S hale resource systems have had a dramatic impact on the supply of oil and especially gas in North America, in fact, making United States energy independent in natural gas reserves. These shale resource systems are typically organic-rich mudstones that serve as both source and reservoir rock or source petroleum found in juxtaposed organic-lean facies. Success in producing gas and oil from thes...

This article is motivated by a conundrum: How can shale gas development be encouraged and managed without complete knowledge of the associated risks? To answer this question, we used back propagation (BP) neural networks and expert scoring to quantify the relative risks of shale gas development across 12 provinces in China. The results show that the model performs well with high predictive accu...

In April 2011, we published the first peer-reviewed analysis of the greenhouse gas footprint (GHG) of shale gas, concluding that the climate impact of shale gas may be worse than that of other fossil fuels such as coal and oil because of methane emissions. We noted the poor quality of publicly available data to support our analysis and called for further research. Our paper spurred a large incr...

Stress damage of shale during the uniaxial loading process will cause the change of permeability. The study of stress sensitivity of shale has focused on the influence of confining pressure on shale permeability and the change of shale permeability during the loading process of axial stress is lacking. The permeability of gas shale during loading process was tested. The results show that shale ...

We investigate the health impacts of unconventional natural gas development of Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania between 2001 and 2013 by merging well permit data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection with a database of all inpatient hospital admissions. After comparing changes in hospitalization rates over time for air pollution-sensitive diseases in counties with unconven...

In classic theory, the natural gas generated by organic matter (OM) would become dry with the increase of source rock maturity [1]. Meanwhile, the carbon isotope of gas would become heavy during the evolution process of source rock [2-4]. However, some new characteristics of geochemistry appear in shale gas found in shale with over maturity, such as the isotopic rollover, partial reversal and f...

Based on the porous flow theory, an extension of the pseudo-functions approach for the solution of non-linear partial differential equations considering adsorption-desorption effects was used to investigate the transient flow behavior of fractured wells in shale gas reservoirs. The pseudo-time factor was employed to effectively linearize the partial differential equations of the unsteady flow r...

In the early 2000s US gas production was in slow but steady decline despite increasing drilling activity. As US natural gas prices rose in response to the resulting tight market, the only supply-side solution appeared to lie in the development of liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in the Middle East and Africa for importation to the North American market. Almost unnoticed in its early stages,...

Advances in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing have sparked a natural gas boom from shale formations in the United States. Regulators face a rapidly changing industry comprised of hundreds of players, operating tens of thousands of wells across 30 states. They are often challenged to respond by budget cuts, a brain drain to industry, regulations designed for conventional gas developm...

Various analytical, semi-analytical, and empirical models have been proposed to characterize rate and pressure behavior as a function of time in tight gas and shale gas systems featuring horizontal wells with multiple hydraulic fractures. Despite a few analytical models, as well as a small number of published numerical studies, there is currently little consensus regarding the large-scale flow ...