Environmental Considerations Associated with Hydraulic Fracturing Operations
by James A. Jacobs, Stephen M. Testa
4Overview of Drilling and Hydraulic Fracture Stimulation Techniques for Tight Oil and Gas Shale Formations
4.1 Introduction
The development of extended and accurate horizontal drilling and high‐volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) stimulation techniques with specialized chemicals is directly related to the types of geologic targets and production methods needed to extract unconventional petroleum deposits. Unconventional petroleum resources allow for reconsidering aspects focused on for conventional oil and gas plays: the natural processes of biomass accumulation and burial, hydrocarbon generation, expulsion and migration of the hydrocarbons, entrapment, and alteration. A variety of unconventional and alternative energy resources have entered the marketplace in recent years, competing aggressively with conventional fuels such as coal, and oil and gas, produced from conventional reservoirs (Lehr and Keeley 2016). Some of the more common unconventional hydrocarbon resources are:
- Oil sands: Extra heavy crude oil or crude bitumen trapped in unconsolidated sands. Examples include the Athabasca Basin tar sands in the McMurray Formation, Alberta, Canada, and the Orinoco Basin heavy oil belt in Venezuela. Oil sands are extracted using surface mining and in situ steam‐assisted gravity drainage (SAGD), and significant post‐extraction processing is required, which is energy intensive.
- Oil shale: Organic‐rich shales and fine‐grained rocks containing significant volumes of kerogen. Oil ...