Marcellus Shale Fracking – Transloading Bulk Materials for Marcellus Shale Drilling

Posts Tagged ‘natural gas pocket’

The Marcellus horizontal drilling is legal and practical due to the way the formation of shale rock has formed. When a drilling company just drills straight down, or what is called vertical drilling, their borehole only intersects the shale layer that is a small and limited area.

The shale layer in the Marcellus shale region is not vertical but horizontal, like nearly all layers of the earth’s mantle. The horizontal drilling is vertical drilling at the top, but a directional drill head changes the course and direction of the borehole during the drilling process.

The main advantage of this process is that a greater area of the shale rock bed is exposed in the borehole. This increases the possibilities of the drilling to intersect with a natural gas pocket. Because of this increased area of exposure when fracking is needed to increase the amount of natural gas or oil from the shale rock bed, a better result is achieved.

The secondary advantage is that multiple boreholes can be started on the same platform, but go in different directions. This allows for more underground area that can be covered without a greater impact on the surface environment.

Horizontal drilling is accomplished by starting a vertical shaft downward. As the hole is being drilled, the direction is guided sideways. This is not a 90-degree turn like on a street, but a slow curving arch that could take hundreds of feet before the corner is achieved.

With this style of drilling, most wells are capable of extracting up to 5 times more natural gas and oil than with a vertical borehole alone. The time it takes to drill a horizontal well is comparable to a vertical well, which is only 30 to 45 days. The time is dependent on the depth the well is to penetrate to.

In the region of Marcellus, horizontal drilling is the most common and economically practical application for the extraction of natural gas and oil from below the surface.