GE and Statoil aim for water-free fracking

FRACKING could one day ditch its reliance on water and instead use CO2to break apart shale deposits and free the gas trapped inside.

General Electric has announced it is working with Statoil to develop the process, which should go some way to repair the bad environmental reputation earned by shale developers, which typically use more than 9m l of water per frack.

Using such large volumes of water in arid regions such as Texas in the US has prompted industry to seek an alternative fluid.

A key challenge will be to find a way to help the CO2transport the sand proppant that holds open the cracks formed in the rock, as water does today, GE's chief technology officer Mark Little toldReuters.

He added that fracking with CO2is not economical now, and the project's engineers are looking to develop a method to continuously capture CO2at the wellhead, frack with it, recycle it and repeat the process.

"Ideally, we'd have a virtuous cycle going on," said Little. The partners have not given a development for the project.

Canadian process developer GasFrac has developed a water-free fracking process that uses liquefied propane gas. This has found small-scale application in the US with the cost of importing large volumes of propane proving restrictive.

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Taxonomy

• Industrial Equipment
• Fluid Dynamics
• Fracking