Talk by Paul Meakin

Shale gas, shale oil, oil shale and computational geomechanics

For over 150 years, almost all of the world’s oil and gas has been produced from porous rock reservoirs, which have been filled by the migration of hydrocarbon fluids, often through great distances, from organic rich, fine grained, very low permeability source rocks known as shales (although many source rocks do not meet the technical definition of shale). It has also been known, for many decades, that large quantities of hydrocarbon remain in the source rocks, but it was not possible to recover this oil and gas. However, in recent years, horizontal/multilateral drilling, hydraulic fracturing, fracture propping and other innovations have made it possible to recover large quantities of natural gas (shale gas) from source rocks in North America, and shale gas is now becoming an important resource in many regions around the world. More recently, attention has turned to the recovery of hydrocarbon liquids (shale oil) from source rocks, and this is also becoming important. In addition, oil can also be produced from immature organic rich shales that have not been buried to depths at which the temperature is high enough to generate oil and gas, and a variety of technologies are being developed to produce oil from this “oil shale” resource. We have been conducting experiments and developing computer code to develop a better understanding of hydraulic fracturing, fracture propping and the coupled geomechanical (fracturing and deformation), chemical, heat transport and fluid flow processes that occur when hydrocarbon fluids are generated in and expelled from extremely low permeability organic rich source rocks. The presentation will focus on the nature of and relationships between shale gas, shale oil and oil shale, global shale gas, shale oil and oil shale resources, and relevant research conducted at the University of Oslo and the Idaho National Laboratory. Time permitting, some of the environmental issues associated with development of these important resources will be discussed.