Being tight with loose terminology?

There has been a lot of discussion recently about a local company resuming exploration for gas in our region. In particular the announcement by the company that they intend to drill a deep borehole next to the Lismore-Kyogle Road at Bentley has raised a great deal of heated debate. For example, this story in the Northern Star shows just how intense the feelings (one way or another) can be. One thing has been clear though is people are sometimes having trouble figuring out what gas companies are doing. The news release from Metgasco and their Review of Environmental Factors report state the proposed drill hole will be for "conventional gas". Critics of gas companies say since hydraulic fracturing (fraccing, fracking etc) may be carried out in the proposed drill hole the gas must be "unconventional" tight gas. Some people (including the local members of parliament) seem to think any drill hole in the area must involve coal seam gas. It is all a little confusing.

The first thing to note is gas should not be described as either "conventional" or "unconventional". There is essentially no difference in the gas (mainly comprised of methane). The difference is in how it is extracted.

The second thing to note is "tight gas" is only termed such by an arbitrary permeability value assigned by oil and gas engineers. In the real world there is a spectrum between traditionally sourced gas and tight gas. The tighter gas is gas occurring in a reservoir but does not flow as rapidly as in other locations. Tight gas is restricted from flowing by the fill in the cross connecting voids by a material formed after the gas migrated there (usually a natural cement such as calcite or quartz). The lack of cross connection between gas filled pore spaces is what reduces the permeability of the rock.

To clarify I use filter analogies. A new filter will let a substance flow through it easily but an old one is more clogged up and doesn't let the substance flow as rapidly. In the oil and gas industry an arbitrary permeability value is used as an indication of when it is called tight gas. It usually has a permeability of less than 0.1mD (millidarcy). It is also important to be clear that permeability is not the same as porosity because even tight gas reservoirs still have high porosity.

What is a millidarcy? I should do a blog post specifically on Darcy's Law but in the mean time it is good to visualise 1 millidarcy as the permeability of water in a fine sand filter. The way a millidarcy is calculated is through measurement of the velocity of fluid flow through the filter, viscosity of the fluid, cross sectional area of the filter and the pressure. In the case we are talking about the fluid is gas. The main difference being gas has a much lower viscosity and therefore can pass through a finer filter even easier. For 1 millidarcy our analogy for gas might be a fine paper filter instead of fine sand filter for water. It is interesting to note that the measurements needed to calculate the permeability of a gas reservoir are identical for hydrogeologists trying to understand groundwater flow or brewers filtering a favorite beer.

When the permeability of a gas reservoir decreases to 0.1mD the gas flows at a lower and lower rate. This means that it becomes less economical to let the gas migrate out of the geological formation on its own. Instead companies often look to reservoir stimulation which in its simplest form is introducing acid to dissolve minerals. Such a common mineral is calcite that may have clogged the formation, opening up the blockages between the pores. This is a very useful technique in natural calcium cement rich formations. Acidification has been used for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years to increase the flow rate of groundwater sources for drinking, irrigation and other purposes. It is still commonly used in Australia today for groundwater purposes too. However, the most well known form of reservoir stimulation is the increasingly used hydraulic fracturing (fraccing/fracking). Fraccing involves the introduction of a fluid such as water (plus other ingredients) under pressure to propagate fractures through the formation. These fractures allow gases to escape much more easily. I don't want to go into details about fraccing here but I will suffice to say that the method is controversial.

As far as the terminology goes, tight gas is a very loose term. Tight gas is not an "unconventional" gas, it is a bog standard gas that sometimes require "unconventional" techniques to extract it. It is also important to note that reservoir stimulation is an "unconventional" method of extracting gas, but this does not in itself say much because the "conventional" method of extracting gas is just sticking a big hole in the ground.

I hope this blog post makes sense. While I was writing, it became obvious that several different posts are needed to explain the different areas of gas reservoirs. In the mean time I hope that this short post makes sense. I'll see what I can do over the coming months to further delve into the hidden world of petroleum geology (while steering as far away from controversy as possible).