One key detail which is the basis for Halliburton's technology (and much of their wealth)- although it is not widely appreciated outside the industry, is that in the last decade, in addition to traditional oil exploration, they have looked specifically for deep *coal*.
"Look" instead of "drill" is the operative word. "Coal?" you say, "why coal?" Traditional natural gas deposits, per se, are not found in the same formations as coal. Nowadays you often must drill in 1000 feet of ocean to find new natural gas, since those deposits are found in salt domes in what was once geologically deep ocean... whereas coal beds were more often formed in bogs or shallow land seas, which is now under dry land. To find these prime deep coal locations, if one is secretive enough, one does even have to drill, at least not always- and need only to search through the archived records of past drilling, which every state requires to be kept in official records. There is a long history of drilling in the USA in almost every state. Some states have over one million wells which have been drilled over the past 150 years. Most of the efforts turn out to be "dry" but many old bore holes hit deep coal.... Useless (heretofore). Before perfecting the fracture drilling method(s), some of which are trade secrets, not patented, and cannot be used in the USA, due to risks and laws, Halliburton was able to get hold of the mineral rights for many of these deep coal seams - for cheap, for course ... since deep coal was deemed to be of little commercial value. Outside of Russia and S.Africa, you cannot find many miners willing to do the dangerous work of mining deep coal. Subterranean coal seams contain substantial quantities of methane. This has been a hazard of deep coal mining for centuries. This is especially true of Eastern USA coal. Thousands of coal miners have died as a result of this. Conventional natural gas reservoir store methane as a free gas under pressure, often in a domed salt formation, which seal-in the gas. Coal's unique structure allows it to store the gas through direct adsorption onto its carbon surface. According to the patents, methane adsorbs into micropores on the surface of coal- 10 to 100 square meters of surface area per gram of coal, giving coal beds the capacity to adsorb significant amounts of gas, often more than the same volume of traditional salt domes. It is released by hydraulic fracturing of plate boundaries. Halliburton previously (under Cheney's reign) had bought-up, some say "stole" the intellectual property, but then was able to perfect most of the patents and IP related to this technology into a robust technique. The beauty of this process for deep beds is that once some of the layers in the coal seam (usually a horizontal stratus) is fractured, and part of the gas has been released, then the compression-structure of the bed will further micro-fracture under the billion ton weight of the overburden, and more and more gas is released. It is an unexpected synergy. That is the better known part of the story, related to US production of gas from deep coal beds. Fracture drilling has other uses as well but none compare to this technology, in terms of ROI. In areas in the rest of the world, especially deserts, where the drilling restrictions are non-existent or more lax (i.e. the 'mordida' in Latin countries) there is much more going on than we know about. Halliburton has about the same level of secrecy (and use of strong arm tactics) as the CIA. Why do you think Halliburton is moving to Dubai? (besides the possibility of having all of their assets seized, if the Dem-wits should win the White House)? Well, in one hypothesis, some of that rationale might have direct relevance to CANR! As Paul Harvey would say, stay tuned for the rest of the story ... (teaser: page 2 will be "the CANR connection" to the advance extraction of deep oil and gas from otherwise "dry" deposits) Jones
