Hydraulic fracturing in unconventional reservoirs - Identification of hazards and strategies for a quantitative risk assessment

The production of unconventional gas resources, which require a fracking process to be released, such as shale gas, tight gas and coal bed methane, has become an economically attractive technology for a continued supply of fossil-fuel energy sources in many countries. Just recently, a major focus of interest has been directed to hydraulic fracking in Germany. The technology is controversial since it involves severe risks. The main difference in risk with respect to other technologies in the subsurface such as carbon sequestration is that fracking is remunerative, and it is important to distinguish between economical and environmental issues. The hydrofracking process may pose a threat to groundwater resources if fracking fluid or brine can migrate through fault zones into shallow aquifers. Diffuse methane emissions from the gas reservoir may not only contaminate shallow groundwater aquifers but also escape into the atmosphere where methane acts as a greenhouse gas. The working group "Risks in the Geological System" as part of ExxonMobil's hydrofracking dialogue and information dissemination processes was tasked with the assessment of possible hazards posed by migrating fluids as a result of hydrofracking activities. In this work several flow paths for fracking fluid, brine and methane are identified and scenarios are set up to qualitatively estimate under what circumstances these fluids would leak into shallower layers. The parametrization for potential fracking sites in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony (both in Germany) is derived from literature using upper and lower bounds of hydraulic parameters. The results show that a significant fluid migration is only possible if a combination of several conservative assumptions are met by a scenario. Another outcome of this work is the demand for further research, as many of the involved processes in the hydrofracking process have yet not been fully understood (e.g. quantification of source terms for methane in the fractured reservoir, fracture propagation, fault zones and their role in regard to fluid migration into shallow aquifers). A quantitative risk assessment which should be the main aim of future work in this field has much higher demands, especially on site specific data, as the estimation of statistical parameter uncertainty requires site specific parameter distributions. There is already ongoing research on risk assessment in related fields like CO2 sequestration. We therefore propose these methodologies to be transferred to risk estimation relating to the use of the hydraulic fracking method, be it for unconventional gas or enhanced geothermal energy production. The overall aim should be to set common and transparent standards for different uses of the subsurface and their involved risks and communicate those to policy makers and stake holders.