Shale in Europe: Working Together for the Environment
Peter Richter, Global Unconventional Technology & Marketing Manager at oilfield services company Schlumberger said that now that North America had had shale gas for a number of years now, the rest of the world is exploding with unconventional gas opportunities.
However, he told delegates at Shale Gas World Europe 2011 in Warsaw, Poland that the way things were done in North America was not the way they had to be done in the rest of the world.
Mr. Richter said: “These resources are important to the world, and local economies and will have an impact. International development will be different with different regulatory and fiscal regimes. We need to work together as an industry to make sure we have proper regulations in place, to develop these plays in an environmentally conscious way.
“We still don’t know the resources, that will take some time. And we also have to look at the resource infrastructure.”
He said well costs would be challenging internationally, especially in the beginning.
“Can we get to US well costs?” he asked, opining that they could be 3-4 times as expensive in other places that didn’t have the infrastructure in place.
“When it’s there, then the economics will come in to play.”
Large-scale development, he noted, was feared in Europe.
“There’s a lot in the media and people are afraid of this. The way things were does not mean that it has to be that way,” he said, explaining that with pad wells the area of land used for drilling could be drastically reduced.
“Can technology reduce the impact? The answer is yes.
“As an industry we need to make sure we’re acting responsibly, doing the wells properly to make sure that we’re doing the wells right in the first place,” said Mr. Richter, who emphasized engaging communities because the industry needed to tell them what unconventional gas was and was not.
He emphasized that production could bring a strong economic boom to such areas as well.
According to him, truck traffic was the biggest concern in North America: the numerous semi trucks that supplied proppant and water to frack unconventional wells.
Speaking of the steps of resource evaluation, drilling, completion and production, Mr. Richter said that not all of it could be done in silos.
“You need to have an integrated approach, doing more with less, finding out ‘where are the sweet spots, so we can drill the right wells first?’” he concluded.