Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Shale Oilfield Fuel Tank Polishing

By Iva Cannon


Distributed all over the planet, there are literally millions of fuel tanks in use in a variety of different industries, including oil and gas exploration and production. They are pressed into service for a number of different tasks, including processing, storage, transportation, etc. Each and every one of these millions of fuel tanks has to be cleaned more than once in its lifecycle. Many are located outdoors, where the workers do not have a pump to hand or any other type of oilfield fuel tank polishing equipment.

New technologies in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have made it possible to access vast stores of gas and oil from fine-grained sedimentary rock formations, called shale, beneath the surface of the earth. Without these reserves, America would only have enough oil to last another ten years.

After only a few years of shale exploration, not only does America have access to fuel for the remainder of this century, it is now the top oil producer in the world, having surpassed Russia. This success has come at a price. There are concerns that hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking, " contaminates drinking water and causes earthquakes.

In the process of fracking, a well is first drilled deep into the Earth's crust above shale rock formations where oil and/or gas have been determined to reside. A combination of water and chemicals are then forced down the drilled well at high pressures, forcing cracks in the underlying rock and freeing the oil and gas to rise up to the surface via the induced cracks and the drilled well. Seven major shale oil plays have been identified and exploited in the United States. These are Niobrara, Bakken, Granite Wash, Permian, Andarko-Woodford, Marcellus and Eagle Ford.

Slightly more than half of the investment in these seven fields is going into two major plays: Eagle Ford and Bakken. Wells of the Bakken shale play, located in Western North Dakota and Eastern Montana, are approximately 10,000 feet deep. The brittle and easily-harvested shale formations of Eagle Ford in Southern Texas produce at depths between 4,000 feet and 14,000 feet.

One-fourth of the total money invested in shale oil drilling is split between the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and the Permian Basin in west Texas and New Mexico. The Permian is named for the geologic period from which the shale deposits are derived. Marcellus Shale is one of the shallowest deposits, drilled to a depth of 6,300 feet.

The rest of the reserves are located in Texas and Oklahoma (Granite Wash), Oklahoma (Andarko-Woodford), and Nebraska (Niobrara). The wells in Granite Wash are the deepest of anywhere else at 15,000 feet.

An unfortunate consequence of increased drilling activity is the increase in road traffic fatalities. In the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford alone, during 2014 there were 696 fatalities and a total of 8,600 serious accidents in which vehicle occupants were killed or suffered life-changing injuries. The busiest time for road traffic accidents is around 5:00 a. M. This increase has been attributed largely to crashes involving civilian vehicles and semi-trucks.




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