We will discuss the current state of the art in modeling climate impacts (from greenhouse gases, or GHGs) from production of oil from tight oil formations such as the Bakken and Eagle Ford formations of North Dakota and Texas. We first outline a detailed well-by-well modeling effort that examines over 7000 wells in the Bakken formation and 10,000 wells in the Eagle Ford formation. We will discuss the data gathering effort and collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and UC Davis which produced these unique datasets. This effort includes detailed well-level datasets from state level regulatory agencies, private datasets, and public technical documents. We model each well using the Oil Production Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimator (OPGEE), and derive distributions of emissions for each well and month of operations. In contrast to prior work on tight oil emissions, we include a detailed assessment of the energy required to drill and fracture each well with the new, open-source GHGfrack model, which uses the well geometry, depth, and casing diameters to model the energy requirements of drilling. We also use data for each geologic formation to estimate the energy requirements for hydraulic fracturing. This dataset on the In addition, we will discuss current and ongoing efforts to estimate fugitive emissions in the Bakken formation using infra-red imaging techniques. We will discuss the prevalence and stability of methane leaks from producing wells, describing a long-term data gathering effort in the field. Important results include that Bakken and Eagle Ford wells have similar overall upstream emissions profiles, despite the fact that the flaring rate in the Bakken is higher than in the Eagle Ford. This is due to the significant additional energy required to drill and fracture Eagle Ford wells, which consume a significantly larger amount of water and require higher injection pressures than Bakken wells. Both of these formations have emisisons over the full life cycle similar to average US crude oil production. If flaring were reduced at Bakken wells, the Bakken formation would have lower emissions per unit of energy than a typical US crude oil. We will also show that fugitive methane leaks in the Bakken formation are ubiqitous, and that a sizable fraction of visited wells show evidence of leaking hydrocarbons.

Climate impacts of tight oil production: Comparing the Bakken and Eagle Ford formations using detailed drilling and fugitive emissions estimates

251st National Meeting (2016)

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