Fracturing and Natural Gas in Groundwater: Is There a Connection?
Authors: Darling Bruce K. 
Published: June 2016

Beyond the Headlines

Editor’s note: Professionals in the oil and gas industry often receive questions about how industry operations affect public health, the environment, and the communities in which they operate. Of particular concern today is the impact of hydraulic fracturing on the environment. In this column, JPT invites energy experts to put those questions and concerns about industry operations into perspective. Additional information about the oil and gas industry, how it affects society, and how to explain industry operations and practices to the general public is available on SPE’s Energy4me website.

Anyone who has watched films such as Gasland and Promised Land is aware of the alleged dire consequences to groundwater resources from the petroleum industry’s decades-old practice of hydraulic fracturing of tight formations to release hydrocarbons.

Gasland (a “documentary”) and Promised Land (a movie starring Matt Damon) purport to expose such threats, which are highlighted in the form of natural gas discharging from groundwater or flares from the kitchen faucets of landowners whose water wells are located near fields with recently fractured wells.

Such representations are intended to create the impression that fracturing opens pathways from deeply buried strata for the migration of natural gas, brine, and drilling fluids to shallow formations that are sources of groundwater for cities and rural areas where fracturing is a common method for oil and gas extraction. The print and broadcast media are complicit in the matter, as both have piled on to fan the sentiment of Americans against this method of developing much needed natural gas resources.

A consequence of antifracturing films and reporting is confusion among the public and attempts by environmentalists to ban fracturing.

Origins of Natural Gas

Natural gas is derived from different sources. Most of what we think of as natural gas is produced within the deep subsurface under high- temperature and high-pressure conditions (thermogenic gas). A much smaller component is derived from the production of gas in the shallow subsurface under lowtemperature and low-pressure environments (biogenic gas, that is, coal beds, swampy environments, and landfills).

Geochemists can differentiate between thermogenic and biogenic gases by looking at their carbon compositions (as illustrated by gas chromatographs) and their carbon and hydrogen isotope signatures.

This column focuses on the role of gas chromatography as a differentiator of biogenic and thermogenic gases. Carbon and hydrogen isotope ratios will be the subject of another column.

Gas Chromatography

Because of the different environments in which natural gases are generated, thermogenic gases and biogenic gases can be expected to have distinct compositions. All hydrocarbons are carbonbased compounds with the number of carbon atoms of the components ranging from one to as many as 30 (C1 to C30). For our purposes, we are interested only in those components with one to six (C1 to C6) carbon atoms, which are methane through hexane, respectively.

Biogenic gases are primarily methane (C1) and very little ethane (C2) and, in some cases, propane (C3), with methane usually accounting for 99% or more of total gas. Thermogenic gas consists of measurable components of fractions heavier than methane (that is, C2 through C6 gases).

The difference between thermogenic and biogenic gases is illustrated in Fig. 1, which shows the composition of the gas samples collected from the groundwater of the Wilcox aquifer and produced-gas samples from nearby fractured wells that were thought to have been the source of natural gas in the aquifer, approximately 10 miles north of Shreveport (Caddo Parish), Louisiana. The figure shows the percentage (by mass) of each hydrocarbon and nonhydrocarbon gases detected in the samples.