The debate surrounding the safety of shale gas development in the Appalachian Basin has generated increased awareness of drinking water quality in rural communities. Concerns include the potential for migration of stray gas, metal-rich formation brines, and hydraulic fracturing and/or flowback fluids to drinking water aquifers. A critical question common to these environmental risks is the hydr...

a r t i c l e i n f o The use of high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has increased substantially over the past five years in the United States. Use of this drilling technology to extract natural gas from hitherto impermeable shale is expected to increase even more in coming decades. Two institutions, integration contracts and well spacing requirements, evolved to mitigate the...

Limited direct measurements of criteria pollutants emissions and precursors, as well as natural gas constituents, from Marcellus shale gas development activities contribute to uncertainty about their atmospheric impact. Real-time measurements were made with the Aerodyne Research Inc. Mobile Laboratory to characterize emission rates of atmospheric pollutants. Sites investigated include productio...

©2015 8872147 Canada Inc. or its licensors CMAJ, February 17, 2015, 187(3) E99 Unconventional gas development, including high-volume hydrofracturing (fracking), has enabled a dramatic increase in North American shale gas drilling. In Canada, drilling is taking place in British Columbia and Alberta and is under active consideration in more populated areas of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia...

With the recent boom in US shale gas production, optimal development of these assets has become a topic of significant interest. In addition to the complex physics typically associated with shale plays, field development optimization can be a challenging problem itself when binary, integer and continuous variables are concurrently present. For complex problems of this nature, it is appropriate ...

This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient oil shale pyrolysis process triggered by a topochemical reaction that can be applied in horizontal oil shale formations. The process starts by feeding preheated air to oil shale to initiate a topochemical reaction and the onset of self-pyrolysis. As the temperature in the virgin oil shale increases (to 250-300°C), the hot air can be replaced by ambie...

We combine a new pore-scale model with a reservoir simulation algorithm to predict gas production in gas-bearing shales. It includes an iterative verification method of surface mass balance to ensure real-time desorption-adsorption equilibrium with gas production. The pore-scale model quantifies macroscopic petrophysical properties of formations using an algorithm of gas transport in porous med...

This paper (SPE 134583) was accepted for presentation at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, Florence, Italy, 20–22 September 2010, and revised for publication. Original manuscript received for review 28 June 2010. Revised manuscript received for review 28 September 2010. Paper peer approved 5 October 2010. Summary This paper presents an experimental study on the ability of orga...