To What Extent Could Shale Gas Fracking Contaminate Ground Water

Introduction:

The fossil fuels consider as a main source of conventional natural energy, which provide world with energy . However, growing energy consumption and depletion of accessible fossil fuels reserves increased demand of unconventional energy, such as shale gas. Producing natural gas from tight shale formation known as “Shale gas” is one of the most rapidly expanding trends in onshore and local natural gas exploration and production. This gas is trapped in impermeable rock formation, such as shale. It has fine grain rocks formation with low fluid permeability and this formation is commonly sedimentary rocks that are formed by deposits of mud, silt and some organic materials. Shale formation contains high amounts of natural gas which is mostly methane and it is used to generate electricity and domestic heating. This formation need to be fractured in order to allow the natural gas to be passed through the porous of shale formation .

The process of extraction valuable natural gas from shale rocks is called hydraulic fracture (HF) or ‘fracking’. This technique was developed in 1949 by Halliburton oil service company to stimulate the of oil a

nd gas production in conventional energy sources such as sandstone and limestone. However, advances in drilling and well stimulation technology have made this technique feasible to extract viable quantities of natural gas from unconventional resources, such as shale and coal bed methane formations (CBM)