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Economic Impacts, Environmental Risks and Low Impact Practices Associated with the Giant Barnett Shale Natural Gas Field

Integrated approaches can be applied to the development of new energy sources to improve overall economic and environmental impact planning and mitigation. This is strikingly illustrated by the development of a massive natural gas field in North Texas, USA. Attention is being paid not only to technological factors but also to environmental and socioeconomic factors, with industry-academia involvement in community outreach playing an important role. 1. Brief History of the Barnett Gas Play The Barnett Shale gas play in North Texas is one of the largest natural gas fields in the United States, producing nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day. A particularly rich zone lies directly under Fort Worth, Texas, and is currently being drilled at a frantic pace producing some remarkably prolific wells from this thick, highly organic-rich shale. The first economic production wells were drilled back in the early 1980s by Mitchell Energy, in an attempt to test and prove that gas could be recovered from this very tight (dense) but highly fractured shale. George Mitchell (Mitchell Energy) drilled a number of wells into the shale to see what recovery techniques might be needed to tap into the vast estimated reserves held in what most people thought was a formation that would not release its gas economically. Perseverance, determination and creative engineering led this company, in the early 1990s, to attempt horizontal drilling along with water fracing (hydraulic fracturing) techniques within the brittle Barnett Shale which opened up a much longer pay zone and resulted in spectacular fracture production.