This document describes in detail the organic petrology and maturation of the Bakken Formation located in the Williston Basin. This report is organized into five sections. Section I will introduce the Bakken Formation in reference with the Williston Basin. It will also address sedimentary and structural aspects of the Bakken Formation. Section II outlines the processes that formed the Bakken Formation that occurred during the Devonian/Mississippian age. Section III will summarize organic components and influence within the Bakken Formation. Furthermore Section IV will address the nature of inorganic constinuents that influence the Bakken Formation. Section V will discuss production history and current production of oil and gas found within the Bakken Formation. This report concludes in Section VI with a complete analysis of the Bakken Formation summarizing the four main sections of this paper.
I. The Bakken Formation, an Introduction
The Bakken Formation is a clastic unit measuring to be around 45 meters thick that stretches across the Williston Basin that was deposited during the Late Devonian to the Early Mississippian. The Bakken Formation consists of three primary members that onlap (in some places lower member is absent due to non-deposition or over step of the middle member); the upper, middle, and lower members. Both the upper and lower members within the Bakken Formation are black shales (Jiang, 2001). The black shales in the upper and lower members formed offshore in anoxic condtinos. The shales in the upper and lower members of the Bakken Formation are composed of hard silicous and pyritic components (Webster, 1984). These members are also fissile and non calcareous and contain numerous amounts of conodonts and oth...
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...f Petroleum Engineers, DOI: 10.2118/90697-MS.
Julie A. LeFever, Carole D. Martiniuk, Edward F.R. Dancsok, Paul A. Mahnic, 2013, Petroleum Potential of the Middle Member, Bakken Formation, Williston Basin, Sixth International Williston Basin Symposium, p. 74-88.
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LeFever, Julia A., 2013, History of Oil Production from the Bakken Formation, North Dakota.
Stuart Alan Cox, David Cook, Kenneth Dunek, Gerald R. Daniels, Connie Jo Jump, Robert David Barree, 2008, Unconventional Resource Play Evaluation: A Look at the Bakken Shale Play of North Dakota, Society of Petroleum Engineers.
S. Zargari, S. D. Mohaghegh, 2010, Field Development Strategies for the Bakken Shale Formation, National Energy Technology Laboratory.
This area is known as the Permian Basin. Most of the oil is being produced from rocks
Gas in shale formations are“low in permeability,” making it very tedious to extract, but with the increase in technological knowledge in fracking and horizontally drilling into shale beds, the vast reserves of natural gas resource could be extracted (4). Fracking is a large industrial operation that boost the “productivity of a oil or gas well” (5). It is a process by which, under very high pressure, a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand, are pumped into shale formations that causes fractures in the rocks to open wider or create new fractures that would allow otherwise trapped oil and gas to flow into the wells (6).
The pipeline carries three different kinds of oil which are synthetic crude and diluted bitumen, and also a light crude oil. The light crude oil comes from the Bakken formation located in North Dakota and Montana while the synthetic crude and diluted bitumen come from the oil sands in Canada. There are already three phases of the pipeline in operation and a fourth proposed phase which has yet to be built.
Marcellus Shale drilling causes a problem because it involves the use of hundreds of deadly chemicals. Over three hundred chemicals are used in the Marcellus Shale drilling process (Environmental). According to Howells, author of the article “Don’t Frack with Our Water!,” these chemicals are especially dangerous because the companies that use them will not tell the public what specific chemicals are being used. However, through studies of the chemicals, some of them can be identified. Some of the chemicals in the fracking fluid and wastewater have been identified as carcinogens. Many of the other chemicals have been found to be harmful to humans (Environmental). According to Griswold, author of the article “The Fracturing of Pennsylvania,” wastewater is a combination of different chemicals that come from the process of fracking. Not only does this wastewater contain chemicals that were originally used in the drilling, but it also contains harmful substances that come from the earth like salts and other compounds (Griswold).
Oklahoma's oil and natural gas industry is giving us unstoppable progress for energy solutions, but the other parts of the nation are still searching for theirs. While providing jobs for the thousands of people who live in Oklahoma, the oil and natural gas industry not only donates to America's petroleum production, but it also produces millions of dollars for our state’s economy, schools, and roads. Making new headways in our industry every day, artificial technology, scientific breakthroughs, adequate new exploration, and drilling methods took place. Without these upgrades, we would not be able to extract oil and natural gas from challenging fields more efficiently than we can now. As capability rises, environmental impact will continue to go down. In 1897, a tower of surging oil divided the Bartlesville sky. Oklahoma's preliminary drilling swaged badly, brought forth by the federal controls on wellhead prices of natural gas applied to interstate commerce in the 1950s. By 1982, oil prices hit an all time high of $37.60 per barrel. Furthermore, the number of progressive drilling rigs in Oklahoma also hit a record of 882. The total quantity produced from the soul and natural gas industry in Oklahoma reached about 40 billion dollars in 2007. Also, through the gross production tax, oil and natural gas producers and royalty owners gave more than 2 billion dollars to Oklahoma used for teacher retirement, public schools, wildlife management, bridges, roads, and state colleges. Petroleum remains an indispensable Sooner State industry. Natural gas continued to grow in the early 1990s despite of the entire staggering bust that was caused by the plummeting world crude oil p...
In today’s world humans are consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels. The top five oil consuming countries in the world are the usual suspects. These include the United States, China, Japan, India and Russia. Canada comes in at number 10 with a daily consumption of 2,287 thousand barrels per day. There are three major types of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. These resources were formed during the Carboniferous Period 360-286 million years ago. During this time earth was covered in swamps with large amounts of plants and waters filled with algae. When these plants and trees began to die they would form layers of peat. Hundreds and thousands of years would pass adding sand and other materials on top of the peat. This formed the sedimentary rocks we know today. As the thousands of years turned into millions of years the water of the peat layer was pushed out of the peat until the layer of diatoms turned into coal, oil or natural gas (CEC, 2013). Canada has oil industry throughout the country and currently 12 out of 13 provinces are active in the oil industry. Natural gas production is occurring in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, and New Brunswick. Natural gas could also become large industry in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland & Labrador, Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Oil production is currently taking place in the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland & Labrador (CAPP, 2013).
Drilling for Natural Gas in the Marcellus and Utica Shales: Environmental Regulatory Basics [Fact sheet]. (n.d.). Retrieved from Agriculture and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University website: http://wayne.osu.edu/topics/agriculture-and-natural-resources/gas-and-oil-lease-information/2011-wayne-county-oils-and-gas-lease-meeting-resources/Marcellus_Shale_Fact_Sheet.pdf
The extraction of crude oil from the Athabasca oil sands is carried out by surface mining and in situ mining. 90% of recoverable bitumen is located too deep to be recovered by surface mining (Mossop, 1980). Both techniques require invasive processes to successfully extract the bitumen from the subsurface and result in degradation of the land upon which they ar...
Crude oil is formed within the Earth’ crust and within ocean basins. An ocean basin is a “depression of the earth’s surface in which an ocean lies”. As plants and animals die and remain at the bottom of the ocean they turn into fossils.
The Austin Glen formation, which may be found at the Johnson Iorio Memorial Park, encompasses an abundance of clastic sedimentary rocks. More specifically, thin black shale and thick greywacke compose this formation. The thin black shale may be described as fine-grained and its color derives from lack of oxidation. This indicates the rock formed in deep ocean conditions. The shale layers are thin, and are approximately two to three centimeters wide. On the other hand, the greywacke shale, which is about fifteen centimeters, is thicker than the black shale. The greywacke is coarse grained, and a sandstone. The black shale and greywacke alternate between layers
America is facing an energy revolution. The shift from traditional energy sources such as coal and oil are fading while newer sources are being used to sustain an insatiable thirst for energy. A front-runner is natural gas, a cleanly burning and abundant alternative for conventional energy sources. This nonrenewable resource is found miles underground in prehistoric shale deposits, to show the magnitude “North America has approximately 4.2 quadrillion (4,244 trillion) cubic feet of recoverable natural gas that would supply 175 years worth of natural gas at current consumption rates” locked in these shale deposits (Loris). However, the dilemma comes from how natural gas is extracted from the earth. One of the processes of accessing the natural gas is called Hydraulic Fracturing or “Fracking”. It is the process of shooting a highly pressurized mixture of water, sand, and chemicals into cracks in the shale deposits, essentially fracturing the shale that then releases the natural gas (Malakoff).
"Sedimentary Rocks." Backyard Nature with Jim Conrad. N.p., 18 May 2015. Web. 25 Oct. 2015.
Hydraulic fracturing, having been patented in 1949 has been the caveat by which one third of the natural gas in the U.S. is obtained.1 The fracturing process requires millions of gallons of fluid to be driven into the ground at high enough pressures to break up shale and rock and in turn lets out natural gases. The process has been proven to be very successful thus being one of the major contributors to modern day natural gas collecting. Though there are many great aspects to hydraulic fracturing, concerns do arise. What is in this fracturing fluid? Is there ground water being contaminated with rocks and the unknown fluid during this process? The hydraulic fluid is known to contain a variety of additives such as dilute acids,
Hydraulic fracking is an extraction technique used to uptake natural gas in a deep gas well drilling (Brown et al., 2007). Rocks are fractured by a pressurized liquid which is typically a mix of water, s...
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