Shale Gas and Fracking: the Politics and Science

How is Shale Gas Formed Video Transcript

Hello. This is Sarah O'Hara. And in this presentation, we're going to take a look at
what shale gas is and how it's formed. Before doing so, we'll take a look at what is
shale itself. Then we'll move on to how the shale gas is formed and where we find it.
And then, finally, what I want to do is take a look at what we mean by conventional
and unconventional gas, and how do they differ.
So to start with, what is shale and how is it formed? I think the first thing to say is
shale is the most abundant sedimentary rock that's found in the world. And we see it
across all five continents.
It's a very fine-grained sedimentary rock. Individual particles are generally less than
4/1,000 of a millimetre in diameter, so you can't see them by the naked eye. And the
particles tend to be platy, rather than the more rounded grains that you get in silty or
sandy materials. As such, it's classified or categorised as a mudstone.
We also refer to shale as being a clastic rock. This means that it's been formed when
clasts or fragments of other rocks that have been eroded are redeposited and, over
time, form a rock. But shale is distinguished from other mudstone because of two
distinguishing features.
The first is that it's laminated. And that means that the rock is made up of many,
many layers of material as the sediment accumulates, so it's very, very thin. But it's
also fissile. And that means that the rock can be easily broken along the planes of
these laminations.
You won't often see this, if you look at a rock that's come from deep in the ground.
But when it's surface-- and you can see in the photograph here, is shale that's
exposed at the surface-- that through the process of weathering, we can very, very
clearly see some of these laminations beginning to be picked out by the weathering
process.

So the natural gas that we find within shales is just like oil and coal. It's a fossil fuel. It
formed millions of years ago and began life as plants and animals that lived within the
waters. And during their life, these plants and animals absorbed energy from the sun.
And it was stored as carbon in their bodies.
When they died, they'd sink down to the sea bed. And if this was an oxygen-deficient
environment, they'd be preserved. And over time, they would become trapped in the
layers of sediment and organic material that accumulated.
The buildup of heat and pressure within these deposits resulted in the compaction of
the sediments and the formation of shale. But the same heat and pressure also breaks
down the carbon bones and the organic matter that's trapped within the sediments.
So when temperatures exceed around about 120 degrees C, or 250 degrees
Fahrenheit, it would effectively cook the rock and cook the organic material contained
within it, and that would create the oil and gas. Now this is a process that takes
millions and millions of years.
The chemical composition of shale gas is no different from natural gas. And it's
dominated by methane. The deeper the sediment and the hotter the temperatures
that are achieved, the greater the percentage of methane that we find. So more
mature deposits will tend to have more methane in them.
Gas is described as being conventional or unconventional. And it can neither be
associated with oil, as we can see here, or none associated, whereby, it forms a
discrete reservoir of gas. In both of these cases, what we find is the gas is held in
place by a seal rock. And this stops the gas and methane migrating up through the
sedimentary sequence. Unconventional gas only differs because of the geological
setting in which we find it.
So as I mentioned earlier, shale is very fine-grained, but it does have lots of little
pores in its spaces between these grains. But what happens is, because the
sediment's very platy, these pores are not connected, so the gas can't flow through it
very easily. And for this reason that we refer to it as unconventional. It's just trapped
in the pores within the rock.
Because shale rock is so common, the geographical spread of potential deposits of
shale gas is much greater than the discrete pockets of gas that we find in
conventional deposits. So geologists suggest that there will be major deposits in
China, in Argentina, in Algeria, the USA, and Canada.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, China has the largest
deposits of technically recoverable shale gas. And as you can see, the United States,
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where shale gas extraction has developed quite rapidly in the last few years, this
ranks fourth. At the bottom of the table is the UK, estimated to have about 26 trillion
cubic feet of technically recoverable gas, which is far, far smaller than anything we
see from, say, China and Argentina.
But you'll find out more about the UK shale gas potential from Will, later this week.
But let's now hear from Ed Hough from the British Geological Survey, and what he has
to say about how shale gas is formed.
Shale gas is essentially the same as gas that's extracted from the North Sea, so it's
methane. You may get smaller amounts of hydrocarbons, including propanes, butanes.
But essentially, about 80% to 95% will be methane. It's just the same as North Sea
gas.
So the difference between conventional and unconventional gas doesn't relate to the
actual gas itself. The gas is essentially the same. What we have is, for conventional
systems, conventional hydrocarbon systems, we have the ability to drill a bore hole
into the hydrocarbon reservoir and achieve commercial flows of hydrocarbons, of gas
from the reservoir.
But from conventional systems, if you drill a bore hole into shales, for example, you
won't achieve commercial flows of gas. So to obtain commercial flows of gas, there's a
need to, actually, what's called, stimulate the rocks, to fracture the rocks, to allow gas
to flow from the rock itself into the wellbore.
So a conventional gas reservoir might be one that's hosted in a sandstone. And with a
sandstone, you have grains of sand, which may be about a millimetre in diameter. And
these are packed into the rock. Between them, you develop pore spaces, so gaps. And
it's within those gaps that the hydrocarbons can accumulate. The pore spaces may be
on the millimetric scale.
Now if you contrast that to the situation of shale, shales, because of the much finer
grain size, the actual spaces between the pores are much smaller. And we're looking
at, instead of the millimetric scale, we're down to the nanometer scale. So we're a few
orders of magnitude smaller than you would find in a conventional system. And it's the
connectivity between these pore spaces, or the pore connectivity between pore
spaces, which makes the extraction of gas extremely challenging from shales.