Fracking’s next frontier: Energy giants seek bigger offshore payoffs with deep-water fracking fleets
David Wethe, Bloomberg News | August 7, 2014 | Last Updated: Aug 7 2:59 PM ET
Energy companies are taking their controversial fracking operations from the land to the sea — to deep waters off the U.S., South American and African coasts.
Cracking rocks underground to allow oil and gas to flow more freely into wells has grown into one of the most lucrative industry practices of the past century. The technique is also widely condemned as a source of groundwater contamination. The question now is how will that debate play out as the equipment moves out into the deep blue. For now, caution from all sides is the operative word.
Offshore fracking is a part of a broader industrywide strategy to make billion-dollar deep-sea developments pay off. The practice has been around for two decades yet only in the past few years have advances in technology and vast offshore discoveries combined to make large scale fracking feasible.
While fracking is also moving off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, the big play is in the Gulf of Mexico, where wells more than 100 miles from the coastline must traverse water depths of a mile or more and can cost almost US$100 million to drill.
Those expensive drilling projects are a boon for oil service providers such as Halliburton, Baker Hughes Inc. and Superior Energy Services Inc. Schlumberger Ltd., which provides offshore fracking gear for markets outside the U.S. Gulf, also stands to get new work. And producers such as Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc may reap billions of dollars in extra revenue over time as fracking helps boost crude output.
Fracking in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to grow by more than 10% over a two year period ending in 2015, said Douglas Stephens, president of pressure pumping at Baker Hughes, which operates about a third of the world’s offshore fracking fleet.
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Pancaked Layers
Deep-water wells cut through multiple pancaked layers of oil-soaked rock, and each layer must be fracked to get the most oil out — a task that can take a full day to get to the bottom of the well. Halliburton and others have figured out a way to save time and money by fracking all those layers in one trip down the well, instead of doing each layer separately.
The more intense fracking means larger volumes of water, sand and equipment are needed to coax more oil out — and bigger boats to carry it all.
“It’s getting more sophisticated,” James Wicklund, an analyst at Credit Suisse in Dallas, said in a phone interview. “The volumes needed, especially for these lower tertiary fracks, are huge.”
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/08/07/frackings-next-frontier-energy-giants-seek-bigger-offshore-payoffs-with-deep-water-fracking-fleets/?__lsa=730c-e6c4
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Just imagine what these corporations are doing to the environment:
Cuprits:
