Shale Oilfield Fuel Tank Polishing

By Iva Cannon


There are millions of tanks all over the world in an almost infinite number of industries, including oil exploration and production. They are being used for transportation, storage, processing and more. From time to time, each and every one of these millions of tanks has to be cleaned. Most of them are located outdoors in places like oilfields, where there is no access to a pump or other oilfield fuel tank polishing equipment. Companies have developed solutions like portable, diesel-powered pumps to make the job easier. As horizontal drilling for shale oil and gas reserves continues to grow, the demand for clean tanks will increase.

New technologies in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have opened up the possibility of exploiting vast reserves of oil and gas trapped inside densely-packed, sedimentary shale rock deposits deep within the Earth's crust. Without this resource, the country faced a complete fuel drought in the next decade.

Now, thanks to new technologies, no longer will there be oil available to fuel us into the 22nd century, America is also free from having to rely on capricious foreign countries for its energy needs. All this has heavy price. Although the state-of-the-art of shale oil drilling is improving all the time with the aim of reducing its impact on the environment, there remain concerns about the fracturing process triggering earthquakes and contamination of public water supplies.

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 remaining fraction of the shale oil investment pie is divided amongst Granite Wash (Oklahoma-Texas panhandle), Andarko-Woodford (Oklahoma), and Niobrara (Nebraska). Granite Wash reserves are the deepest reserves, at approximately 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.




About the Author:



Posted in:

0 commentaires for "Shale Oilfield Fuel Tank Polishing"

Leave a reply