Rock Products

MAY 2015

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60 | Frac Sand Insider May 2015 www.rockproducts.com Domestic Frac Sand Background The practice of fracturing reservoir rock in the United States as a method to increase the fow of oil and gas from wells has a relatively long history and can be traced back to 1858 in Fredonia, New York, when a gas well situated in shale of the Marcellus Formation was successfully fractured using black powder as a blasting agent. Nearly all domestic hydraulic fracturing, often referred to as hydrof- racking or fracking, is a process where fuids are injected under high pressure through perforations in the horizontal portion of a well cas- ing in order to generate fractures in reservoir rock with low permea- bility ("tight"). Because the fractures are in contact with the well bore they can serve as pathways for the recovery of gas and oil. To pre- vent the fractures generated by the fracking process from closing or becoming obstructed with debris, material termed "proppant," most commonly high-silica sand, is injected along with water-rich fuids to maintain or "prop" open the fractures. The frst commercial application of fracking in the oil and gas industry took place in Okla- homa and Texas during the 1940s. In 1949, over 300 wells, mostly vertical, were fracked (ALL Consulting, LLC, 2012; McGee, 2012; Veil, 2012) and used silica sand as a proppant (Fracline, 2011). The resulting increase in well productivity demonstrated the signifcant potential that fracking might have for the oil and gas industry. The frst horizontal well was successfully completed in 1948, and the frst commercial "unconventional well," a horizontal gas well in "tight" shale, was drilled in 1988. The Society of Petroleum En- gineers describes unconventional resources as petroleum accu- mulations that are pervasive throughout a large area and are not signifcantly affected by pressure generated by water. The extreme- ly small pore-size and absence of favorable permeability results in high resistance to hydrocarbon fow. Recovery of gas and oil from these units presents technological challenges. The extremely low permeability typically causes the hydrocarbons to remain in the source rock unless artifcially induced fracturing is introduced and proppants are injected to maintain the fracture openings and to pro- vide a pathway through the rock to facilitate the fow of hydrocar- bons through the well (Ratner and Tiemann, 2014). In 1995, the frst horizontally drilled and hydraulically fractured well in shale was completed (Martin, 2012; Williams, 2013). As il- lustrated in Figure 1, the advent of horizontal drilling combined with fracking permitted the greater recovery of oil and or gas from a pay zone by a single well over an extended area than that of a compar- atively narrow intercept encountered in a vertical hole. Technological advances in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing coupled with increases in natural gas prices in the late 1990s and early 2000s spurred aggressive exploration drilling activities and eventually signifcant production from unconven- Estimates of Hydraulic Fracturing (Frac) Sand Production, Consumption, and Reserves in the United States By Don Bleiwas, Physical Scientist, U.S. Geological Survey

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