Apr 20 2015
The Applied and Environmental Geophysics Group at Keele University, UK, led by Professor Peter Styles, with Dr Rachel Westwood and Mr Sam Toon, has been successful in being part of a European and US consortium that has won 2.7 million Euros (Keele component c. 300,000 Euros) in a very competitive call for research into the environmental aspects of Shale Gas operations to be called SHEER (SHale gas Exploration and Exploitation induced Risks) from the HORIZON 2020 programme.
Professor Styles was the author of the DECC report on seismicity induced by the initial experimental hydraulic stimulation near Blackpool in 2011 but first monitored ’fracking’ in 1988 in the East Midlands and so the Keele group are unique in having actually monitored shale gas activities in Europe. The objective of the SHEER proposal is to develop best practices aimed at assessing the impacts and mitigating the environmental footprint of shale gas extraction and exploration which will inform the legislation for and regulation of Unconventional Oil and Gas across the whole of Europe.
The consortium includes collaborators from Italy, United Kingdom (Keele University, Glasgow University and RSK Water), Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the University of Laramie, Wyoming, USA - where much shale gas activity has already been carried out for several decades - and a number of local governance authorities. It will develop a probabilistic procedure for assessing the short and long-term risk associated with the following potential hazards:
- Groundwater Contamination
- Air Pollution
- Induced Seismicity.
The severity of each of these hazards depends strongly on the unexpected enhanced permeability pattern, which may develop as an unwanted by-product of the ‘normal’ production fracking processes.. The three hazards indicated above may be at least partially inter-related as they all depend on this enhanced permeability pattern. Therefore they will be approached from a multi-hazard, multi parameter perspective. This will be achieved through the following work packages:
- Compilation of a comprehensive database consisting of seismicity data, the state of ground-water and atmospheric condition and operational data collected from shale gas sites during the project and archived from past case studies
- Development of a robust statistically based, multi-parameter methodology to assess environmental impacts and risks across the operational lifecycle of shale gas;
- Collection of a complete suite of operational, geomechanical, seismic, ground-water and atmospheric chemistry data from a planned hydraulic fracturing to be carried out by the Polish Oil and Gas Company (PGNiG)
- Application of the developed methodologies to data gathered from past case studies and the proposed monitoring activities:
- Proposal of best European Community (and applicable globally) practices for the monitoring and assessment of the protocol necessary for the minimisation of any environmental impacts associated with shale gas exploration and exploitation.
And it has also been announced that the group had won a second separate European Grant (INFRADEV) to create a comprehensive database of Episodes of Anthropogenic (Induced Seismicity) together with the operational parameters which casued them so that human activities can be better moderated to avoid these environmental problems.