Bishop Hill Lateral thinking
May 22, 2013 Energy: gas The Institute of Directors has issued a report on shale gas, saying that it could create tens of thousands of jobs in areas that desperately need them.
Shale gas development could create tens of thousands of jobs, reduce imports, generate significant tax revenue and support British manufacturing. The Institute of Directors’ comprehensive new report, Getting shale gas working, studies the lessons of previous energy developments, investigates the economic impacts of potential shale gas production at scale, and sets out the practical steps for both government and industry to overcome the key barriers.
I was particularly struck by the section on an oil and gas field in Dorset called Wytch Farm - the largest onshore field in Western Europe. This has been operated since the 1970s in the most environmentally sensitive site imaginable - Poole Harbour - and has achieved horizontal drilling distances of 10km - a world record.
One of the principal arguments put forward by shale gas's opponents - Parliamentarians of various shades, people with interests in conventional gas, environmentalists and so on - is that because the UK is so much more densely populated that the USA, shale development will be impossible on the same scale. This case doesn't seem to hold water if one can drill laterals of 10km length. I'm interested to know therefore if the extraordinary distances achieved at Wytch Farm could be replicated in the shales of the South-East or Lancashire or whether they have only been possible because of the geology of that particular corner of Dorset.
Reader Comments (39)
Yeah, well they are capitalists. They would say that, wouldn't they?
/sarc (Just in case)
They must have heard that the French don't want theirs!
Thank you for the link to that paper
The argument that high population density precludes shale gas development is nonsense. In fact, drilling many horizontal segments from one vertical well greatly reduces the surface impacts from unconventional development. The first shale gas developments in North Texas have included drilling at many sites in city of Fort Worth. There are shale gas wells under the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
Unfortunately, I live in a state, California, where the body politic from the governor on down is immune to fact-based argument.
This reminds me of a recent radio programme about a proposed potash (polyhalite) mine under the North York Moors National Park. The mineral deposit is huge, is worth £billions and will lead to thousands of jobs and enormous revenue. It involves an underground minehead, horizontal mining and removing the polyhalite by underground pipelines. Needless to say, the greens are spinning all sorts of nonsense about it, yet they never say a word about thousands of useless wind turbines despoiling the countryside.
-------------As if killing Bin Laden wasnt enough-----------
President Obama cynically using Hurricane Sandy and patronising the Gay Vote to get re,elected.
After the Oklahoma Tornado check this link out.
http://io9.com/5815423/10-villains-who-used-bad-weather-as-a-weapon
Further to my above, for those who don't know, polyhalite is a multi-nutrient mineral containing four of the six macro-nutrients required for plant growth (potassium, sulphur, magnesium and calcium). So with all that CO2 as well, the future for food production looks good. No wonder the human-hating greens are against it.
I kept my boat at Poole Harbour for a year. You are not even conscious of much going on at all. Unless you were told, you would not notice. And the some of the most expensive residential properties in the country are there (unfortunately my "Barrett Box" was not one of them).
Wytch Farm is just on the edge of the Juraasic Coast and the geology is quite a mix. The drillers go through all sorts. I've been there several times for work and it's one of the best nature reserves in the country.
"They must have heard that the French don't want theirs!"
I drink your milkshake!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_hFTR6qyEo
Phillip Bratby
Maybe you could sell it as carbon capture technolgy by fertizing the land and then the sea via runoff from rivers...:-)
There might even be a grant available!
Those shale gas jobs are not the sort of jobs that progressives really value. They prefer jobs in entertainment(music and dance are great), teaching (i.e., indoctrination), cooking (small scale, of course), gentle gardening around the house, government (telling people what to think, say, and do), gathering excess twigs during woodland walks, and chattering. A group of about six people sitting around a fire making baskets is their idea of heaven. Organizing all of the stuff necessary to produce any metals or gas or oil or coal requires evil corporations, and those jobs are therefore unacceptable and unwelcome.
From what I have read, the technology is continuing to develop rapidly in all areas. Drilling times are dropping; lateral distances are increasing; more wells are being drilled from each pad (up to 40); water re-use is improving. One recent comment was that, in the US, these advances have made some gas-only fields economic even at to-day's low prices.
The main UK shale beds are much thicker than in the US which raises the prospect of pushing out laterals at different levels, in a layer-cake effect, which would also help the economics.
The opposition to drilling for oil in W. Sussex looks misguided in light of the Wytch Farm experience. Ironically Balcombe, which is the centre of attention, is just down the road from some "nodding donkey" oil pumps on the edge of Pulborough. Like Wytch Farm they have been quietly pushing out oil for ages without any impact on the area.
Can anyone list what FACTS suggest that the UK may not enjoy the same beneficial experience as that enjoyed by the US when it comes to the exploration and exploitation of shale?
I would like to know whether there are any hard facts that support the view that the UK would not benefit in the same way as the US has done so.
I do not think that people fully understand the huge impacts that shale has had on the US. not only in driving its economic recovery, but also how it is playing out on the world stage. It is very material that the US is now no longer beholden to the Middle East for its energy requirements. This is having and will continue to have a major impact on how the US engages with the Middle East. It no longer has the same concerns over oil security in that area which means that there is likely to be less intervention by the US in the affairs of Middle Eastern states.
Shale is a game changer. The UK should join the party. It is a no lose scenario since it does not require any major investment by the UK government. It merley requires the UK government to reduce red-tape, and preferrably to cap planning restrictions/objections. Thereafter it can raise money by licencing development, by licencing fields and will reap the rewards of NI from jobs created, from tax paid by those employeses and by reduced welfare payments (which would have been payable to those who had been unemployed but are now employed in the exploration programmes). Once the shale comes on stream, the government will get corporation tax on the profits, cheaper fuel will put more money in the hands of the consumer thereby boosting a consumer led recovery, cheaper fuel will boost industrial competitiveness and exports yielding even more money to the treasury (and protecting jobs).
There is absolutely nothing not to like about shale. This should be at the forefront of the governments policy for growth since it does not require government cash (which does not exist) and this would created real growth which could go on for generations rather than subsidised phoney growth which is the usual result of state funded projects.
Thousands of people pass Wytch Farm on their way to Studland beach, and I bet most are not even aware of it's existence.
Further to my last post, one point that helped the US is private land ownership.
A lot of oil and shale development has taken place on private land over which the government exercises far less controls and restrictions. This has greatly helped developers and made it much more difficult for green lobbyists to hold back change.
The average US citizen has reaped the reward of this light touch government, and one can now expect to see a significant divergence between the economic fortunes of the US and those of Europe.
So - why are UK politicians so dead-set against the prospect of shale gas reducing the cost of gas to the consumer..? What is it that they are so afraid of..? All we hear from them is: 'Oooh, no - we're never going to get cheaper gas. Energy bills will only rise. No chance of repeating the US experience here..'
WHY..? What are they hiding..? How come that NOT having to rely on Russia for gas isn't a Good Idea..?
There are plenty of CIRIA and other construction industry organisation which which show best practice in preventing pollution during construction projects( CIRIA technical Guide c 648) https://sites.google.com/site/advtechnovation/CIRIA-bookshop/book-pages/c649 .
Issues are simple
1. How many lorries to bring equipment to site and can roads take weight?
2. Area of site required- 2 Ha?
3. Height of drilling rig and visibility?
4. Duration of drilling rig on site ?
5. Noise from drilling - time ( 24 hrs drilling or just M- Friday 9-6pm? loudness and frequency?
6. Dust?
7. Odour?
8. Control of run off from site.
9. Amount of water used.
10. Once drilling finished , area, height, noise and visibility of installation.
11. Restoration policy- landfill have been turned into parks.
12. Impact of drilling rig probably not much than from a large water well rig drilling a large public supply.
Overall impact would probably no worse than noise and dust from large tractors or combine harvesters and odour would be less than muck spreading. Completed installation would be no more impact than a station for a public supply water borehole or a barn containing machinery. During harvest times there are many machines at work in countryside and roads to grain silos are often congested with lorries. It would be easy to require all equipment be brought to site over a few days .
Horizontal drilling probably means location of drilling can be moved a few hundred metres in any direction in order to protect environmental or archaeological features.. There are extensive techniques to protect and even move sensitive sites.
If gas companies invested in local areas such as
a. Provided specialist teachers not employed in local schools- 60% of comprehensives do not teach Further Maths A Level. Many comprehensives have poor language teaching and many non specialists teach science subjects compared to grammar and public schools..
b. Pay for work enabling elderly to live in their homes.
c. Lessons and equipment for children whose parents cannot afford such items.
d.Fund any facilities which used to be supplied by local councils but which have been withdrawn.
e. Fund affordable housing .
Made sure poor, elderly, children and whole community benefited from Shale Gas, not just landowner and local councils.
The prospect of an upper middle class greeny arguing against shale gas which would fund affordable homes, help for the elderly,specialist maths and science teachers, music equipment, dance lessons for the less well off but but which they can afford, would be very amusing .
@Richard Verney: All of US fracking occurs on privately-owned land after purchase of subsurface mineral exploitation rights. None of it happens on government-owned land, as the subsurface mineral rights are not generally for sale.
That said, the technological developments going on in fracking are phenomenal: supercomputer usage for 3-D and even 4-D imaging, introduction of robotics in drill heads, real-time monitoring at drill heads, and the work being done on liquid nitrogen as a fracking medium could mean that existing fields can be refracked quite extensively as long as the price is right. LN fracking reduces post-retrieval processing significantly, for instance, as recovery is purely gas rather than liquid. Real neat stuff, unless, of course, you're a green.
On the "Shell Shuns Shale" post here at the start of May, Entropic Man was most insistent that Wytch Farm presented no similarities whatsoever with a shale gas operation.
The point made above re USian commitment to the Middle East needs re-emphasising. The Yanks are going to go home, maybe not for the next election but the one after that.
How's this for a way to get votes? 'We've got all the oil and shale gas that we need from a few miles below our feet. We'll bring our boys and girls home from the Middle East. If Europe or Japan are worried about their oil supplies, let them build their own navies and be ready to fight. It's not our job to mollycoddle the rest of the world. Vote for us.'
Compared to this: 'It's vitally important that we defend the energy supplies of our allies, even though we ourselves no longer need oil or gas from overseas. Europe and Japan can't defend their interests because their armed forces have been run down over the years as they have hidden beneath Uncle Sam's umbrella. So, send your sons and daughters to die for those who can't be bothered to defend their own interests. Vote for us.'
Get our own fossil fuel supplies sorted out and we won't be fighting Iran when they eventually make their bid for local hegemony. If we don't, we will. _Our_ sons and daughters will die abroad because of failures by, inter alia, Worthington, Blair, Cameron, Brown, Paterson, Miliband... etc.
The big question: why is the BGS shale gas report being suppressed? Surely not so they can lock us into high energy prices before it becomes obvious that that is unnecessary.
JF
If issues of noise, dust, odour can be solved, why should the mast of a drilling rig be considered more of an eyesore than a much taller wind turbine? Perhaps rigs of drilling masts could be made to look like windmills.
JF. In fact the longer the government leaves the report, the greater the technological evolution and therefore the greater the reserves recoverable at lower cost. The LDs plus Gummer and Yeo are no doubt hoping the BGS will reduce the amount of reserves. However, what may happen is that the more time given, the less cautious may be the geologists. When calculating reserves geologists tend to be cautious as they will be blamed if expensive investment in development proves to be un-economic.
The 10 Km record at Wytch Farm did not stand very long, and has been broken in many different geological settings since. The current record is in Sakhalin Island in Russia of 11.45 Km horizontal reach, with a number of wells of almost 11 km reach drilled offshore Qatar.
Attention tends to focus, quite reasonably, on the "first wave" impact of shale in the US: lower gas prices; lower power prices; more jobs; increased tax revenues; growth of support industries; improved energy security; etc..
Those are massively impressive on their own but it is worth looking beyond, to the following waves.
Cheap oil, gas and liquids are driving a colossal amount of investment in primary process industries. Refineries are being expanded or modified - and new ones built - to use natural gas liquids instead of naptha. This cheap feedstock is promoting expansion of plants for basic chemicals, plastics and even fertiliser. Several gas-to-liquids plants are planned to produce fuels. One company is uprooting a methanol plant in Chile and shipping it back to rebuild in the US.
Behind this tsunami of investment, the next phase will be on-shoring of manufacturing. With super-cheap energy and commodities, why ship stuff halfway round the world?
My view is that America is on the cusp of a huge boom similar to the golden years after WWII. Europe faces the enormous risk of being caught between a resurgent US and the leviathans of China and India. Present policies will condemn us to a village pond future: green and stagnant.
Their response to this is predictable - it would be the same as their response to any similar prospects; they believe that these things should be provided by a benevolent state, not evil capitalists.
Where the money comes from is never clear - basically they regard publically funded things as free.
@MikeH
Before I retired I used to watch Euronews in the morning before starting work; one of the adverts I remember was by an oil company talking about producing cleaner fuel (diesel I hink) from natural gas. Unfortunately I can't remember which oil company it was.
NW.Having grown up in the country, I can think of some very beefy women being incensed that an upper middle class greeny stopping her children being able to afford to live in the village. The village meeting would probably turn into a no holds barred fight. The women I know who have worked the land and scrubbed floors have fore arms like wrestlers. The chance of a greeny winning would be minimal . They would be facing strong women who have had probably to endure years of high handed treatment from them.
I think it would be perfect plot For Midsommer Murders.
SandyS; Shell is the market leader in gas-to-liquids. They have a huge plant in Qatar which makes diesel - as you said - from natural gas and I think they have a smaller one in the Far East. That diesel has a number of attributes: gas is much cheaper than oil (about 15% of the oil price in energy terms, I think); it frees up oil for other uses; it contains no sulphur; particulate emissions are much lower; it has a higher cetane rating (ie produces more power). Shell market it in Europe as "V-max".
The 10 Km record at Wytch Farm did not stand very long, and has been broken in many different geological settings since. The current record is in Sakhalin Island in Russia of 11.45 Km horizontal reach, with a number of wells of almost 11 km reach drilled offshore Qatar.
May 22, 2013 at 7:58 PM | Not in the pub yet
Has anyone tried to frack a 10km well?
The fluid volume required would probably increase proportionally to the length, but how much extra pressure would you need to overcome friction losses over the extra distance?
Mike H - thanks re: Shell gtl. Some links I found below. Not sure if it is regularly at the UK pumps though.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/deer_2007/session7/deer07_dahlstrom.pdf
http://www.shell.com/global/aboutshell/major-projects-2/pearl/overview.html
http://www.shell.com/global/future-energy/meeting-demand/natural-gas/gtl.html
http://www.shell.co.uk/gbr/products-services/on-the-road/fuels/vpower/what-is-v-power-nitro-plus.html
And, sort of related, imagine one of these in Poole Harbour!:
http://www.shell.com/global/aboutshell/major-projects-2/prelude-flng/overview.html
I rode my pushbike across the flatlands of the Isle of Purbeck where Wytch Farm is located last summer.
And apart from one or two tracks being concrete roads wide enough to take a petrol tanker, there was nothing at all to see of the drilling activity. Just heathland and confer forest with some grassland for grazing.
It's a very peaceful, and ever so slightly spooky place. Enid Blyton set some of her Famous Five books near there and it still has a bit of the feeling of the land that time forgot.
If WF is an example of how fracking could be done while remaining sensitive to the local environment, then I think many people's fears will prove to be largely groundless.
Latimer A; reading between your lines, I suspect you meant that there was no sign of the oil production work at Wytch Farm. I believe there has not been any actual drilling there for a long time.
With regard to shale - oil or gas - it is worth mentioning that the drilling phase is very short-lived. From what I have read, exploratory drilling can take a couple of months after which the wells are usually shut-in and the rig moves on while all of the data are analysed. If it is worth going for production, crews in the US have got the whole drill-frack-completion operation down to a matter of days per well. So a multi-well pad would again require a few months.
Media reports tend to focus on the drilling phase but, once the wells are completed, all of the rig equipment, pumps, tankers, etc are cleared away. All that is left is a fenced-off plot - typically about half a football pitch - with some pipework, instruments and valves in the middle which would probably be housed in a kiosk about the size of a two-car garage. The progress in lateral drilling means that these small, unobtrusive plots would be miles from one another.
Lastly, we hear a lot about our population density making shale difficult. In reality, the reverse may be true because a lot of the potential hassle with truck movements which are typical for the US may not be needed here. Over there water is trucked in, power comes from generator trucks and waste is finally trucked away. Given the likely proximity to infrastructure over here, those utilities could possibly be provided by temporary connections. Cuadrilla have already been told that water could be piped in, for example (the amounts involved are actually pretty small by water industry standards). One of their sites is about half a mile from a large brickworks so temporary connections look quite feasible.
The only real roadblock is the lack of political will.
Obama supports fracking . Gas prices have fallen from $15 per Million BTU to $4 per M BTU in USA.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/22/obama-administration-supports-fracking-and-natural-gas-despite-environmental-opposition/#more-86838
Update to my previous post....
The IoD has just released a major report and a separate summary on getting shale moving in the UK. It contains up-to-date info on all aspects (from a quick look at the summary).
Francis Egan himself suggests that 2km is the likely lateral extent, not 10 km due to the issue of attempting to maintain such pressures over such a distance. He also has stated that 'for now' urban areas will not be drilled under. If this situation changes then the technical, environmental and political dangers to the shale gas project will ratchet up. Might be better for boosters not to get too far ahead of themselves until much of the claims making subsides and the desired rational discussion proceeds with actual results that can be evaluated from both sides.
So fracking is an unacceptable insult to the landscape. A temporary rig, up for a few months, a ground level fenced enclosure. But windmills dozens of meters tall, peppered all over the landscape, visible for miles, capable of flinging dangerous shards when they fail, leaving large concrete footings are acceptable.
The so-called environmentally conscious are not applying rational standards.
Whose rationality? Who decides? That is why discussion is required, listening to each other rather than shouting past each other or having the powerful alone decide.