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Since then, over 170,000 oil and gas wells have been fractured in Western Canada. [1] [2]: 1298 Fracking is a process that stimulates natural gas or oil in wellbores to flow more easily by subjecting hydrocarbon reservoirs to pressure through the injection of fluids or gas at depth causing the rock to fracture or to widen existing cracks.
The inclusion of unconventional shale gas with conventional gas reserves has caused a sharp increase in estimated recoverable natural gas in Canada. [1] Until the 1990s success of hydraulic fracturing in the Barnett Shales of north Texas, shale gas was classed as "unconventional reserves" and was considered too expensive to recover.
Oil shale formation takes place in a number of depositional settings and has considerable compositional variation. Oil shales can be classified by their composition (carbonate minerals such as calcite or detrital minerals such as quartz and clays) or by their depositional environment (large lakes, shallow marine, and lagoon/small lake settings).
Because proven reserves include oil recoverable under current economic conditions, nations may see large increases in proven reserves when known, but previously uneconomic deposits become economic to develop. In this way, Canada's proven reserves increased suddenly in 2003 when the oil sands of Alberta were seen to
Oil reserves in Canada were estimated at 172 billion barrels (27 × 10 ^ 9 m 3) as of the start of 2015 . This figure includes the oil sands reserves that are estimated by government regulators to be economically producible at current prices using current technology. [ 1 ]
In 2007 the World Energy Council estimated that these oil sands areas contained at least two-thirds of the world's discovered bitumen in place at the time, [3] with an original oil-in-place (OOIP) reserve of 260,000,000,000 cubic metres (9.2 × 10 12 cu ft) (1.6 trn barrels), an amount comparable to the total world reserves of conventional oil.
Hydraulic fracturing [a] is a well stimulation technique involving the fracturing of formations in bedrock by a pressurized liquid. The process involves the high-pressure injection of "fracking fluid" (primarily water, containing sand or other proppants suspended with the aid of thickening agents) into a wellbore to create cracks in the deep rock formations through which natural gas, petroleum ...
Maryland introduced a temporary fracking ban in 2015, [117] which was made permanent in 2017. [118] [119] Washington joined these states by banning hydraulic fracturing in May 2019. [120] A type of fracking technique called slickwater fracking was used in Texas in 1998 to complete natural gas wells in the Barnett Shale. [121]