What India can do on shale gas: California's travails have many lessons

By Sunil Sharan

The success that the United States has had with shale gas and oil is widely touted, but often ignored are the struggles that one of its largest states, California, has experienced with exploi ting shale, a sedimentary rock formation. In fact, California's travails hold many lessons for India.
To begin with, there has been utter confusion about California's shale reserves. Initially , it was believed that the state's Monterey Shale deposits contained 13.7 billion barrels of oil. Fresh estimates from the US Energy Information Administration have slashed this number by 96%, to about 600 million barrels of oil.

In India too, shale gas estimates have varied substantially . Shale gas is just natural gas and shale oil a substitute for conventional crude oil.

The terms shale gas and oil are being interchangeably utilised in this article because they are found in similar shale basins and their method of extraction too is alike.) The US EIA believes that India's technically recoverable shale gas reserves are about 95 trillion cubic feet (tcf).Technically recoverable resources represent all the oil and gas that can be produced with current technology , industry practice and geologic knowledge.

To give an idea, 95 tcf is enough to run the country's gas-fired power stations for at least 20 years at current consumption rates, according to industry analysts. Other estimates have pegged India's shale gas reserves at over 200 tcf, thereby making it difficult to gauge how attractive the resource really is and how to plan policy around it.

`Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to spare' could be a dictum applicable in this case. California, with a long coastline, is nevertheless experiencing an unprecedented drought that is forcing families to flee those very areas where shale reserves are most found. Shale gas and oil extraction requires enormous quantities of water to be injected at high pressure to break the shale rock formations and release the embedded gas and oil in a process that is called hydraulic fracturing or “fracking“.

India too is endowed with a rich network of rivers but suffers from a scarcity of fresh water because of strong demand in irrigation and an even more rapid uptick in industrial and domestic needs. In an uncanny resemblance to California, India faces water stress where shale gas reserves are most to be found, which are the Cambay , Gondwana, and Krishna-Godavari basins, as well as the Indo-Gangetic plain.

Underground resources in the US are owned by landowners, who for the large part are happy to sell drilling rights to private explorers. In India though, the government owns what is below the surface, so landowners have no incentive to lease out their holdings. Instead land will have to be acquired for fracking, but land acquisition has become an awfully contentious issue in India.

So is it all doom and gloom on the Indian shale front? Not necessarily . Water-free extraction techniques that utilise shock waves, acidisation which opens tiny pores in rocks, and injection of carbon dioxide into the shale rock are being developed. Till such time as they mature, India should keep discovering its shale deposits and get ready to prime them.

(The writer is an energy expert.)