Image of the Day: Latest Onshore Licensing Round

This week sees the release of DECC's 14th onshore licensing round. Potential operators can bid for licences that give them the exclusive right to explore for oil and gas, and indeed shale gas, within their licence block.

Note that having a licence doesn't automatically grant a right to drill or to do hydraulic fracturing. Operators must still get planning permission, and the relevant permits from the EA, DECC, HSE etc before they are allowed to do anything.

Below is a map showing the current state of play onshore in the UK. The map shows existing wells, fields and licence blocks, and the new blocks made available for licensing are shown in purple.

I have also created a google earth .kml file so you can look at this data in more detail. You can download it here.

Another day, another shale gas report

Update (23.7.2014): It transpires that Gwen Harrison, the report's lead author, was recently an election candidate for the Green Party, which has explicitly stated its opposition to fracking in all circumstance. Moreover, judging by recent tweets it seemed she was involved blockading trucks at IGas's Barton Moss site.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with joining political parties nor joining protests. However, it makes a mockery of the claim that the report is "impartial" and "evidence-based", and goes a long way to explaining the report's contents.


Original Article:
Another day, another shale gas report to dissect. Today's offering comes to you courtesy of Scientists for Global Responsibility and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. The report claims to take an "impartial, evidence based approach". It does anything but, so once again it falls to me to point out the more egregious errors.

The best place to start is on the very first page, which shows two schematic images of the fracking process. In both cases the scale of images is such that the depth of the well is smaller than the height of the drilling rig, implying that fracking is taking place at a depth of less than 100m, rather than the actual depth, typically 2 - 3km.

Similar images are provided on page 4, and nowhere are images with the correct scales shown. The images are so out of scale that the "impartial, evidence based" claim immediately cannot be taken seriously. The moment you see an image like this, you know what to expect.

To the non-expert, the degree of the error in these images might not be immediately apparent, so I did a little photoshopping to demonstrate. Imagine if you were reading a report on whether it was safe for commercial airliners to overfly cities at altitude, and on the first page of the report was the following image, I don't think it would be taken that seriously by air safety experts:

German Success...?

A big week for Germany in the news. And no, I'm not talking about 7 - 1!

New rules for hydraulic fracturing have been announced in Germany. This has been widely reported as "Germany bans fracking", but the devil may be in the detail - indeed some groups opposed to fracking have referred to it as a "fracking enabling law". This is because it appears that fracking will be allowed at depths below 3,000m, and "where drinking water is not in danger". It is not clear whether this means in areas where no potable groundwater is present, and/or "if the liquid being used cannot contaminate water".

The laws are due to be further discussed in the Autumn, where hopefully some of these ambiguities will be addressed.

Fracking is not new to Germany. Most of Germany's existing natural gas production, from Lower Saxony in the north of the country, requires hydraulic stimulation to be economic. These are not shale rocks, but "tight sandstones", with low permeability requiring fracturing to improve flow rates. The figure below shows the number of frack-jobs performed in Germany over the last few decades.

It's not clear whether the proposed ban would include these existing reservoirs.

Image (video) of the Day: How near-surface microseismic monitoring works

As part of the monitoring requirements for their new wells in Lancashire, Cuadrilla are installing near-surface microseismic monitoring arrays. Geophones are buried to depths of 50 - 100m. They are capable of detecting the small "pops" and "cracks" as the shale is fractured, allowing the operator to map where the fractures are going as the stimulation progresses.

This video explains how the technique works, and how it is used both to allow operators to maximise the efficiency of their operations, and to minimise any environmental risks.

The video is made for an American audience, and I think to UK eyes it comes across as a little slick and "corporate", but it's well worth a watch.