Shale gas: a provisional assessment of climate change and environmental impacts

Shale gas: a provisional assessment of climate change and environmental impacts by The Tyndall Centre, University of Manchester, January 2011
The analysis in this report clearly demonstrates that the risks associated with the cumulative impact of drilling sufficient wells to provide any meaningful contribution to the UK’s energy needs cannot be dismissed, however low they might be at the individual well level. … Anything from the catastrophic failure of a well casing (for example during high pressure fracturing) through to partial loss of integrity of poor cement seals is likely to result in a pollution event. … Interestingly, New York State (2009) identifies that natural gas migration “is a more reasonably anticipated concern with respect to potential significant adverse impacts”…despite ongoing laboratory and field experimentation, the mechanisms that limit vertical fracture growth are not completely understood.

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