Hydraulic fracturing in the US

Hydraulic Fracturing in the U.S
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Hydraulic Fracturing in the U.S
Introduction
Hydraulic fracturing (HF) along with horizontal drilling has transformed shales that were previously not productive into the biggest natural gas fields in the globe. In the United States, the process of hydraulic fracturing is used in 9 out of ten natural gas wells, where millions of gallons of chemicals, water and sand are pumped into the ground in order to break apart the rocks to release gas. Concerns has been raised by scientists that chemicals which are used to fracture rocks could create a threat not just underground, but also when the waste fluids are mishandled and spilled out on the surface (Yew, 2007).
Literature review
Valko & Economides (2005) stated that hydraulic fracturing refers to a process which can enhance the flow of gas or oil from a well. This procedure is typically carried out by pumping liquids down a well and into underground rock units under extremely high pressures that fracture the rock. Usually, the objective is to form a network of fractures that are interconnected, which will serve as pore spaces for the movement of natural gas and oil to the well bore. The first industrial use of the process of HF was in 1903 and prior to that year, the procedure was employed at the Mt. Airy quarry in North Carolina where it was extensively employed in separating blocks of granite from bedrock (Brady & Brown, 2007). Conversely, the initial application of HF in stimulating natural gas and oil wells in the United States took place in the 1940s at the Hugoton gas field in the state of Kansas. One thousand US gallons of gelled gasoline as well as sand obtained from Arkansas River was inserted into the gas-generating limestone formation located 730 m underground for the well treatment. The procedure was successful in increasing the rates of well production and the practice then spread rapidly. In 1949, a patent on this procedure was issued and an exclusive license awarded to the company that invented it – Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company. This company then on March 17, 1979 carried out the first two commercial HF treatments in Archer County, Texas and Stephens County, Oklahoma. Today, the HF procedure is used worldwide each year in thousands of wells (Zoback, 2010).
According to Jaeger, Cook and Zimmerman (2007), massive or high-volume HF treatment was first used in the United States by a firm called Pan American Petroleum in 1968 to a well in Oklahoma’s Stephens County. Five hundred thousand pounds of proppant was injected into the rock formation. Geologists from the United States in the 1960s became more and more aware of large volumes of gas-saturated rocks whose permeability happened to be very low to economically recover the natural gas. The government of the United States tried out with the use of underground nuclear explosions to fracture the rock and allow the recovery of gas from the rock. Explosions such as these were conducted in the Piceance Basin of Western Colorado and New Mexico’s San Juan Basin although the outcomes were disappointing, and therefore, halting the tests. Consequently, petroleum industry then embraced the new massive HF method as a way of recovering tight gas (Spellman, 2013). An oil and chemical corporation, Amoco, in early 1970s introduced massive HF to the Wattenberg field of Colorado for the sole purpose of recovering natural gas from the low permeability J Sandstone. It is notable that the Wattenberg field was not unprofitable before massive HF. The injected 200,000 pounds of sand proppant and 132,000 gallons were effective in recovering much higher volumes of natural gas than had been impossible to recover previously (Brady, 2012). The success of massive HF in Wattenberg Field was followed by its application in natural gas wells drilled to tight sandstones of the Mesaverde Group of Western Colorado in the late 1970s. Beginning 1970s, a substantial number of tight-sandstone natural gas wells in the United States were stimulated using massive HF. The following are some of the areas that were made economic by the massive HF procedure; fields in the Green River Basin of Wyoming, Ohio’s Clinton-Medina Sandstone play, Cotton Valley Sandstone trend in Texas and Louisiana, and New Mexico’s San Juan Basin (Valko & Economides, 2005).
The process of HF is also largely applied in coalbed methane wells, which started to be drilled in the 1980s. Zoback (2010) pointed out that coalbed methane wells are typically hydraulically fractured to increase the rates of flow to the well. Commonly, HF is employed in some coalbed methane areas, for instance the Raton Basin of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado and Black Warrior Basin of Northern Mississippi and Western Alabama, but not in others, for instance the Power River Basin of Northern Wyoming and Southeast Montana, as it depends on the geology of the local area. The volumes injected are much smaller compared to those of either shale gas wells or tight gas wells. The average volume injected for coalbed methane wells is 57,500 gallons (Brady & Brown, 2007). The process of HF is also extensively used in shales. In the 1970s, the government of the United States kicked off the Eastern Gas Shales Project which comprised several private-public hydro-fracturing pilot demonstration projects. At the same time, a natural gas industry research consortium, Gas Research Institute, obtained endorsement for funding and research from the country’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Mitchell Energy in 1997 developed the HF method called slickwater fracturing, and this was very essential in making the extraction of shale gas economical (Davis, 2012). In the United States, the shale-gas industry increased by 45% annually from 2005 to 2010, and as a percentage of America’s overall gas production, shale-gas grew to 24% in 2012 from 4% in 2005. As of 2012 in the United States, over 1.1 million jobs in HF have been done – some natural gas wells were fractured hydraulically at least twice – and nearly 90 percent of new United States onshore natural gas and oil wells are hydraulically fractur...