Tag: Shale gas

British government fracking fan fracked

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In November 2019 the Conservative government of Boris Johnson declared a moratorium on development of shale gas by hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) in England. This followed determined public protests at a number of potential fracking sites, the most intransigent being residents of Lancashire’s Fylde peninsula. They had been repeatedly disturbed since mid 2017 by low-magnitude earthquakes following drilling and hydraulic-fluid injection tests by Cuadrilla Resources near Little Plumpton village. Their views were confirmed in a scientific study by the British Geological Survey for the Oil and Gas Authority that warned of the impossibility of predicting the magnitude of future earthquakes that future fracking might trigger. The shale-gas industry of North America, largely in areas of low population and simple geology, confirmed the substantial seismic hazard of this technology by regular occurrences of earthquakes up to destructive magnitudes greater than 5.0. The Little Plumpton site was abandoned and sealed in February 2022.

Cuadrilla’s exploratory fracking site near Little Plumpton in Fylde, Lancashire. (Credit: BBC)

On 22 September 2022 the moratorium was rescinded by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in the new government of Liz Truss, two weeks after his appointment. This was despite the 2019 Conservative manifesto pledging not to lift the moratorium unless fracking was scientifically proven to be safe. His decision involved suggesting that the seismicity threshold for pausing fracking operations be lifted from magnitude 0.5 to 2.5, which Rees-Mogg claimed without any scientific justification to be ‘a perfectly routine natural phenomenon’.  He further asserted that opposition to fracking was based around ‘hysteria’ and public ignorance of seismological science, and that some protestors had been funded by Vladimir Putin. In reality the Secretary of State’s decision was fuelled by the Russian Federation’s reducing gas supplies to Europe following its invasion of Ukraine, the soaring world price of natural gas and an attendant financial crisis. There was also a political need to be seen to be ‘doing something’, for which he has a meagre track record in the House of Commons. Rees Mogg claimed that lifting the moratorium would bolster British energy security. That view ignored the probable lead time of around 10 years before shale gas can become an established physical resource in England. Furthermore, an August 2018 assessment of the potential of UK shale-gas, by a team of geoscientists, including one from the British Geological Survey, suggested that shale-gas potential would amount to less than 10 years supply of UK needs: contrary to Rees-Mogg’s claim that England has ‘huge reserves of shale’. Indeed it does, but the vast bulk of these shales have no commercial gas potential.

Ironically, the former founder of Cuadrilla Resources, exploration geologist Chris Cornelius, and its former public affairs director, Mark Linder, questioned the move to unleash fracking in England, despite supporting shale-gas operations where geologically and economically appropriate. Their view is largely based on Britain’s highly complex geology that poses major technical and economic challenges to hydraulic fracturing. Globally, fracking has mainly been in vast areas of simple, ‘layer-cake’ geology. A glance at large-scale geological maps of British areas claimed to host shale-gas reserves reveals the dominance of hundreds of faults, large and small, formed since the hydrocarbon-rich shales were laid down. Despite being ancient, such faults are capable of being reactivated, especially when lubricated by introduction of fluids. Exactly where they go beneath the surface is unpredictable on the scales needed for precision drilling.  Many of the problems encountered by Cuadrilla’s Fylde programme stemmed from such complexity. Over their 7 years of operation, hundreds of millions of pounds were expended without any commercial gas production. Each prospective site in Britain is similarly compartmentalised by faulting so that much the same problems would be encountered during attempts to develop them. By contrast the shales fracked profitably in the USA occur as horizontal sheets deep beneath entire states: entirely predictable for the drillers. In Britain, tens of thousands of wells would need to be drilled on a ‘compartment-by-compartment’ basis at a rate of hundreds each year to yield useful gas supplies. Fracking in England would therefore present unacceptable economic risks to potential investors. Cornelius and Linder have moved on to more achievable ventures in renewables such as geothermal heating in areas of simple British geology.

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s second-class degree in history from Oxford and his long connection with hedge-fund management seem not to be appropriate qualifications for making complex geoscientific decisions. Such a view is apparently held by several fellow Conservative MPs, one of whom suggested that Rees-Mogg should lead by example and make his North East Somerset constituency the ‘first to be fracked’, because it is underlain by potentially gas-yielding shales. The adjoining constituency, Wells, has several sites with shale-gas licences but none have been sought within North East Somerset. Interestingly, successive Conservative governments since 2015, mindful of a ‘not-in-my-backyard’ attitude in the party’s many rural constituencies, have placed a de-facto ban on development of onshore wind power.

UK shale gas: fracking potential dramatically revised downwards

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

Bowland Shale 1
Areas in Britain underlain by the Bowland Shale formation (credit: British Geological Survey)

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

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

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

Frack me nicely?

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‘There’s a seaside place they call Blackpool that’s famous for fresh air and fun’. Well, maybe, not any more. If you, dear weekender couples, lie still after the ‘fun’ the Earth may yet move for you. Not much, I’ll admit, for British fracking regulations permit Cuadrilla, who have a drill rig at nearby Preston New Road on the Fylde coastal plain of NW England, only to trigger earthquakes with a magnitude less than 0.5 on the Richter scale. This condition was applied after early drilling by Cuadrilla had stimulated earthquakes up to magnitude 3. To the glee of anti-fracking groups the magnitude 0.5 limit has been regularly exceeded, thereby thwarting Cuadrilla’s ambitions from time to time. Leaving aside the view of professional geologists that the pickings for fracked shale gas in Britain [June 2014] are meagre, the methods deployed in hydraulic fracturing of gas-prone shales do pose seismic risks. Geology, beneath the Fylde is about as simple as it gets in tectonically tortured Britain. There are no active faults, and no significant dormant ones near the surface that have moved since about 250 Ma ago; most of Britain is riven by major fault lines, some of which are occasionally active, especially in prospective shale-gas basins near the Pennines. When petroleum companies are bent on fracking they use a drilling technology that allows one site to sink several wells that bend with depth to travel almost horizontally through the target shale rock. A water-based fluid containing a mix of polymers and surfactants to make it slick, plus fine sand or ceramic particles, are pumped at very high pressures into the rock. Joints and bedding in the shale are thus forced open and maintained in that condition by the sandy material, so that gas and even light oil can accumulate and flow up the drill stems to the surface. Continue reading “Frack me nicely?” →

Fracking in the UK; will it happen?

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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)
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
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.

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Review of fracking issues

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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.

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Fracking leaks

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Cameron speaking in 2010.
David Cameron speaks (credit: Wikipedia)

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.

English: Boris Johnson holding a model red dou...
Boris Johnson holds a model London red bus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.

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Fracking check list

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Bergung der Opfer des Grubenunglücks
Aftermath of the 1906 mine explosion at Courrières, northern France; the largest mining disaster in Europe with 1099 fatalities. Image via Wikipedia

Britain is on the cusp of a shale-gas boom (see Britain to be comprehensively fracked? : EPN 14 October 2011) and it is as well to be prepared for some potential consequences. In extensively fracked parts of the US – the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Colorado – there are reports of water taps emitting roaring flames after dissolved methane in groundwater ignites. This is largely due to common-place household water supplies from unprocessed groundwater, which are rare in Britain. But there are other hazards (Mooney, C. 2011. The truth about fracking. Scientific American, v. 305 (Nov 2011), p. 62-67) that have enraged Americans in affected areas, which are just as likely to occur in Britain. In fact the nature of shale-gas exploitation by horizontal drilling beneath large areas poses larger threats in densely populated area, as the people of Blackpool have witnessed in the form of small earthquakes that the local shale-gas entrepreneur Cuadrilla admit as side effects of their exploratory operations .

Chris Mooney succinctly explains the processes involved in fracking shale reservoirs; basically huge volumes of water laced with a cocktail of hazardous chemicals and sand being blasted into shales at high pressure to fracture the rock hydraulically and create pathways for natural gas to leak to the wells. One risk is that this water has to be recovered and stored in surface ponds for re-use. About 75% returns to the surface and also carries whatever has been dissolved from the shales, which can be extremely hazardous. By definition a shale containing hydrocarbons creates strongly reducing conditions, which in turn can induce several elements to enter solution as well as easily dissolved salts; for instance divalent iron (Fe2+) is highly soluble, whereas more oxidised Fe3+ is not, so waters having passed through gas-rich shales will be iron-rich. But that is by no means the worst possibility; one of the most common iron minerals in sedimentary rocks is goethite (FeOOH), which adsorbs many otherwise soluble elements and compounds. In reducing conditions goethite can break down to release its adsorbed elements, among which is commonly arsenic. The blazing faucet hazard results from hydrocarbon gases leaking through imperfectly sealed well casings to enter shallow groundwater, where the gases can also create reducing conditions and release toxic elements and compounds into otherwise pure groundwater by dissolution of ubiquitous goethite, as in the infamous arsenic crisis of Bangladesh and adjoining West Bengal in India where natural reducing conditions do the damage.

What is not mentioned in the Scientific American article is the common association of hydrogen sulfide gas with petroleum, produced from abundant sulfate ions in formation water by bacteria that reduce sulfate to sulfide in the metabolism. This ‘sour gas’, as it is known in the oil industry, is a stealthy killer: at high concentrations it loses its rotten-eggs smell and in the early days of the petroleum industry killed more oil workers than did any other occupational hazard. Visit the spa towns of Harrogate in Yorkshire and Strathpeffer in northern Scotland and sample their waters for examples of what Carboniferous and Devonian gas-rich shales produce quite naturally: noxious stuff of questionable efficacy. The environmental effects of such natural seepage from gas-rich rocks tell a cautionary tale as regards fracking. The highly reducing cocktail of hydrocarbon and sulfide gases in rising, mineral-rich formation water kills the microbiotic symbionts that are essential to plant root systems for nutrient uptake die and so too do trees. The onshore Solway Basin of Carboniferous age in NW England illustrates both points, having many chalybeate springs as the sulfide- and iron-rich waters are euphemistically known and also a strange phenomenon in many of the deep valleys cut by glacial melt waters as land rose following the last glacial maximum. Once trees reach a certain height – and correspondingly deep root systems – they die, to litter the valley woodland with large dead-heads.  Also leaves on smaller trees turn to their autumnal colours earlier than on higher ground. Both seem to be due to minor gas seepages from thick sale sequences in the depths of the sedimentary basin. Indeed, both are botanical indicators to the hydrocarbon explorationist.

To recap, a common size of a fracking operation using several horizontal wells driven from a single wellhead is 4km in diameter entering gas-rich shales at up to 2 km depth. Each well can generate fractures of a hundred metres or more in the shales and surrounding rocks, as they have to for commercial production. In Britain, most of the sites underlain by shales with gas potential are low-lying agricultural- or urban land. The producing rock in the Blackpool area is the Middle Carboniferous Bowland Shale that lies beneath the Coal Measures of what was formerly the Lancashire coalfield, now a patchwork of expanding urban centres. On 23 May 1984 an explosion occurred in Abbystead, Lancashire at an installation designed to pump winter flood water between the rivers Lune and Wyre through a tunnel beneath the Lower to Middle Carboniferous Bowland Fells. The Abbystead Disaster coincided with an inaugural demonstration of the pumping station to visitors, of whom 16 were killed and 22 injured. Methane had escaped from Carboniferous shales to build up in the flood-balancing  tunnel soon after its construction. Methane build-ups were by far the worst hazard throughout the history of British coal mining, thousands dying and being maimed as a result of explosions. One of the largest death tolls in British coal-mining history was 344 miners at Hulton Colliery in Westhoughton, Lancashire in 1910 after a methane explosion; the methane may well have escaped from the underlying Bowland Shales.

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Britain to be comprehensively fracked?

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Tower for drilling horizontally into the Marce...
Drill rig in Pennsylvania aimed at hydraulic fracturing of the hydrocarbon-rich Marcellus Shale of Devonian age. Image via Wikipedia

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 14th 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.

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