When I was a young geologist at the Geological Survey in Utrecht (the Netherlands) in spring 2010, a representative from Realm Energy rocked up at the office one day. He wanted to know as much as possible about Namurian black shales along the northern margin of the London-Brabant Massif. And he wanted it quickly.
A shale gas rush in the making?
Only vaguely aware of what the sudden interest was about, I supplied the information with a sense of joy because someone took a genuine interest in what I was doing.
A few days later, it became a little more obvious why the Realm geologist seemed to be in a hurry, because then two representatives from Cuadrilla knocked on the door. The company was interested in the same aspects of Carboniferous black shales, as well as the Posidonia Shale that is present in the Roer Valley Graben in the south of the country. Again, I helped supply them with what I could get my hands on.
Whilst Realm seemed to disappear from the radar – maybe they were concerned about the level of deformation in the Namurian compared to shale basins in the US – Cuadrilla decided to look a little deeper.
However, by the time they reached the stage of two securing two drilling permits from villages in the south of the Netherlands, the anti-shale gas storm had come to full strength which led to the withdrawal of their licences in both places in October 2011. Cuadrilla never drilled a well in the Netherlands after all.
In the UK, Cuadrilla got further and ended up drilling two wells in the Bowland Basin, essentially targeting the same types of shales as the ones they were interested in in the Netherlands. However, as many people will know, seismic events were detected that could be related to drilling activity, which caused operations to come to a halt.
And yesterday, the OGA ordered Britain’s only two shale gas exploration wells drilled near Preston to be plugged and abandoned. The wells were drilled to a depth of 2.25 km and both had a 750 m horizontal section in the Carboniferous shales.
Spirit Energy, a joint venture partner, will provide funding towards the cost of the work, according to the press release Cuadrilla put out in response to the decision. It reiterates the entrepreneurial spirit of Spirit: acquiring stakes in UK onshore shale gas as well as the basement play in the West of Shetland. Both adventures have not worked out.
With the BGS estimating that the Bowland Shale formation potentially contains 37.6 trillion cubic metres of gas in northern England, there is quite a potential resource out there.
Cuadrilla notes that the timing of the decision is particular: “At a time when the UK is spending billions of pounds annually importing gas from all corners of the globe, and gas prices for hard-pressed UK households are rocketing, the UK Government has chosen this moment to ask us to plug and abandon the only two viable shale gas wells in Britain,” said Francis Egan, Cuadrilla’s CEO.
HENK KOMBRINK
