What is the difference between shale and methane gas?

64% of England is believed to sit on top of recoverable shale or methane deposits.

Many areas of the country have been and are under review and drilling licenses have been granted  to energy companies in abundance.

The major difference between drilling for methane and shale gas is that methane tends to be much closer to the surface.

The coal bed seams tend to be less than 1000 metres deep whereas shale gas can be three times the vertical distance (and therefore the time, volume of water, chemicals, money, etc.).

It’s not for shale… yet.

As we can see from the Shepherdswell planning application in Kent, Coastal Oil and Gas applied to drill for methane gas which uses a similar technique to drilling for shale gas.

The large-scale adoption of shale gas fracking from the US has brought with it some more cutting edge methods of methane extraction which make it very similar to drilling for shale.

Drilling companies like Coastal Oil and Gas often submit exploratory proposals to drill for methane before attempting to drill for shale gas.

Drilling for Coal Bed Methane (CBM) is currently far more prevalent than shale gas in the UK – but it seems to be flying under the radar. This is because drilling for methane has been happening in the UK on a small scale for a long time.

The other unconventional method of extracting gas is Underground Coal Gasification (UCG) but that has not been talked about in Kent.

What do you think?

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