Shale gas is currently being explored in Europe as an alternative energy source to conventional oil and gas. There is, however, increasing concern about the potential environmental impacts of shale gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing (fracking). In this study, we focussed on the potential impacts on regional water resources within the Baltic Basin in Poland, both in terms of quantity and qua...

Seawater desalination, the desalination of waters flowing back from hydraulic fracturing processes and brackish water desalination constitute important desalination applications. These have a combined market size in excess of $25 billion per annum and a combined water production rate equivalent to the domestic consumption of over 300 million people. Each application offers its own distinct chal...

Mechanical alloying (MA) is a solid-state powder processing technique involving repeated cold welding and fracturing of powder particles in a high-energy ball mill. It has been used to obtain nanocrystalline binary system FeNi. Fe and Ni elemental powders have been ball milled in a planetary mill (Pulverisette5, Fritsch) for various times up to several hours. The morphology of the powders was e...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel combustion may be reduced by using natural gas rather than coal to produce energy. Gas produces approximately half the amount of CO2 per unit of primary energy compared with coal. Here we consider a scenario where a fraction of coal usage is replaced by natural gas (i.e., methane, CH4) over a given time period, and where a percentage of the gas pr...

Natural fractures seem to be ubiquitous in shale gas plays. It is often said that their presence is one of the most critical factors in defining an economic or prospective shale gas play. Many investigators have presumed that open natural fractures are critical to gas production from deeper plays such as the Barnett, as they are for shallower gas shales such as the Dev‐ onian shales of the nort...

One of the primary public concerns with new development of shale and other unconventional gas resources is potential contamination of shallow groundwater with natural gas (largely methane). Natural gas contamination of shallow groundwater can result from leaky gas production wellbores (e.g. Stein et al., 2003; Van Stempvoort et al., 2005). However, there is also concern that hydraulic fracturin...

Hydraulic fracturing in the fractured reservoirs plays a significant impact on the production rate. In this study, the hydrostatic condition is taken into account, the hydraulic fracturing operation was applied in every direction usinga written distinct element code. In each direction the hydraulic fracture is applied with different lengths and in each level the amount of production is predicte...

Hydraulic fracturing is a key technology for shale gas production. Activating the natural fracture (NF) system in reservoirs and forming complex network can greatly improve effect of fracturing. The mainly influenced by geological factors operational parameters reservoir. Effectively reforming reservoir under unfavourable conditions maximizing activation NFs substantially increase its reformed ...

beginning with a discussion of energy and exergy analysis definitions, the presented study provides a descriptive mathematical model for energy and exergy analysis for a co-current gas cooling tower. for this purpose using conservation laws of mass, energy and momentum, the variation of temperature and enthalpy of gas and liquid streams are predicted along the tower length and are used in order...