Tuesday
Jul142015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Shale gas coolness
Jul 14, 2015 Energy: gas While looking for something else I came across this (promotional?) video for a new drilling rig for shale gas operations, which claims huge efficiency gains because it can partially assemble itself and also walk from one well to the next.
Which I thought was pretty cool.
Reader Comments (10)
Frackin' gel, we'll be well.
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I liked Robot Wars.
This would be cool.
The rate of technological progress in fracking is astounding.
"Darling, did you leave the gate open?"
"Oh, no, don't tell me the shale gas plant has wandered in again!"
"It's sniffing round the robot vacuum cleaner."
"Oh great, the last thing we need is a load of baby robots that drill holes all over the place."
"On the bright side, we'd have the only pet that cleans up its own mistakes."
Wait for the Green Blob to ask "What big is your shale gas drilling machine's footprint?"
"Walking rigs" are pretty common these days in the US. They can't "walk" from one drill pad to another, but they can move several meters on a pad, which makes drilling a large number of holes in different directions from a single large pad much faster and cheaper.
I love technology.
The rate of technological progress in fracking is astounding.
Really? The first patent was issued in the 1850s. The roots of modern facking go back to Halliburton's activities in the early 1950s. By 1975 the American public was hearing its President talk about shale oil production in his State of the Union speech. The innovation of combining fracking with horizontal drilling is not new either. In the 1980s Mitchell Energy & Development began to experiment with hydraulic fracking in shale formations in Texas and had come up with a worthwhile commercial approach by the early 1990s. The earlier innovations were much more important than what we are seeing today because they could be used to produce oil from shale formations economically.
[Snip - I'm not going to let you divert every shale thread into a discussion about economic viability]
Walking isn't that novel. "Big Geordie" the biggest dragline we ever had in the UK could walk at about 2 metres per minute.
I would doubt if there is much scope for walking rigs here. Our rigs in the UK will be nothing like as close to one another as in the US and there will be a lot more in the way of obstacles and valuable real estate en route.
Dave I think you have missed the point. Normally they drill a series of wells in one location fanning out in all direction. Drilling to depth and then Horizontal sometimes out to several Kilometres. The Rig would only walk within the area where the well-heads are.