Marcellus Shale Fracking – Transloading Bulk Materials for Marcellus Shale Drilling

Posts Tagged ‘shale gas’

The shale gas from the Marcellus deposit in the upper eastern part of the United States is large enough to supply the natural gas needs of America for the next 100 years.

The natural gas found in the shale rock basins around the world uses a different process than other known and easier to extract deposits. The leading reasons these deposits are being mined for their energy reserves is the fact that most of the easily accessible deposits have already been drained of their energy reserves.

The most common process to accelerate the extraction procedure is called hydrofracking. This involves the injection of a water and frac sand slurry into the well bore under extreme pressure. The water along with the pressure behind it cracks or fractures the brittle shale rock bed with multiple micro fissures. The frac sand is present to flow into these newly formed fissures and remain there after the pressure is reduced on the slurry.

With the fissures formed, a new link to all the micro energy deposits that are naturally formed in this type of rock layer are now accessible. Without this technology of fracking being used, this energy reserve would be inaccessible for use by the American consumer. With the ever increasing demand for natural gas in America, this source of energy cannot be ignored or underutilized if the demand is to be met for.  the consumers.

The use of hydrofracking is not a new technology in the energy extraction industry. It has been around since it was first used in the early 1900’s. It was used on a conventional well bore in Texas to reactivate a dying oil well. Today this process is used on nearly 90% of all energy bearing wells around the world to help meet the ever rising demand for this natural resource. The extraction of the shale gas energy reserve is one of the ways this demand is being met.

Oil and Gas Drilling Video

How do basic oil and gas operations work? Companies looking for oil and natural gas use a drilling rig to drill their oil well or natural gas well. This animation reviews the various steps in oil and natural gas recovery, from drilling to completion….

For drillers or service companies in the fracking business that need materials delivered to the drilling sites you will do well to contact Tran-Z, the foremost transloading company in the northeast.

Click HERE to read more about shale gas fracking.

The energy resource called shale gas has been know for many years, but only recently extracted. This was because there were numerous other reservoirs that were easier to tap into. Now with the world’s energy needs are growing and the reserves shrinking, it has become economically feasible to go after and develop the wells with shale deposits of energy.

The natural gas is trapped inside of rock formations or shale rock. This is not permeable and needs to be fractured to allow the gas to escape. The procedures to efficiently extract this gas are nearly perfected in America at this time. This has lead to speculation that nearly half of the natural gas supply that Americans will be using by 2020 will be from this source.

America is not the only place on the globe where shale deposits rich with gas and oil can be found. Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia all have energy rich shale deposits that can be extracted to help meet the worlds demand for this clean burning energy source.

On a positive note, this newly used energy source is helping to keep the price of natural gas down from more traditional sources like Russia and the Middle East.

The places around the world where deposits are found were left during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic ages that have since formed a brittle rock layer. Because of the rocks brittleness, the fracturing of the rock is easier and can be kept open with sand easily.

While methane is 72 times more damaging to the atmosphere than CO2, once burned it is relatively harmless and preferred to, instead of coal because of its non-polluting status. Shale gas might not be a renewable energy source, but it is a clean energy that can help the world reduce its dependency on coal and oil while not polluting the air we breathe.

Transloading services come in to play with the companies that do the drilling and have to move large quantities of fracking sand and drilling equipment.  Click on the TranZ banner on the right for more information.

The energy resource referred to as natural gas is mainly made up of methane. This molecule has one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. When found in its natural state, there are many other gases present that must be removed before the consumer can use it. The other gases are ethane, propane, butanes, and pentanes, along with other larger molecules. It is part of the process of this gas and then sulfur dioxide in small quantities is added. This is done because methane is a colorless, odorless gas and the t-butyl mercaptan is added so a leak of this gas can be recognized because of the explosive nature of the gas.

Natural gas can be found in many places where other energy sources are found because they all rely on the decaying of organic matter for them to materialize. This is evident from the many coal mine explosions when a pocket of this gas is found and leaks into the mine shafts.

Nearly all oil wells have this gas present in the oil itself. In the 1800s and the early 1900s, this gas was not generally sold because the linguistics of transporting and storing it was not cost efficient. As a result, most of this gas was just burnt off at the oil well itself. These types of deposits are called fossil natural gas or associated. Non-associated deposits are referring to deposits of this gas that are isolated from other energy deposits.

Other types of deposits where gas is found are referred to as resource gases. These include sour gas, shale gas, tight gas and, of course, coal bed methane.

The shale gas is the most common source other than the associated gas that is found in the Marcellus shale deposit in the Appalachian Basin. In 2008, there was an estimated 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas deposits to be present just waiting to be extracted. This is a great domestic energy resource that our country is taking advantage of in a positive manner.