Bings Ain’t What They Used To be .pdf of lecture to National Mining Museum Bings2 Summary 1. The past 300 years have seen miraculous advances in civilization and the quality of life, largely brought about by extracting the prodigious energy resources of fossil fuels. 2. Paraffin Young: a truly remarkable Scottish genius – created the […]

A 3D-view of the microseismicity generated during reservoir stimulation reveals an unusual spatial distribution. The borehole, black squares, follows the usual geometry. The  lateral dips gently down from its toe (far westernmost tip) having been drilled on-azimuth parallel to the presumed minimum horizontal stress direction. The cloud of 38,383 microseismic events detected by a well-distributed […]

Micro earthquakes produced by high pressure fracking at Preston New Road do not follow the expected distributional pattern. At first sight all looks to be business like. Cuadrilla’s hydro-fracking, at the end of 2018, generated a tight swarm of over 38,000 micro earthquakes at depths below 2km. Furthermore, the energy released neatly followed the anticipated […]

Recently each area has been following a different approach (not necessarily closely aligned to their perceived political stances). Following devolution of onshore fracking legislation (e.g. Scotland Act, 2016 Section 47), each region has followed different paths. For example: Scotland: Notwithstanding the Scottish Parliament’s competence to legislate, no new primary legislation has been passed. Scottish Ministers […]

A new analysis demonstrates that the likelihood for successful fracking can be simply judged by the occurrence of previous oil and gas shows. All across the USA those states which proved to be commercially viable for fracking (red names in diagram below) are found to have had high previous conventional gas production. In contrast states […]