Horizontal drilling is a fairly new technique that is used
to drill horizontally inside the earth after a vertical drill has been used. Alfaro Oil and Gas, founded by Brian Alfaro, are active in the Eagle Ford Shale and utilize this technique to drill into the shale formation.
Fracking techniques are used to fracture shale rock in order for natural
resources like natural gas and crude oil to be released. If more sites like the
Barnett combo are located, then that would mean more natural gas resources
would be available to the residents of the United States . If this were the
case then we would no longer have to be so dependent on foreign countries in
order to get our crude oil and natural gas resources from them. We would have
more than enough of a supply here in the United States to take care of the
demand that the residents here would need.
It has been estimated that the Barnett Combo is more than at
least 6,000 feet deep and is very thick. So thick, in fact, that you would have
to fracture the shale in stages in order to get all of resources out of the
area. A Horizontal well would run you anywhere between 2 and 3 million and the
Barnett Shale location have a chance to one day be able to produce up to 3 to 4
billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. This
not only means that we could stop being so dependent on crude oil and
start using natural gas as an alternate fuel source, but we could also stop
being so dependent on foreign countries and the hold they have over our fuel
supply as well as our government. These are just a few of the reasons that shale exploration is so important, notes Brian Alfaro.
The use of fuel has a strong hold on nearly everything. It
affects our economy in more ways than one and can have a dramatic effect on how
we deal with our neighboring countries. Future developments of the Barnett
Shale area could be very tricky as the Dallas and Fort Worth areas are becoming
very heavily populated which means there will be less open space left for
drilling.