Promotional Information

"That which cannot be measured, cannot be regulated or otherwise controlled or exploited." This is the last sentence of the book, and informs all aspects of sustainable enterprise: productivity improvement, environmental protection and the wellbeing of the public in contact with the industry.

Table of Contents

1. Background

Part I: Air Emissions2. Fugitive Methane and Emissions From Flaring3. Detection of Methane and Amelioration4. Particulate Matter and Volatile Organic Chemicals

Part II. The Potential for Contaminating Ground Water5. Methane in Groundwater6. Potential for Liquid Contamination of Groundwater

Part III: Improving Economics of Recovery7. Illuminating the Reservoir8. Improving Net Recovery of Fluids9. Subsurface DNA Sequencing: A New Tool for Reservoir Characterization

Part IV: Informing Policy10. Enabling Regulations and Empowering the Public

About the Author

Vikram Rao is the executive director of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium, having assumed this position on September 1, 2008. He spent 9 years with Halliburton and another 25 with predecessor companies. Most recently, he served as senior vice president and chief technology officer responsible for Halliburton’s technology effort as well as intellectual asset management. He joined a predecessor company in 1974 as a senior research engineer. Dr. Rao currently advises the non-profit RTI International and the firms BioLargo Inc., Biota Technology Inc., Alchemy Sciences Inc., Fervo Energy Inc., Sage Geosystems Inc., Clyra Medical Technologies Inc., and Cybele Microbiome Inc. He is a past chairman of the North Carolina Mining and Energy Commission. He is the author of more than 30 publications and has been awarded 42 United States patents and foreign analogs. RTI Press released his book Shale Gas: The Promise and the Peril in July 2012 and a revised second edition in 2015. His book Sustainable Shale Oil and Gas in the Emerging Issues in Analytical Chemistry series, with Dr. Rob Knight, was released in 2016. Rao earned a doctorate and a master’s in engineering from Stanford University and holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in Chennai, India. Rob Knight is a Professor in the Biological Sciences Graduate Program at the University of California San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His research interests include the human microbiome, microbial community ecology, and multi-omics analyses. His current areas of focus are bioinformatics and glycobiology.