Well yes, but has anyone worked out what happens to the actual ground when
you do this kind of extraction. If people live above it all sorts of things
might occur with time.
Brian

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"Dave N" wrote in message
...
On 17/04/2012 03:38, Mike Tomlinson wrote:

Following on from another thread...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...fracking-gets-
green-light

http://tinyurl.com/cumqamx

(that's a vaguely dirty-sounding shortlink tinyurl came up with!)


Indeed, and to listen to some business commentators there are sufficient
reserves under Lancashire to last the UK for 50 years. Such comments must
obviously be taken with large quantities of salt, but they illustrate the
problem of separating fact from fiction in the energy world given the
hyperbole surrounding the issue on both sides of the social, political,
economic and environmental arguments, not to mention self-interested
misinformation.

Nevertheless it is probably indisputable that very significant deposits of
oil shale are to be found beneath Lancashire. Whether the recoverable gas
resources are commensurate, is an entirely different and still largely
unanswered question. This underlines the futility of making predictions
about when fossil fuels will "run out", and all that ensues from such
pronouncements.

There are very large deposits of shale oil in many other parts of the
world still to be fully assessed, just two examples out of many are China
which has what are believed to be vast deposits far larger than those
found in the USA, and Argentina. The latter are onshore deposits in
addition to the offshore deposits of oil being explored in the Atlantic
near the Falkland Islands. New gas fields have just been confirmed in the
Eastern Mediterranean and the very first test well explored off Cyprus has
been assessed at about 5 trillion cubic feet. This field will not require
"fracking" and the gas is recoverable through natural pressure. There are
other fields yet to be explored in the area and that doesn't take into
account fields already found off Israel. Both countries are considering
how they might export natural gas in light of their respective
geopolitical situations but it is a given that they have discovered more
natural gas than they consume when exploration has only just begun.

The price of natural gas in the USA has plummeted in the last year, simply
because large quantities of shale gas have come onto the market and the
USA is now contemplating exporting gas. The price of gas has fallen so
low there and so rapidly that companies are now having to mothball up to
half of the wells which they only opened up very recently.

--
Dave N