The process involves pumping water containing small percentages of other materials into the porous shale under pressure to hydraulically fracture it and release the trapped oil and gas.
FORBES: Promised Land's Fracking Fictions: OPEC Goes Hollywood With Crocudrama
What if it is right there trapped in oil and natural gas-bearing shale, enough to possibly supply our U.S. needs for centuries?
But as this column discussed a month ago, U.S. production is booming as new technologies unlock vast deposits of oil and gas trapped in porous shale, and oil prices remain strong.
With the usual steam injection methods, only a quarter or so of the oil trapped underground can be recovered.
Then there are the 1.5 trillion barrels that Shell estimates are trapped in the oil shale deposits of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.
And even if America pumped all the oil trapped in forbidden areas, it would not attain the volumes necessary to dictate world prices.
The test well, Jack-2, delved through 7, 000 feet of water and 20, 000 feet of sea floor to tap oil trapped in tertiary rock laid down 60 million years ago.
To do so they're pushing the frontiers of imaging technology to peer beneath miles of water, rock and salt layers thousands of feet thick--all in the hopes of finding billions of barrels of oil trapped below.
Overall, crude oil prices remain trapped in a wide, sideways trading range, but are now in the bottom portion of that range.
FORBES: Comex Gold Steady-Weak, Silver Lower amid Sell Off in Crude Oil Market
Overall, crude oil prices remain trapped in a wide, sideways trading range.
FORBES: Comex Gold, Silver Steady to Weaker amid Bearish Outside Markets
To get at the oil and gas trapped in shale, drillers use powerful hydraulic pumps to force water and chemicals through holes punched in the concrete-and-steel well casing.
Only in the last decade, though, have engineers figured out how to drill these shales to liberate the natural gas and oil which have been trapped within.
Instead of hunting for them with expensive exploratory wells, drillers know exactly where the gas and oil are now, trapped in huge sandstone formations that extend across entire states.
And meanwhile, families continued to struggle with health care costs, too many of our kids couldn't get the education they needed, the nation remained trapped by our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.
In some locations, sedimentation created sufficient pressure to convert -- to cook -- the unoxidized carbon in the organic material into oil, some of which was trapped in reservoirs.
Oil must be managed properly or it will remain trapped in the ground.
This recent article in the New York Times describes how American oil folks have figured out how to extract crude that is trapped in rock that is largely surrounded by shale.
FORBES: US Oil Industry Leads the Way in Extracting Hard-to-Get Crude; Steel to Benefit
Capiapo, Chile (CNN) -- Hedging their bets, officials in Chile said on Sunday they will set up an oil drill as a third option to rescue the 33 miners trapped underground since August 5.
When natural-gas prices followed the rise in oil earlier this decade, exploration companies used new methods to get at gas trapped in shale formations from Texas to Pennsylvania.
Oil and gas companies use traditional horizontal drilling techniques to bore into the land were gas is trapped.
应用推荐