The "shale gas" concept in Canada: a preliminary inventory of possibilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term "Shale Gas" refers to unconventional, continuous-type, self-sourced resources contained in fine grained (ranging from clay to very fine sandstone), organic-rich, low permeability reservoirs in which thermogenic or biogenic methane is stored as free gas in the matrix or fracture porosity, or as adsorbed/dissolved gas on the organics and/or clays. These are self-enclosed petroleum systems, characterized by inefficient "dysfunctional" expulsion and migration, where source, reservoir and trap are all present in the same thick shaly succession. The most prospective shale gas targets will be thick, widespread, gas-saturated, fine grained, organic-rich units with a) significant Type III (terrestrial, gas-prone) organic matter in thermally mature to overmature states, b) significant Type II (marine, oil- and gas-prone) organic matter in a thermally overmature state, and/or c) rich organic matter of any type that is thermally immature and subject to extensive biogenic decomposition. The current economic climate of depleting conventional reserves and rising prices presents an opportunity for the emergence of the shale gas concept in Canada, although significant environmental concerns must be addressed from the beginning. Successful shale gas production has a long history in the USA and each of the four (or more) known play types (Antrim, Ohio/New Albany, Barnett, Lewis) owes its success to different balances of the controlling factors of TOC, thermal maturity, lithology, mineralogy, depth, fracturing, production technique and infrastructure. Entirely new, undescribed, play styles probably still exist. Intensive and detailed, pre-drill, geological study of each potential shale gas play is an inexpensive and efficient method for technical evaluation, to properly assess the economic possibilities, choice of target and recovery of resources. Canada's sedimentary basins collectively provide numerous (perhaps 50) possible shale gas targets, scattered over at least 7 regions. Of these, seven represent regional-scale units with enough geological prospectivity to justify concerted geological study due to the presence of one or more of excellent geological potential, geographic location, proximity to infrastructure, and/or relation to known conventional and unconventional plays. They are: Upper Ordovician of Appalachian Basin, Upper Devonian of Appalachian/Michigan Basin, Upper Devonian of northwestern WCSB, Triassic of northwestern WCSB, Jurassic of western WCSB, Middle to Upper Cretaceous of WCSB Plains, Middle Devonian of Mackenzie Corridor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".