Natural Gas And Shale
People have been using natural gas to cook their food and heat their dwellings for quite a long time
. Natural gas is an extremely useful fuel; it's potent and relatively safe to use. It's relatively cheap and is plentiful enough that the United States has, by some estimates, a supply that will last for decades, if not more than a century. Before you can turn the dial on your stove and click the cooking flame to life, natural gas must be captured and piped into your home. In their endless search for new and reliable sources of this resource, geologists and other scientists have figured out how to reclaim natural gas from shale. In the future, a significant percentage of the heat from your furnace could come from this shale gas, so let's take a look at where it comes from, and how energy companies get it to your home.
The easiest natural gas to reclaim is the kind that is found atop oil deposits. After millions of years of pressure and heat, biological material becomes petroleum and gas that rest between two layers of impermeable rock. Hard rock like that isn't going anywhere, so the petrochemicals (oil and gas) are eager to escape when the rock is pierced. When oil companies drill a new well, they often remove large amounts of natural gas first.
The Energy Information Administration notes that the primary component of natural gas is methane, a hydrocarbon molecule. Lots of energy is locked in those flammable molecules. Once burned, methane releases carbon dioxide and water. The carbon dioxide is a bit of a problem; while CO2 occurs naturally in the atmosphere, too much of it is a problem. A greenhouse gas, excessive carbon dioxide, most climatologists believe, is contributing to the rise in global temperatures.
Geologists would be happy indeed if all natural gas were bottled up with easy-to-retrieve oil deposits. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Removing shale gas presents different challenges to engineers. Shale is a sedimentary rock, which means that it is formed by gradual deposits made by bodies of water. This clay and other fine particles are condensed into fine, wide sheets because of the way bodies of water work. A stream or lake bed may flow quickly at one point and slower the next. Vast shale deposits reflect this, as some layers will appear thick, and others thin. As shale is composed of whatever materials happen to settle on the bottom of the water, the color will vary somewhat between shales.
There is a significant amount of natural gas in a great deal of the shale in the United States. NaturalGas.org highlights a map that illuminates the biggest deposits. As you might expect, there's a lot of shale gas in the Midwest, where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, for millions of years, have deposited organic matter in between layers of sedimentary rock. The Northeast is also shale gas-rich, which makes sense because Pennsylvania was once on the ocean floor, and the area is also coal-rich.
The big challenges have been technologically insurmountable for some time: how do you remove molecules of gas from rocks, and how do you extract this gas without damaging the environment? A Houston Chronicle article by Jennifer A. Dlouhy seems to indicate that these hurdles have been overcome. The technique, pioneered by a company called XTO is called hydraulic fracturing; in which engineers inject fluids underground to shatter this shale along its seams. Once the underground environment is disrupted, the natural gas is released and floats to the surface, just like most other gases. After the gas is above ground, it is collected and held in pressurized tanks until it is brought to municipal supplies.
The benefit of technique lies in its reduced impact on the environment. Instead of digging up acres of land, hydraulic fracturing allows energy companies to keep the surface relatively intact. The natural landscape remains largely untouched because the drilling and water blasting happen underground. Just like everything else in the world, there's a catch: the water used to erode the rock needs to be run off somewhere. Adding this water to nearby rivers or streams could result in excessive levels of undesired pollution. The water could also seep through those shale seams into drinking water supplies.
None of us are going to stop using natural gas anytime soon. As the easiest-to-access supplies of natural gas are exhausted, shale gas will be an increasingly attractive option.
by: Terry Mickelson
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