America has abundant natural resources and recent innovations combined with horizontal drilling in shale formations has unlocked vast new supplies of natural gas, allowing the nation to get to the energy it needs today, and transforming our energy future.
The process of bringing a well to completion is generally short-lived, taking a few months for a single well, after which the well can be in production for 20 to 40 years. The process for a single horizontal well typically includes four to eight weeks to prepare the site for drilling, four or five weeks of rig work, including casing and cementing and moving all associated auxiliary equipment off the well site before fracking operations commence, and two to five days for the entire multi-stage fracturing operation.
Hydraulic fracturing, as well as shale gas production, has played an important role in the development of America's oil and natural gas resources for nearly 60 years. In the U.S., an estimated 35,000 wells are hydraulically fractured annually and it is estimated that over one million wells have been hydraulically fractured since the first well in the late 1940s. Each well is a little different, and each one offers lessons learned. The oil and natural gas production industry uses these lessons to develop best practices to minimize the environmental and societal impacts associated with development.
Studies estimate that up to 80 percent of natural gas wells drilled in the next decade will require hydraulic fracturing. Fracking makes it possible for shale oil extraction to produce oil and natural gas in places where conventional technologies are ineffective. It uses water pressure, under tight controls, to create fractures in rock that allow the oil and natural gas it contains to escape and flow out of a well.
Recently, fracking has come to represent all parts of the development and production of a well, even though the time spent on hydraulic fracturing is only a brief period over the lifetime of a well.
