunately for those bawling lustily about the economic potential of fracking source rocks such as the Bowland Shale, recent aerial surveys over US gas fields will come as a major shock. At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in early December 2012 methane emissions from two large gas fields in the western US were released (Tollefson, J. 2013. Methane leaks erode green credentials of natural gas. Nature, v. 493, p. 12). They amount to 9% of total production, which would more than offset the climatic ‘benefit’ of using natural gas as a coal alternative.

A shift from coal to natural gas-fuelled power generation would slow down climatic warming, if leakage is kept below the modest level of 3.2% of production. So if the latest measurements are an unavoidable norm for gas fields then natural gas burning in fact increases global warming. Even more telling is that, until the shale ‘fracking revolution’, gas was produced by drilling into permeable reservoir rocks capped by a seal rock – usually a shale. The gas would not have leaked except from the well itself. Fracking, by design, increases the permeability of what would otherwise be a seal rock – hydrocarbon-rich shale – over a large area.

English: Schematic cross-section of the subsur... — Schematic cross-section illustrating types of natural gas deposits (credit: Wikipedia)

Aerial analyses to check emissions over oil and gas fields, let alone over shale-gas operations, are not widespread. However, the technology is not new. Where emissions are strictly enforced in populated areas, as over oil terminals and refineries, overflights to sample the air have been routine for several decades. Little mention is made of such precautionary measures in the promotion of fracking.

Another point is that as well as often being far from habitations, US shale-gas operations are generally into simple stratigraphy and structure. The Lower Carboniferous Bowland Shale now being touted as fuel for Britain’s escape from a descent into economic depression, with its estimated 200 trillion cubic feet of as potential, is intensely faulted and broadly folded, having experienced the Variscan orogeny at the end of the Palaeozoic Era. The complexity and pervasiveness of this brittle deformation is amply shown by geological maps of former coalfields that incorporate subsurface information from mine workings. The Bowland Shale lies below the Upper Carboniferous Coal Measures, many of the likely targets for fracking have never been subject to intensive underground mining simply because the Coal Measures were eroded away tens of million years ago. Consequently the degree to which many fracking targets may be riven by surface-breaking faults and fracture zones is not and possibly never will be known in the detail needed to assess widespread methane leakage.

Sometime in early 2013, the British Geological Survey is set to release estimates of the Bowland Shale gas reserves, in which its detailed mapping archives will have played the major role. That report will bear detailed scrutiny as regards the degree to which it also assesses potential leakage.

Gas Leaks from Fracking Accelerate Global Warming (stephenleahy.net)
The fracking dream which is putting Britain’s future at risk | Andrew Rawnsley (guardian.co.uk)
‘Frackademia’: how Big Gas bought research on hydraulic fracturing | Richard Schiffman (guardian.co.uk)

Groundwater in Africa

Published on May 23, 2012 by zooks7771 Comment

Sub-surface water supplies have rarely, if ever, figured in Earth Pages except in passing or in relation to the on-going crisis of arsenic pollution in drinking-water supplies. That is largely because of the paucity of groundwater publications that have a general interest. So it was welcome news to learn that hydrogeologists of the British Geological Survey and University College London have produced a continent-wide review of groundwater prospects for Africa, probably in most need of good news about water supplies (MacDonald, A.M. et al. 2012. Quantitative maps of groundwater in Africa. Environmental Research Letters, v. 7 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/7/2/024009. They used existing hydrogeological maps, publications and other publically available data to estimate total groundwater storage in a variety of aquifer types and the yield potentials of boreholes. Details can be seen at http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/groundwater/international/africanGroundwater/maps.html

Dominated by the vast sedimentary aquifers of Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan, such as the Nubian Sandstone, around 0.66 million km³may lie below the continental surface: more than 100 times the annually renewable freshwater resources, including the flows in three of the world’s largest rivers, the Nile, Congo and Niger. Though only a fraction of this subsurface potential may be available for extraction through wells, the arithmetic, or rather the statistics, suggest that small diameter boreholes and simple handpumps, as well as traditional wells, can sustainably satisfy the drinking water needs of the bulk of Africa’s rural populations with yields of individual wells between 0.1 to 1 l s^-1. However, groundwater use in irrigation and for large urban supplies demands well productivities an order of magnitude higher from thick sedimentary sequences, which rarely coincide in Africa with areas suitable for large-scale agriculture or existing cities and large towns. Both the humid tropical lowlands with thick unconsolidated sediments and the deep sedimentary rock aquifers beneath the Sahara and other arid areas match great groundwater potential with either little need for groundwater or virtually no potential for agricultural development and very few people. Moreover, the truly vast reserves of North Africa that are an order of magnitude or more greater than in any other countries are at such depths and so remote that development needs commensurately huge investment, in the manner of oil-rich Libya’s Great Man Made River Project projected at more than US$25 billion investment. To say that reserves, convenience and yields are inequitably distributed in Africa would understate the hydrogeological difficulties of the continent.

Africa well productivity — Average well productivity predicted by MacDonald et al from Africa’s regional geology

Much of Africa has crystalline basement at the surface that has useful yields (>0.1 l s^-1) only when deeply weathered, and even then rarely yields better than 1 l s^–¹. An exception to this general rule is where basement has been shattered by large faults and fractures. Sedimentary cover is generally thin across the continent and with highly variable yield potential. The other issue is that of sustainability, for if extraction rates exceed those of recharge then groundwater effectively becomes a non-renewable resource. About half of the African surface, mainly in its western equatorial region, has sufficient rainfall and infiltration potential to outpace universally high evapotranspiration to give recharge rates of more than 2.5 cm of annual rainfall. For all the areas repeatedly hit by drought and famine, average recharge through the surface that escapes being literally blown away on the wind is less than half a centimetre.

To have synopses of all the important issues surrounding African groundwater – the best choice for safe domestic supplies in hot, poor areas – would seem to be very useful to those engaged in development and relief strategies; i.e. to governments, the UN ‘family’ and World Bank. But there are important caveats. An obvious one is the antiquity of many of the surveys drawn on by MacDonald et al. Some 23 out of 33 were published more than 20 years ago using data that may be a great deal older: such has been the snail-like pace of publication by all geological surveys, including BGS. That is compounded by the small scale of the maps (mainly smaller than 1:1 million) and the extremely sparse geophysical data concerning subsurface geology across most of Africa. ‘Quantitative’ is not the adjective to use here, for unlike in most of the developed world, groundwater reserves and locations in Africa have not been measured, but estimated from pretty meagre data. In fact to be brutally realistic, most of the source maps are based on educated guesswork by a few hard-pressed geoscientists once personally responsible for areas that would cripple most of their colleagues working in say Europe or North America.

If there is a truism about water exploration in Africa, outside the well-watered parts, it is this: sink a well at random, and it will probably be dry. The stats may well be encouraging, as MacDonald et al. clearly believe, but finding useful groundwater supplies relies on a great deal more. Outside cities, people survive as regards groundwater often as a result of traditional means of water exploration and well digging: they or at least some locals are experts at locating shallow sources. Yet to improve their access to decent water in the face of both rising populations and climate change demands sophisticated exploration techniques based on geological knowledge. Most important is to ensure supplies to existing communities, whose locations do not necessarily match deeper groundwater availability, bearing in mind that a universal problem for most African villagers is the sheer distance to wells with safe water. Rigs used to drill tube wells are expensive to hire, so the likelihood of success needs to be maximised. In the absence of large-scale (1:50 000) geological maps – rarities throughout Africa – only skilled hydrogeological interpretation of aerial or satellite images followed-up by geophysical ground traverses offer that vital confidence.

Danakil ASTER — Geologically useful ASTER image of the Danakil Block in Eritrea/Ethiopia, showing Mesozoic and Recent sedimentary aquifers and crystalline basement (Steve Drury)

In fact, thanks to the joint US-Japan ASTER system carried in sun-synchronous orbit, geologically-oriented image data are available for the whole continent. Interpretation requires some skills but few if any beyond learning in a practical, field setting. Indeed, the African surface in its arid to semi-arid parts, most at risk of drought and famine, lends itself to rapid hydrogeological reconnaissance mapping using ASTER data. Given on-line training in image interpretation, a ‘crowd-source’ approach coordinating many interpreters could complete a truly life-giving and easily available map base for local people to focus their own well-construction programmes.

Africa may struggle to extract groundwater, experts say (scidev.net)

Britain to be comprehensively fracked?

Published on October 14, 2011 by zooks7771 Comment

In ‘Fracking’ shale and US ‘peak gas’ (EPN of 1 July 2010) I drew attention to the relief being offered to dwindling US self-sufficiency in natural gas by new drilling and subsurface rock-fracturing technologies that opens access to extremely ‘tight’ carbonaceous shale and the gas it contains. The item also hinted at the down-side of shale-gas. The ‘fracking’ industry has grown at an alarming rate in the USA, now supplying more than 20% of US demand for gas. This side of the Atlantic the once vast reserves of North Sea gas fields are approaching exhaustion. This is at a time when commitments to reducing carbon emissions dramatically depend to a large extent on hydrocarbon gas supplanting coal to generate electricity, releasing much lower CO₂ by burning hydrogen-rich gases such as methane (CH₄) than by using coal that contains mainly carbon. Without alternative, indigenous supplies declining gas reserves in Western Europe also seem likely to enforce dependency on piped gas from Russia or shipment of liquefied petroleum gas from those major oil fields that produce it. The scene has been set in Europe in general and Britain in particular for a massive round of exploration aimed at alternative gas sources beneath dry land. Unlike the US and Canada, the British are not accustomed to on-shore drilling rigs, seismic exploration and production platforms, and nor are most Europeans. Least welcome are the potential environmental and social hazards that have been associated with the US fracking industry, which seem a greater threat in more densely populated Europe.

The offshore oil and gas of the North Sea fields formed by a process of slow geothermal heating of solid hydrocarbons or kerogen in source rocks at a variety of stratigraphic levels, escape into surrounding rocks of the gases and liquids produced by this maturation, and their eventual migration and accumulation in geological traps. By no means all products of maturation leave shale source rocks because of their very low permeability. That residue may be much more voluminous than petroleum liquids and gases in conventional reservoir rocks; hence the attraction of fracking carbonaceous shales. British on-shore geology is bulging with them, particularly Devonian and Carboniferous lacustrine mudstones, Carboniferous and Jurassic coals, and the marine black shales of the Jurassic (see http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/energy/shaleGas.html and https://www.og.decc.gov.uk/upstream/licensing/shalegas.pdf), to the extent that areas of potential fracking cover around a third of England, Wales and southern Scotland.

News is breaking of a major shale-gas discovery beneath Blackpool, the seaside resort ‘noted for fresh air and fun, where Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom went with Young Albert their son…’ (Albert poked a stick at Wallace the lion and was eaten), said by energy firm Cuadrilla to have gas reserves of 5.7 trillion m³. The announcement followed 6 months of exploratory drilling, and drew attention to the burgeoning interest by entrepreneurs in the upcoming 14^th Onshore Licensing Round for petroleum exploration in Britain. It isn’t just from major petroleum companies, but in some cases even what amount to family businesses finding sufficient venture capital to spud wells; similar in many respects to the US fracking boom that began a mere 10 years ago.

Deep under Lancashire, a huge gas find that could lead to 800 ‘fracking’ wells (independent.co.uk)
Fracking gas test drill discussed (bbc.co.uk)
Is fracking environmentally friendly? (environmenteng.wordpress.com)
The answer to cheaper gas bills? (bbc.co.uk)
Camp Frack mobilises against UK’s first shale gas well (guardian.co.uk)

Hi-tech future may be saved by ocean floor sediments

Published on August 22, 2011 by zooks777Leave a comment

Global rare earth element production (1 kt=106... — China's growing REE market share. Image via Wikipedia

Since the now far-off founding of the Club of Rome and the re-emergence of Malthusian ideology, time and again there have been warnings about the imminent running out of resources that are essential for modern life. The latest concern one of the formerly haunted wings of the Periodic Table, central to petrogenetic geochemistry, but little else; the rare-earth elements. From early beginnings as the source for phosphors in the screens of colour televisions all 15 REEs now have a growing commercial role in applications ranging from precision guided weapons, night-vision goggles and stealth technology in the military sphere, through the satiation of artificial appetites for electronic gaming and mobile phones, to applications of super-efficient magnets in medial scanners and ‘green’ power generation. The crisis being discussed currently is not so much a shortage – REEs are not so rare – but the cornering of their mining by the Peoples’ Republic of China, which produces more than 95% of RREs used at present (~120 thousand tons). Yet world reserves are estimated at almost 100 million t, of which China has 36 million. Mining is often in only a few known, high-grade deposits; for instance most of the US reserves of 13 million t are locked in the Mountain Pass Mine, California that is currently on a ‘care-and-maintenance’ regime, i.e. shut. This one-sided economy sends shudders through capital’s strategy forums, i.e. in the US, Silicon Valley and the Pentagon.

Not surprisingly, geochemists and oceanographers from Japan, the world’s most hi-tech country, have bent their collective will to finding alternative sources, and may have revealed one in an unexpected location (Kato, Y. et al. 2011. Deep-sea mud in the Pacific Ocean as a potential resource for rare-earth elements. Nature Geoscience, v. 4, p. 535-539). Their work stems from ‘mining’ existing geochemical data from deep-sea drilling projects on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, that reveal a wide range of REE concentrations in the ooze coating the seabed: from <250 to >2000 parts per million. The richest pickings seem to lie in a swath either side of the East Pacific Rise at around 15°S, where the group estimate that a 1 km² plot could yield about one fifth of current world annual production, even though REE concentrations lie way below their on-shore economic cut-off grade. Apart from the need for dredging at depths around 3-5 km on the abyssal plains, and the inevitability of destroying a largely unknown ecosystem, the positive aspect of these metal-rich oozes is that the REE can be extracted simply by acid leaching of the goethite (FeOOH) in which the bulk of the elements reside. Goethite is something of a geochemical ‘mop’ with a capacity for adsorbing elements of all kinds on grain surfaces; so much so that it is being considered as a means of cleaning up heavy-metal pollution. Both the REEs and the iron probably arise from seabed hot springs where oxidising conditions result in dissolved ferrous iron combining in ferric form with oxygen to form goethite, which in turn scavenges other dissolved ions. Many of the on-shore REE deposits are carbonatites (intrusions of carbonate-rich magmas) that contain fluoro-carbonates and phosphates that host the REE, or beach sands in which wave swash concentrates the durable heavy phosphates in so-called black-sand deposits. Carbonatites are rare, most occurring in ancient ‘shields’, as in southern Africa, Canada and China, but being so unusual are not difficult to find. One in the Canadian Shield known as the Big Spruce Lake deposit provides phosphorus- and potassium-rich soil that encourages the growth f conifers and so creates a geobotanical anomaly of large trees where local climate generally supports only stunted ones.

The rising demand and currently restricted supply of REEs is creating an exploration boom for carbonatites as the metal prices rise inexorably. Yet it may also produce a shift to what seems to be an alternative kind of source; iron-rich deep-sea sediments, though more likely those preserved on-shore in ophiolite complexes than at the huge depths of the abyssal plains. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that oceanographers and geochemists have pointed to untold metal riches before: manganese nodules that litter huge tracts of the seabed and contain sufficient copper, nickel and cobalt to maintain supplies for millennia. Despite a half-billion dollar investment in the 1960s and 70s, there is no nodule-dredging industry. There are however well-advanced plans for deep water mining of gold-rich hydrothermal sites, but miners will go just about anywhere to gloat over Marx’s ‘money commodity’

Byron King: The Real REE Demand Opportunity (businessinsider.com)

Gold, magma and groundwater in Nevada

Published on March 1, 2011 by zooks777Leave a comment

Twin Creeks gold mine, Nevada, USA; Carlin-sty... — Twin Creeks gold mine, Nevada, USA; Carlin-style mineralisation. Image via Wikipedia

With the price of gold having climbed to above $1400 oz^-1 while social revolutions develop in North Africa and the Middle East, articles on how gold deposits form will get a wider readership than they would have during its doldrum years in the late 20^th century – the price has increased 7-fold since 2000. The bulk of gold nowadays can be mined profitably from ores in which it cannot be seen, except using a microscope, at grades well below 1 g t^-1 (1 part per million) thanks to cheap heap-leaching with sodium cyanide of lightly milled ore. The epitome of low-grade gold is that produced at huge open-pit mines in Nevada from sedimentary host rocks. The gold is far too fine grained to have been deposited as placers, and also occurs dissolved in pyrite (Fe₂S), so most experts regard it as having been introduced by hydrothermal fluids. Yet that covers two possibilities: by deep penetration of groundwater or from magmatic waters, and it is hard to decide which, again because the mineralisation is too fine grained to allow conclusive studies of fluid inclusions and stable isotopes. Also, such evidence as there is suggests low temperature fluids (~200° C) with low salinity; ambiguous data.

By using a synergy of ore-mineral chemistry, experimental data and ages of magmatism and mineralisation, Nevadan geologists have developed a convincing model for these ‘Carlin-type’ deposits (Muntean, J.L. et al. 2011. Magmatic-hydrothermal origin of Nevada’s Carlin-type gold deposits. Nature Geoscience, v. 4, p. 122-127). First, the mineralisation is of Eocene age and was introduced in Lower Palaeozoic sediments. The Eocene in the western USA saw the end of a period of compressional tectonics related to subduction since the Jurassic, fluids from which gave rise to partial melting of the overlying mantle wedge. This was succeeded by extensional tectonics and further intrusive magmatism dated between 40 to 36 Ma. This provided thermal energy and passageways for fluid migration. The second line of evidence is that hydrogen- and oxygen isotopes from fluid inclusions in hydrothermal gangue minerals show evidence that both mantle-derived and meteoric water mixed in the ore-forming fluids, and sulfur isotopes are similarly evidence of dual origin. Thirdly, the authors reasonably postulate from experimental data that basaltic back-arc magmas of Jurassic to Eocene age may have repeatedly added metals, including gold, to the mantle wedge that underpinned Nevada during subduction over a 175 Ma period. Thus later extension-related magmatism sourced in the wedge would itself have become metal enriched from this ‘fertile’ source. Moreover, conditions would have been ripe for highly oxidised conditions in the magmas and high concentrations of water in their fractionated descendants. Under such conditions gold and other metals favour entry into hydrothermal fluids. Given the extensional tectonic conditions such fluids could rise efficiently. Initially highly saline and very hot, rapid rise of the fluids would eventually result in them cooling adiabatically and separating into a dense salty liquid or brine and remaining vapour. That would force down the chlorine content in the vapour, favour some metals (Fe, Ag, Pb, Zn and Mn) ending up in the brine, while others (Au, Cu, As and Sb together with S) would remain in the vapour phase together with dissolved CO₂ in large amounts, making the vapour acidic. Able to pass into the fractured Palaeozoic cover, the fluids widened fractures in the carbonate sediments and facilitated their own precipitation of minerals, the foremost being gold-bearing pyrite. Nevada is probably unique, but my goodness it is a big gold province; >6000 t of gold in tham thar hills.

Surprise in store for coal burning

Published on January 6, 2011 by zooks7771 Comment

Of the fossil fuels coal has long been assumed to be the most plentiful, even the most pessimistic forecasters having acknowledged a global lifetime of centuries for known reserves. The determination of the emerging giant economies of China and India and of the USA to fuel themselves through coal-burning seems inevitable if highly risky for the climate. But that depends on coal remaining the cheapest fuel, largely because of the sheer abundance of supplies. A recent commentary on coal (Heinberg, R. & Fridley, D. 2010. The end of cheap coal. Nature, v. 268, p. 367-369) suggests that there is a growing tendency for reserve estimates to decrease as geologists factor in practical restrictions – place, depth, seam thickness and quality – on feasibility under current mining conditions, instead of just looking at known masses of coal. Astonishingly, the end-19^th century estimate of five thousand years of US coal supplies dropped to about 400 years by 1974 and is currently judged to be 240 years. China and India look likely to have less than 60 years-worth left. On top of that, the widely publicized turn to carbon capture and storage (CCS)for ‘clean-coal’ future supplies will inevitably drive-up prices of coal-fired energy. The two main factors in this remarkable transformation of ‘King Coal’ are fundamental economic forces in capitalism and the increasing refusal of miners to accept dangerous working conditions. The second is especially the case for China, where most coal is deep-mined; in the late 1990s it saw a drive to close down unsafe mines that caused production to fall, although it has greatly accelerated this century – further driving down coal’s lifetime there. It seems from this analysis that any realistic hope for a CCS-based coal economy, especially in China and India, depends on declining safety and environmental standards in their largely underground mines, which in turn depends on the highly unlikely willingness of their workforces to accept worse conditions.

New clues to origin of porphyry-type ore deposits

Published on September 13, 2010 by zooks777Leave a comment

The prominence of porphyry Cu-Au-Mo deposits above active subduction zones at continental margins, as in the Andes, has long encouraged ore geologists to suggest that they form as part of continental arc magmatism. Typically they occupy cupolas above large, intermediate to felsic, subvolcanic magma chambers that source the ore-forming fluid and most of the metals. Most show evidence of the influence of explosive fluid boiling that shatters the host porphyry mass during late stage hydrothermal activity thereby producing myriad cracks that become mineralised as a stockwork. One of the largest, among the longest worked and most investigated porphyry deposits is that at Bingham Canyon in Utah, USA. New isotope geochemistry bucks the accepted wisdom about porphyry-type mineralisation, in particular the source of the contained metals (Pettke, T. et al. 2010. The magma and metal source of giant porphyry-type ore deposits, based on lead isotope microanalysis of individual fluid inclusions. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 296, p. 267–277).

The Bingham Canyon ores and host intrusion are Cenozoic in age (~38 Ma). However, isotopes of lead in fluid inclusions within the ore zone reveal a much more ancient metal endowment of the mantle underlying continental crust, around 1800 Ma ago, probably by metasomatism during the accretion of Palaeoproterozoic island arcs. Magmatism in the late Eocene, presaging the evolution of the Basin and Range extensional province drew in Cu and Au from the mantle and Mo from assimilated continental crust; i.e. Bingham Canyon and other huge porphyry deposits of the Western USA inherited metal enrichment from long beforehand, unlike those of active continental arcs. The intrinsic importance of the discovery is that given intermediate to felsic magmatism of any age, if it is sourced in relics of earlier arc-related igneous events then there is a chance that more recent activity may spawn rich porphyry deposits; more or less anywhere, given a metal endowed infrastructure. That opens up exploration possibilities to hitherto unexplored ground above ancient subduction zones.

New clues to origin of porphyry-type ore deposits

Published on September 1, 2010 by zooks777Leave a comment

‘Fracking’ shale and US ‘peak gas’

Published on July 1, 2010 by zooks7771 Comment

Around 1970 the production of natural gas in the US reached its peak and has been slowly declining since then. The degree to which the US economy has grown to depend on natural gas and growing fears of becoming dependent on insecure supplies on the international LPG market has seen a stealthy growth in unconventional technologies to maintain indigenous supplies. The greatest growth has been in winning the useful fuel from ‘tight’ organic-rich shales that are usually regarded as source rocks for conventional petroleum rather than resources in their own right (Kerr, R.A.. 2010. Natural gas from shale bursts onto the scene. Science, 328, p. 1624-1626). The technology relies on drilling methods developed in the oil industry that allow several holes from a single platform to bend to pass at low angles through thin, gently dipping strata. That allows far larger volumes to be tapped than through a single, vertical well. Oil shales are not yet targeted for liquid petroleum because of the cost, but as Richard Kerr, a news writer for Science, reveals they are supplying an increasing proportion of US gas demand: from 1% to 20% since 2000. Being less of a source of carbon dioxide than coal or oil that might seem to be a ‘good thing’ all round, but there are worrying and little known problems with the technology.

To get the gas out demands that the permeability of shale is artificially increased by jacking open joints and fractures using very high-pressure fluids that carry sand to wedge them open when production begins open: this is ‘fracking’ in driller-speak. Not only gas starts to move, but also water locked into the shale for millions of years and often highly toxic. Drillers hope that all the fluids will follow the holes, but that is by no means guaranteed and some may make their way into aquifers and up to the surface. The fluids used in fracking are deliberately full of chemicals that help open up cracks and even biocides that keep them from being clogged by bacterial films: around 15 million litres used per well. Although aimed to be recycled these noxious fluids can escape, sometimes in massive blowouts. Uncontrolled gas and formation water escapes can cause explosions and kill of forested areas by disrupting tree-root biota.

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