Fracking Alaska: unlocking more oil and gas.

• Author: Bradner, Mike
• Position: OIL & GAS

Could the world's--and Alaska's--petroleum industry be on the cusp of one of those leaps in technological advances that turns conventional thinking upside down?

Could those advances suddenly make our long-planned Alaska gas pipeline an obsolete idea? Alternatively, could they also usher in a new era of growth for Alaska's petroleum industry? Both of these outcomes are possible.

Periodically, just when things seem to be winding down, when oil fields are mature and the technology is old, human ingenuity comes up with a new idea and what seemed old and tired suddenly has a fresh face.

Remember the Club of Rome's gloomy prognosis in the 1970s? It was that world's nonrenewable resource base would be depleted soon. Then there was "peak oil," the more recent variant of the theme. Resource supplies did indeed tighten, but the resulting increase in prices unleashed a wave of technical innovation that resulted in huge new supplies of oil and gas and minerals.

The newest idea on the block is that a 60-year-old idea, the fracturing of underground rocks through the injection of high-pressure liquids, is now combined with newer technologies. This is unleashing a flood of new petroleum supplies.

Just in time, too. The nation's supplies of conventional natural gas from mature fields is declining. Suddenly, however, the U.S. is awash with natural gas extracted from the tight rocks of shale deposits through drilling and fracturing. The nation now has a 50year or more surplus of gas.

Now the same ideas are being applied to oil, and U.S. domestic oil production is on the increase again after decades of decline, thanks partly to liquids being produced through the shale fracturing. That petroleum production from tight shale rocks might be economically possible seemed far-fetched just a few years ago. No longer.

There are two implications for Alaska. One is that the flood of gas into North American markets may have taken the market once thought possible for a North Slope natural gas pipeline. A second is that these new approaches--fracturing combined with new well technologies--might make it possible for a lot of new oil to be produced from Alaska, particularly the North Slope.

PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES

The fracturing of rock through high-pressure injection of fluids is a long-established practice in the industry and it has been done for decades in Alaska. The concept is that the fluids, pumped down under high pressure, force cracks in the rocks that make it easier for the oil and gas fluids to flow to the producing wells.

There's a lot of science behind...