Gas Shales Summit to Screen 'Haynesville' Documentary
The ninth annual Gas Shales Summit has added a special June 2 screening of the independent film "Haynesville, a Nation’s Hunt for Energy” to the meeting agenda.
According to Peter Duncan, Summit chair and chief executive officer of MicroSeismic, a Houston-based, analytical services company, “The screening will be followed by an audience discussion with the film's director, Gregory Kallenberg. The issues here are of enormous importance to the nation’s economy and energy security. It is essential that industry develop this resource, but do so in ways that recognize the need to not harm the environment.”
"Haynesville" takes place in the Louisiana backwoods and follows the momentous discovery of the largest natural gas field in the United States. It explores the current energy situation and what something the scale of the Haynesville (170 trillion cubic feet or the equivalent of 28 billion barrels of oil) could mean to the United States’ energy picture. In a never-seen-before on-screen discussion, environmentalists, academics and oil and gas industry folks hash out the idea of trying to find cleaner energy sources and how this natural gas could possibly help provide an energy answer."
The Summit, scheduled for June 2-3 in Houston, Texas, will provide industry and environmental groups a forum for the issues surrounding the development of gas shales. These include horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracture reservoir stimulation technologies used to obtain gas from shale, the environmental concerns that have been raised about these technologies, and possible future restrictions on production. Although technologies have now made vast natural gas deposits in extensive domestic shale formations economically recoverable, growing environmental concerns have threatened drilling programs.
The technologies driving shale gas recovery are horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracture reservoir stimulation. In hydraulic fracture reservoir stimulation, or ‘frac’ing,’ high pressure water is forced into the reservoir rock in order to create or enhance permeability through fracturing of the rock matrix. This allows gas to be produced from rocks that would not otherwise permit the gas to flow to the producing wellbore.
According to Duncan, “Hydraulic fracturing has been in use for 60 years, but the increase in the visibility of the technology owing to the importance of the gas shale discoveries has brought the technology under intense scrutiny. Issues have been raised as to the possibility of groundwater contamination from the chemicals that are often placed in the frac’ing fluids to increase the efficiency of the procedure, and that frac’ing may lead to an increase in earthquake activity in the area of the treatments. As a company providing acquisition and analysis of passive seismic data, we are intimately involved in this issue.”
For more information, visit www.insightinfo.com/gasshales.