Sentences with phrase «shale layers»

8:21 p.m. Updated The producers of Bloggingheads.TV invited me to join Abrahm Lustgarten of ProPublica in a discussion of the drilling boom aimed at the vast deposits of natural gas identified in deep shale layers and other deposits around North America and, increasingly, the world.

This technology holds great potential to lower the «dread to risk ratio» surrounding the hydraulic fracturing process, in which water with traces of other substances is injected into a well at high pressure to fracture deep shale layers holding the gas.

Chip Northrup, a former oil and gas investor from Texas who now splits his time between Dallas and upstate New York, is an articulate and energetic opponent of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for the natural gas locked in deep shale layers in the state.

The study should ease * concerns that reports of briny water mixing with drinking water have anything to do with gas drilling, including the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, used to release gas from deep shale layers.

The areas where water samples drawn from near - surface layers had traces of the natural contaminants from the deep shale layers showed no relationship to past or current gas drilling activity, the researchers reported.

He said regulators have always thought that there are few emissions during the drilling process, but when drilling rigs drill through shale layers containing a lot of natural gas, a pressure pulse will send gas out of the well and into the atmosphere.

Fracturing a deep shale layer one time to release natural gas might pose little risk to drinking - water supplies, but doing so repeatedly could be problematic

«For example, a clay or shale layer can be impermeable, but if fractured during an earthquake, could release mud and water that was under pressure below the layer.

The fossil was found alongside ammonites and crustaceans, called index fossils, because they date the shale layer.

The marine shale layer in which it was found is part of the Eagle Ford Group, a rock unit unique to Texas.

Acidic water reached the shale layer by percolating through the overlying limestone, the researchers suggest, aided by cracks created by mining operations.

Not exact matches

Layers make for a weaker product like a shell or shale - like object that breaks apart when pierced by a screwdriver, for example.

More bountiful still is oil shale, a type of heavy oil that lies between layers of rocks like North Dakota's shale - oil but requires oilsand - like extraction and upgrading techniques.

Although the Permian has been gushing crude since the 1920s, its multiple layers of oil - soaked shale remained largely untapped until the last several years, when intensive drilling and fracturing techniques perfected in other U.S. Shale regions were adopted.

One portion of the giant field, known as the Wolfcamp formation, was found to hold 20 billion barrels of oil trapped in four layers of shale beneath the desert in West Texas, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a report on Tuesday.

Mitchell's approach involves drilling wells straight down, then taking a 90 - degree turn and continuing along horizontally through a layer of oil - soaked rock such as shale.

They usually consist of fossil trees that were buried upright, and which often traverse multiple layers of strata such as sandstone, limestone, shale, and even coal beds.

They noticed a remarkable congruency as they moved upward through the layers of shale into the time period where animal life began, in the late Proterozoic Eon.

But Clarens says fracking fluids could theoretically leak into aquifers, because the wells must be dug through shallow layers where the aquifers lie in order to reach shales.

The rocks were of sandstone, siltstone, and shale: thin layers of sediment, each layer representing a year, or 10, or 100 — I had no idea — welded by time into varying degrees of solidity.

«Ash from dinosaur - era volcanoes linked with shale oil, gas: Shale oil, gas deposits accompany ash layers from thousands of volcanic eruptions.»

Lee said shale gas and tight oil deposits are not found in the ash layers but appear to be associated with them.

Sedimentary rock such as sandstone and shale, created from layers of deposited material, does an especially good job of preserving animal and plant remains.

Above this reservoir, layers of impermeable rock, such as shale and clays, prevent the CO2 migrating to the surface.

The formation, composed of layers of shale and hydrocarbons, is beneath land that has been the site of conventional oil and gas drilling since the 1880s, when American oil companies first began operating.

However, the technique proved difficult to use in shale deposits, which form in layers that are wide but shallow.

It is highly permeable, making it easy to pump the CO2 in, and is capped by layers of impermeable shale with a total thickness of about a mile, making it hard for the CO2 to get back out.

Here's how a green roof works: a layer of felt retains water for hardy plants like sedum or certain grasses, covered by about an inch of «soil» — really a man - made substrate composed of porous shales and clays.

Once FutureGen is up and running — now scheduled to happen in 2014 — the carbon dioxide gas it produces will be siphoned off, compressed into a near - liquid state, and piped at least a mile down into porous sandstone capped by a layer of impermeable shale.

To find out whether acid rain was indeed the problem, the team focused on one problematic sliding layer in the Jiweishan avalanche: a thin bed of black shale, which contains slippery clay minerals such as talc, in addition to fine organic material and calcite, which helps cement the shale together.

Increases and decreases in glaciation during the Pennsylvanian resulted in sea level fluctuations that can be seen in the rocks as striped patterns of alternating shale and coal layers.

One area that has attracted much attention in the last several years is a stratum of shale called the Marcellus, which was discovered 150 years ago and named for a small town in New York state where the layer of shale had, after a series of geological upheavals, been wrenched to the surface.

There have long been secrets buried deep in the southern Appalachians, covered in layers of shale and coal, lying beneath the ancient hills of the Cumberlands, and lurking in the shadows of the Smokies at the tail end of the mountainous spine that ripples down the East Coast.

Since 2011, Alex Trembath, a tireless and talented energy analyst at nonprofit The Breakthrough Institute, has been digging into the complicated history of public and private initiatives and investments that unlocked the vast gas and oil resource contained in layers of shale rock.

Stefan Bachu, who holds the title «distinguished scientist» at Alberta's provincially funded research organization, Alberta Innovates Technology Futures (AITF), said the saline reservoir that the Quest project has chosen for storage is capped by hundreds of meters of solid shale, overlaid by an additional layer of tight salt rock.

«The radioactive levels at the Marcellus shale formation are off the charts,» he says, referring to the gas - rich layer that underlies much of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Nonetheless, up to 50 layers of natural gas can occur between the surface and deep shale formations, and methane from these shallow deposits has intruded on groundwater near fracking sites.