Fracking: Inventor and Inducer (Continued)

choi

One might have asked where was the "inducer" in the original posting. I did post it, but just 2 seconds short of the two-hours a library allotted to me. So follow-up posting about inducer did not go through. In me meantime, I have done more research.



(2) Fracking | Dash for Cash; If Britain wants an American-style energy boom, it should import American-style local taxation. Economist, Aug 24, 2013
http://www.economist.com/news/le ... merican-style-local

Quote:

"Once a well is drilled—something that can be done increasingly speedily—it is scarcely more of a blot on the landscape than a garden shed. * * * Fracking is indeed a nuisance, particularly while wells are being drilled. Lorries clog the roads. Workers spend money locally—but they also get drunk and fight locally.

"Fracking has boomed in America partly because local people have been paid off handsomely. Landowners can sell the rights to the hydrocarbons under their fields. States tax extracted oil and gas, and redistribute much of the revenue to the affected counties, which spend it on glorious schools and fire stations. America has NIMBYs too—and some states have banned fracking outright—but money has proved a powerful salve. * * * In centralised Britain, by contrast, almost all the proceeds from fracking that do not flow to miners would end up in the Treasury’s coffers. Oil and gas rights are held in effect by the crown, not landowners. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, sets the tax on shale-gas production: it is 30%, much lower than taxes on North Sea fields.

choi

Without advocacy of landowners, drilling (not just fracking but on the surface also) may not go forward in US, either, see this page and next.

(3) Erica Orden, Fracking Debate Divides New York. Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 30992603209018.html
(As he heads into his re-election campaign in 2014, New York Gov Andrew Cuomo facces a politically fraught decision on whether to allow fracking in New York state, which is opposed by environmentalists and some communities but backed by upstate landowners and local officials, who have embraced fracking as a source of energy-industry jobs in a region suffering from population and employment losses)

choi

(4) Editorial: A Tale of Two Oil States; While the shale boom lifts Texas, California sits on vast resources. Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2013
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324695104578416871045535226.html
("Another contrast is that most Texas oil is on private lands, which owners are willing to lease at a price. In California much of the oil-rich areas are state or federally owned, and leasing doesn't happen because of political constraints")

Note:
(a) "The Golden State has long been one of America's big three oil producing states, along with Texas and Alaska, but last year North Dakota surpassed it. This isn't a matter of geological luck but of good and bad policy choices. Barely unnoticed outside energy circles, Texas has doubled its oil output since 2005. Even with the surge in output in North Dakota's Bakken region, Texas produces as much oil as the four next largest producing states combined."

Crude Oil Production. Energy Information Administration (EIA), US Department of Energy, undated.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbblpd_a.htm
(i) click "View History" for each state, one will find that oil boom in North Dakota and Texas began in 2005 and 2011, respectively, suggesting the starting years of meaningful fracking in these two states.
(ii) Crude oil production in 2007: federal offshore> Texas> Alaska> California>> Louisiana> Oklahoma> New Mexico> Wyoming> North Dakota
(b) "The two richest fields are the Eagle Ford shale formation in South Texas, where production is up 50% in the last year alone, and the 250-square mile Permian Basin. Midland-Odessa in the Permian is one of America's fastest-growing metro areas."
(i) Eagle Ford Formation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Ford_Formation
(also called the Eagle Ford Shale; derives its name from the old community of Eagle Ford, now a neighborhood in West Dallas, where outcrops of the Eagle Ford Shale were first observed)
(A) Map 2 shows Eagle Ford Shae is right underneath Austin Chalk (besides showing outcrops), and map 3 presents a larger picture. View the last map (map 4) in this Wiki page for shale oil and gas in this formation.
(B) What is an "outcrop" as a noun?  This Wiki page says, "The Eagle Ford is mostly confined within the subsurface but outcrops on west side of Dallas and continues at a 1 degree easterly prograding tilt."

* outcrop (n, vi)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outcrop
(C) Three examples of outcrops of Monterey Formation:
* Monterey Formation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterey_Formation
* General Research Topics in the Monterey Formation (Monterey Shale). MARS Project, California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), undated.
http://geology.campus.ad.csulb.e ... RS/page3/page3.html

For MARS Project, see (6) below.
* Dolomite, porcelanite, and phosphatic mudstone at Naples Beach, California. MARS Project, CSULB, undated
http://geology.campus.ad.csulb.edu/people/behl/rbehl/naples.htm
("Most times, the very best outcrops of the Monterey Formation are at the beach, where the sand constantly scours fresh faces of the interesting and beautiful rocks. You can find Monterey outcrops in many places along the California coast. Here, Julie Dumoulin is examining the phosphatic facies of the Monterey Formation at Naples Beach, west of Santa Barbara, California. Photo © Rick Behl (1997)")
(ii) Permian Basin (North America)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian_Basin_(North_America)
(so named because it has one of the world's thickest deposits of rocks from the Permian geologic period; The Permian Basin gives its name to a large oil and natural gas producing area)
(c) "California has huge reservoirs offshore and even more in the Monterey shale"
(i) Review of Emerging Resources: US Shale Gas and Shale Oil Plays. EIA, July 8, 2011
http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/usshalegas/
("The largest shale oil formation is the Monterey/Santos play in southern California, which is estimated to hold 15.4 billion barrels or 64 percent of the total shale oil resources shown in Table 1 [ie 64% of US total estimate]. The Monterey shale play is the primary source rock for the conventional oil reservoirs found in the Santa Maria and San Joaquin Basins in southern California. The next largest shale oil plays are the Bakken and Eagle Ford, which are assessed to hold approximately 3.6 billion barrels and 3.4 billion barrels of oil, respectively")
(A) The quotation discussed shale OIL only, whereas table 1 listed both shale oil and shale gas.
(B) For the meaning of "play" in the EIA report, search that word in
shale gas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas  
(C) play (n):
"4b
(1) : the state of being active, operative, or relevant <other motives surely come into play — MR Cohen> <several issues are at play>  
(2) : brisk, fitful, or light movement <the gem presented a dazzling play of colors>"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/play

choi

The following three pages are about Monterey Formation/Monterey Shale.

(5) Map of Monterey Formation:

David Brown, The Monterey Shale: Big Deal or Big Bust? AAPG Explorer, November 2012
http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2012/11nov/monterey1112.cfm

AAPG stands for "American Association of Petroleum Geologists."

choi

(6) Why is the Monterey Formation not contiguous? And why does Monterey Shale hold so much shale oil/gas?  One reason is its dimension.

Josie Garthwaite, Monterey Shale Shakes Up California's Energy Future. National Geographic, June 2013.
http://news.nationalgeographic.c ... alifornia-fracking/

Quote:

"According to US government estimates, as much as 15.4 billion barrels of oil could be locked within the Monterey shale. That would be more than double the amount of oil reckoned to lie within the Bakken shale, the booming play that has made North Dakota the nation's number 2 oil-producing state behind Texas. It's more than five times the oil of Texas' thriving Eagle Ford shale. Indeed, Monterey holds more than half of the undeveloped, technically recoverable shale oil resources believed to exist in the continental United States.

"Unlike North Dakota's Bakken or the other US shale oil plays, the Monterey was deposited at the edge of the North American continent as it broke up, explained geologist Richard Behl, who runs an industry-supported program at California State University, Long Beach. 'It was all faulted, and it broke into all these steep basins and islands and bank tops in between,' says Behl, whose program is called the MARS Project (Monterey and Related Sedimentary Rocks). The shale of the Monterey formation averages nearly 1,900 feet thick and more than 11,200 feet deep, compared to an average thickness of just 22 feet and depth of 6,000 feet for the Bakken shale. The Bakken, spread over 6,500 square miles of North Dakota and Montana, spans nearly four times as much land area as the Monterey.

Note: Regarding quotation 1. In terms of crude oil production, North Dakota surpassed Alaska in 2012. See Note (a) in (4) above.

choi

(7) John D Cooper, Geology and Paleontology of Orange County. John D Cooper Center, California State University Fullerton, undated (free e-book).
http://coopercenter.fullerton.ed ... YofORANGECOUNTY.pdf

Quote:

"Formations. Fossils occur in sedimentary deposits that accumulate through time as a succession of layers known as a stratigraphic record. Geologic history must be read and interpreted from the record of the rocks, and the stratigraphic record of Orange County holds the clues for unraveling a fascinating succession of events and environments leading up to the present landscape on which we live. For convenience, geologists have subdivided the rock record into formations, which are simply 'packages' or bodies of rock that are sufficiently unique to be differentiated from adjacent rock units on the basis of physical characteristics (viz. color, grain size, thickness, rock type, and physiographic expression) and formally named after geographic localities where, or near, they are well exposed (e.g. Trabuco Formation named for exposures in Trabuco Canyon; Monterey Formation named for exposures near Monterey, California).

"The next stratigraphic unit in the succession is the middle to late Miocene Monterey Formation (Figure 7), which crops out extensively along the coastal strip (e.g. Corona del Mar, Newport Back Bay). The Monterey Formation is a deep-marine deposit consisting of mudstone, shale, diatomite, and some chert.