I have no recollection of hearing anything about fracking outside of the US.
Are there other shale formations around the world where fracking would work, or do they somehow appear only in North America?
There are vast oil reserves ALL OVER the world, that would benefit from the application of fracking to even existing and known petroleum and natural gas reserves. But are the structures that hold this oil and gas captive also necessary to support the overburden, and does this overburden then collapse into great gapping holes in the earth’s surface?
After all, extracting too much of the content of a vein of coal sometimes causes a great sinkhole to form, as the mine collapses. The obvious means to overcome this problem, removing the surface layers over the vein of coal, strip mining, creates a whole new set of problems of its own.
Much of this subsidence of earth has already occurred along the marshland and estuaries of the Louisiana coastline, not that sea is rising, but that the seabed is sinking.
I read an article recently that stated that the shales in the US are more suited for fracturing than most others in the world. It has to do with the amount of clay content making them brittle and more easily fractured.
China has a shale play, but it’s twice as deep and resting under the mountains of Sichuan Province. There are others out in arid areas without easy access to water. Another factor is their geology is more fractured—fault prone.