Marcellus Shale Fracking – Transloading Bulk Materials for Marcellus Shale Drilling

Posts Tagged ‘Marcellus shale deposit’

Why use sand with fracking is a question some of the land owners are asking. This has become a topic amongst many land owners that are located on the Marcellus shale deposit in the northeastern portion of America.

Transloading Sand for Fracking

The reason is rather simple. Frac sand is a very same but dense substance that is readily available. This makes this material rather inexpensive. It can be found in many deposits across the nation, including in the northeast part of the United States and in the Texas region.

The shape of this sand does vary from the different deposits from round to irregular. This does not matter or interfere with its use as frac sand. Sand or silica is not water soluble. This is a very important characteristic of frac sand and why it is the medium of choice for hydrofracking. Since it does not dissolve in any capacity, it is always suspended.

Since frac sand has this characteristic of always being suspended, it flows into the crevices and fractures that are created when the well is placed under pressure during the hydrofracking process. Once the pressure is relieved, the frac sand stays in place. This keeps the fractures open and allows the oil and natural gas to escape into the well’s main reservoir.

Once the oil and natural gas is in the main reservoir, it can be extracted by normal means and collected for processing.

Frac Sand Pile

The frac sand does come out during the pressure release of the fracking process, but not during the extraction of the oil and natural gas. This makes it ideal for fracking.

Why use sand with fracking is because it is the perfect medium in price and characteristic properties to perform the necessary job that is required.

Click this link for more on Marcellus Shale Fracking.

If you are in the natural gas recovery business and have transloading requirement needs for sand, and all types of drilling materials for use in the Marcellus Shale region, you should contact the sponsor of this blog at TRAN-Z for assistance.

American natural gas shale deposits are in several regions of the nation. The best known is the Marcellus Shale Deposit that covers the states of New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. To a lesser extent, the states Maryland and Virginia, along with Lake Erie, also have a limited amount under them.

Right next to the Marcellus deposit is the Devonian Shale Deposit that reaches from Ohio in the north, to Tennessee in the south. These two together are the largest deposits in the nation, with estimated 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas deposits in the shale rock bed.

The second largest region is the Barnett Shale Deposit in northern Texas. This deposit covers 17 counties including the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. Other significant deposits are the Haynesville Shale Deposit in the northwestern portion of Louisiana, and Fayetteville Shale Deposit in Arkansas.

There are other smaller deposits in Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, and Michigan, each one with proven reserves that is currently being tapped. What has slowed the recovery of these deposits is the drop in the price of natural gas.

The decline in prices is not due to a reduction in the demand for this domestic natural resource, but the plentiful supply of it. This in turn has reduced the profit potential of recovering this type of deposit.

Unlike other reservoirs, horizontal drilling must occur with fracking the wells to recover natural gas from the shale deposits. This has slowed the recovery of the natural gas from these regions slightly.

European countries are starting to venture into the US market with interest in our natural gas deposits. Their reliance on Russian gas has been problematic for years, so a switch to America is gaining strength.

This should not be a worry since the American natural gas shale deposits are large enough to last America with over 100 years of this energy reserve, we will not be running out any time soon.

The term gas fracking is the slang used in the oil and gas industry when referring to hydro fracturing of the rock deposits. When first used at the turn of the last century, the injecting of water into a well was used to bring more of the oil deposit to the surface.

Horizontal drilling began to be used over 60 years ago. This helped drillers tap into a larger cross section of a deposit. Natural gas explorers soon noticed there were advantages of injecting sand with the water under high pressure to break the rock formations and cause micro fractures in the rock.

The water and sand mixture is called slurry. When this is injected into a well at pressures up to 15,000 psi, it causes the cracking of the rock. This releases the trapped gas that is in the shale rock formations. The sand is used to help keep these micro fractures open so the gas can escape to the surface and be collected.

The horizontal drilling techniques make it possible for the fractures to develop in the rock layer more evenly and in greater numbers. There is no need to fracture rock layers that contain no oil or gas, which this type of drilling helps to reduce.

From an environmental standpoint, this hydro fracturing to recover more trapped natural gas could be beneficial to reducing the buildup of greenhouse gases especially CO2. This is possible if more coal burning electrical plants convert their energy source to the cleaner burning natural gas that is becoming more abundant. This in part can be contributed to advances in the gas fracking techniques now being deployed in the Marcellus shale deposit in the Appalachian mountain region of our country.

The Marcellus shale deposit was so named in 1839 by James Hall because of its exposure at the surface in a cliff near Marcellus, New York. This is just a small portion of it. Most of this shale deposit lies thousands of feet below the surface of the ground in the Appalachian basin from New York in the north to parts of Virginia in the south and into Ohio to the west. This layer of organic sediment is thought o be nearly 390 million years old.

The reason for its importance is the vast amounts of natural gas that is trapped within this organic layer. In 2002, the USGS team estimated that 1.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may be lying undiscovered beneath the Marcellus shale deposit. This has recently changed. By 2007, over 375 wells have been producing gas in the region, and in 2008, the estimated amount of natural gas potential of the region was increased to 500 trillion cubic feet.

The extraction technique that is used is mainly horizontal drilling because the fractures in this layer are vertical. After the initial extraction, a secondary technique is used to extract additional gas from the shale layer. This is called hydraulic fracturing. This is when water is pumped under high pressure into the well to further the fracturing of the shale which releases even more gas. To prevent the fractures from collapsing, sand grains are forced in to the fractures, hence the term fracking sand.

The significance of this deposit can be expressed by the fact that if only 10% of the estimated 500 trillion cubic feet of gas can be recovered, that is enough to supply every American home with natural gas for 2 years. The Marcellus shale deposit is the largest single reservoir of natural gas in America that can help supply this nation with a domestic energy source and lessen our need of foreign resources.

This blog at Transloading.org being a blog about the company, TranZ, will be discussing Marcellus shale and the natural gas drilling methods used as this is the major part of this company’s business.  TranZ provides short line rail service from the mines that produce the fracking sand to bring this sand to railheads where the transloading process is able to deliver the sand to the end user contractor.