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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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You may think that oil companies control this card game, but they don't. Who controls this game is the hungry gullet of consumption. I will defend that statement until the end of time.
We agree on that, BASE. I'm just being difficult because of definitional issues in economics. What an economist calls "demand" means a schedule of quantities demanded compared to the price of the commodity. The amount of petroleum products we demand at any given price is the "quantity demanded."
Thus, the "hungry gullet of consumption" varies its hunger based on the price. When gasoline is relatively expensive, we buy more hybrids and fewer gas-guzzlers. While this price sensitivity takes time to affect the quantity demanded, so does adjustment of the size of inventories of petroleum products.
I think it's these timing issues that confuse the non-economists (specifically populist politicians and the press). They say, for instance, "the amount of gasoline available is relatively unchanged, but the price rose sharply, so it must be some nefarious price manipulation." No, it's not. It's the price adjusting to anticipated future market conditions.
As long as the price is allowed to do so, we can keep that "hungry gullet" under control. When the price gets manipulated downward, however, then watch out!
John
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-earthquake-not-natural-event-expert-says-002703764.html
Ohio earthquake was not a natural event, expert says
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - A 4.0 magnitude earthquake in Ohio on New Year's Eve did not occur naturally and may have been caused by high-pressure liquid injection related to oil and gas exploration and production, an expert hired by the state of Ohio said on Tuesday.
Ohio's Department of Natural Resources on Sunday suspended operations at five deep well sites in Youngstown, Ohio, where the injection of water was taking place, while they evaluate seismological data from a rare quake in the area.
The wells are about 9,000 feet deep and are used to dispose of water from oil and gas wells. The process is related to fracking, the controversial injection of chemical-laced water and sand into rock to release oil and gas. Critics say that the high pressure injection of the liquid causes seismic activity.
Won-Young Kim, a research professor of Seismology Geology and Tectonophysics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday that circumstantial evidence suggests a link between the earthquake and the high-pressure well activity.
"We know the depth (of the quake on Saturday) is two miles and that is different from a natural earthquake," said Kim, who is advising the state of Ohio.
Data collected from four seismographs set up in November in the area confirm a connection between the quakes and water pressure at the well, Kim said.
"There is circumstantial evidence to connect the two -- in the past we didn't have earthquakes in the area and the proximity in the time and space of the earthquakes matches operations at the well," he said.
A spokesman for Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich, a strong supporter of oil and gas exploration in the state, said Ohio could announce a preliminary decision whether to continue the suspension of the wells as early as Wednesday.
The state was already looking into the cause of earlier seismic activity from 10 previous earthquakes, beginning in March, 2011.
According to Kim, this is not the first time Ohio tremors have been linked to human activities. "We have several examples of earthquakes from deep well disposal in the past," Kim said.
A quake of 4.2 magnitude in Ashtabula, Ohio, on January 26, 2001, was believed to be due to deep-well injection, he said. And in 1987 there was an incident with a correlation to high pressure deep well injection, he said.
There are 177 so-called "class two" deep wells in Ohio, according to Tom Stewart, executive vice president of Ohio Oil and Gas Association. They all operate under federal guidelines spelled out by the Clean Water Act.
There is no evidence that the wells in Youngstown were operating at higher pressures than allowed, Stewart said.
"We haven't seen anything from anyone at (the state agency) that would lead us to believe that the well was not operating properly," he said.
Kim said that even though the wells have stopped pumping water into the rock, the area might not have experienced its last earthquake. "It could take a couple of years for the earthquakes to go away. The migration of the fluid injected into the rock takes a long time to leave," Kim said.
Ohio's Democratic Senator, Sherrod Brown, said the quick response by the state shows it is a serious issue.
"There are things we need to know about drilling and earthquakes," Brown told Reuters on Tuesday.
Brown said he supports new energy exploration that brings jobs to the state but has questions about how companies will handle fracking and wastewater disposal. "They have got to answer the question of what they are going to do with the waste just like nuclear power," Brown said.
(Editing by Greg McCune and Jim Marshall)
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Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
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Not that it matters, and not that it happens every day or anything....
But how does BASE104 explain it?
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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GuapoVino
Trad climber
All Up In Here
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So what do you think would be a good guess as to when demand will meet supply in a way that causes things to really get weird? How do you predict it playing out after that? Do you think it will be more of a decades long event where we start to switch over to other forms of fuel (natural gas, ethanol, electric) or do you think we will just go after all the oil we can any way we can even if it means going to war over it?
You suggest natural gas for road transportation. If we were properly motivated by oil shortages, how long do you think it would take to get a useful number of gas stations equipped to sell natural gas? How hard is it to handle compared to gasoline (transporting it to gas stations, storing it, putting it into automobiles)?
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jfailing
Trad climber
Lone Pine
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The process is related to fracking, the controversial injection of chemical-laced water and sand into rock to release oil and gas. Critics say that the high pressure injection of the liquid causes seismic activity.
From what I've gathered, using the term "fracking" is a misnomer in this Ohio earthquake case. It sounds like they were just injecting waste material into a disposal well, which is probably pretty routine (I imagine). Yes, you can create seismicity (earthquakes) through fracking, but injecting water/waste down a deep well through a pre-existing fault zone - which sounds like was the case in Ohio - can cause seismicity as well. So saying it was caused by "fracking" isn't quite accurate... Routine injection? Yes. Fracking? No.
Besides, it's only a magnitude 4.2 fer cryin out loud. I'm curious as to what the highest magnitude earthquake directly caused by fracking or injection is. In Basel Switzerland a few years ago, they canceled an Enhanced Geothermal Systems test because they were inducing microseismicity, and there were a handful of magnitude 4's and 3's, but that's about the worst I've ever heard of.
There is also a big correlation with geothermal wells and earthquakes as well. It is really common on some hydrothermal injection wells, which is clean energy.
True dat - we can track specific seismic events (based on location, depth, magniude, and time) that directly correlate with fluctuating injection rates in an adjacent injection well. This works as a fantastic tool for measuring response in the reservoir - it's real-time data! These events are mostly between 0.1 and 2.0 magnitude - nothing anyone would ever really feel.
Also: this thread is great! No back and forth bitching like other OT threads. Lots of info is provided on both sides, and a respectful discourse is upheld. Keep it goin!
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lucaskrajnik
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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If they dont do it here, they are going to do it over seas.... What am I thinking, we dont want work in the U.S.!?! STOP HYDROFRACKING!!! STOP ALL OIL DRILLING IN THE U.S.!!
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tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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The were injecting wastewater from fracking opperations, so while it wasn't a fracking opperation that caused the quake, it was related to fracking.
Base, have you any info on the Shell exploration in the Chuckchi? The one tidbit I'd heard is that they say their seismic work indicates the geology is some of the best they've seen since the 30's, which puts it on par with Saudi, i.e. a mega field. Of course until they drill and delineate nobody knows for sure what it'll prove out to be.
The real question is are people on a global scale wise enough and self controlled enough to move towards energy efficiency and alternative energies in a timely enough manner to account for declining oil production over the long term. I'm generally an optomist, but I see a bumpy road due to greed and selfishness.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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See? Look at the post above....
OK. There are probably at least 100,000 saltw#ter disposal wells in the country. You can use them to dispose of spent frac water as well. This is by far the safest method and it has a history going back to the beginning of oil.
Most oil wells, and many gas wells, make saltw#ter. Most oil wells make so much oil, so much gas, and so much saltw#ter.
Some wells make thousands of barrels per day of saltw#ter. They are only economic if they make enough oil to cover the disposal expense.
If you have a really sweet disposal zone, like the Arbuckle/Ellenburger cambro-ordovician limestone, that is usually 1000 to 2000 feet thick and already full of saltw#ter, a disposal well can inject thousands of barrels of saltw#ter per day. There are also numerous oil fields that are on secondary recovery waterfloods. That is where you inject saltw#ter to sweep unrecovered oil into producing wellbores. That has been going on since the beginning of time.
The relatioship between earthquakes and disposal wells is well known. If you overpressure your disposal zone, which can happen if it doesn't have great permeability, then the increased pore pressure can lubricate an old fault. The interior US is totally riddled with old faults that are pretty much dead. So it can cause one to slip. They are small earthquakes, but it is easy to correlate them to a specific disposal well because of their shallow depth. You shut down the disposal well and the earthquakes go away. Most of them are sub mag 2.0, but occasionally you get a bigger one like the Ohio one the other evening.
A frac job may inject 3 million gallons of fluid or more. This sounds like a lot, but if you consider the actual volume of the reservoir you are frac'ing, it is quite small. That frac fluid also flows right back.
So a big frac is maybe 80,000 42 gallon bbls of fluid. The injection wells take over 10,000 bbls per day, and they do it for decades. So you actually lower pore pressure in frac'd wells as they produce and the reservoir pressure declines as the well produces gas (all wells decline, and shale gas wells decline like crazy in the first 12 months).
So disposal wells and frac jobs are not related. Two entirely different animals from a physics point of view.
The real famous case of injection wells causing earthquakes was at Rocky Flats (Rocky Mountain Arsenal) back in the sixties. They had hazardous waste injection wells that were causing small earthquakes. Injection was stopped and the earthquakes stopped.
The thing about this is that it is not predictable. There are hundreds of thousands of class 2 commercial disposal wells and on site saltw#ter disposal or secondary recovery injection wells. Many of them are in places where there is intense faulting. The age of the faults in most of the paleozoic hydrocarbon basins are Pennsylvanian or older. Pre dinosaur old.
These faults regularly have little micro earthquakes on them, but they are dead. If there is a little stress on them they can still move a little, though.
I have said this before, but it bears repeating. In Pennsylvania and New York, there is not a geologicaly good zone to dispose of saltw#ter. Sure there are porous zones at depth, but just the power needed to inject saltw#ter makes it nuts. Ohio does have a good injection zone, and they are actually shipping spent frac fluid down to Ohio to get rid of it.
This is the entire problem with the Marcellus. You frac the well, the well flows the frac water back, bringing with it high chlorides and exotic things like Barium, and there isn't really a safe way to handle it. Treating it in municipal treatment plants is nuts. To really clean that water up it would take some kind of wicked reverse osmosis factory. Like the ones that convert ocean water into fresh water.
In the mid-continent, the Arbuckle is the deepest rock in the sedimentary section. Right on top of granite basement. It is super thick, super porous, and super permeable. It is already loaded with saltw#ter brine. You can inject an incredible amount of saltw#ter without having to inject at high pressure. It is so vast that you can't fill it up.
The geology here is great. There is a class 2 disposal well every fifteen miles or so. Saltw#ter and frac fluid get trucked over there and they are safely disposed of. So we don't see the groundwater issues that they see in Pennsylvania.
In a nutshell, disposal wells are totally different. I know of only one instance where a frac caused an earthquake swarm. It was in southern Oklahoma a few years ago. The were all mag 2.0 or much lower, so they weren't felt. They were picked up by the seismograph network. They were super shallow and could be correlated to the frac.
I know a frac sounds huge, but it is small when compared to the available pore space in the target rock, and the well flows that frac water right back at you. Disposing of it properly is the problem in the Marcellus.
There are thousands of horizontal stage frac'd wells in Oklahoma and Texas, and they are being constantly drilled in many plays, not just shale gas. We don't have any problems. The geology here is just very fortunate.
And remember. The biggest fracs may inject 100,000 barrels. And you get most of that right back. A disposal well may inject over 20,000 bbls each DAY.
The class 2 wells are super regulated and monitored for casing integrity. All of the smaller disposal or waterflood injection wells are tested annually.
I wish that it were easy to correlate injection with earthquake risk, but I don't know how, other than studying increasing pore pressure in the injection zone. There is a blizzard of dispoal and injection wells, and the one that will cause an earthquake is like trying to find a black snowflake in a storm.
I wish I could bill this time out.
Also, the disposal zones are way deep.
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CrackAddict
Trad climber
Canoga Park, CA
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From what I've gathered, using the term "fracking" is a misnomer in this Ohio earthquake case. It sounds like they were just injecting waste material into a disposal well, which is probably pretty routine (I imagine). Yes, you can create seismicity (earthquakes) through fracking, but injecting water/waste down a deep well through a pre-existing fault zone - which sounds like was the case in Ohio - can cause seismicity as well. So saying it was caused by "fracking" isn't quite accurate... Routine injection? Yes. Fracking? No.
Besides, it's only a magnitude 4.2 fer cryin out loud. I'm curious as to what the highest magnitude earthquake directly caused by fracking or injection is. In Basel Switzerland a few years ago, they canceled an Enhanced Geothermal Systems test because they were inducing microseismicity, and there were a handful of magnitude 4's and 3's, but that's about the worst I've ever heard of.
It is true that Fracking CAN cause seismicity, but it is only triggering the strain, not the stress. In other words, the stress builds up in the absence of Fracking and can potentially cause a larger Earthquake in the future. Fracking is only "lubricating" the fault zone to the point where slip occurs.
It is conceivable that we could trigger a magnitude 8 by injecting into the San Andreas, but it would likely happen anyway. We are overdue.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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I found a really cool quote that pretty much sums up what I hear:
Michele Bachmann is an extremist who spouts weird conspiracy theories, garbles history and foreign policy, and tells untruths with such conviction that she’s less a liar than a denizen of an alternative reality.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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OK. I finally found somebody who hit the damn nail on the head.
I should give Paul a Supertopo Nobel Prize.
Yeah, there are problems with dealing with all of that water in the Marcellus, and it looks like they are having a real problem with gas in the groundwater from the PNAS paper. That can be dealt with, but it may require some big changes.
Everyone is all just jumping on this like it is the end of the world. Like companies are injecting cyanide into the dirt.
So. Obama opened up the Chukchi and offshore Beaufort Seas to oil and gas leasing a few years ago. I can't believe nobody jumped on this.
Offshore Beaufort starts 3 miles offshore from the coastal plain of ANWR, and all points west. I have peed in it a number of times I count my oceans by urinating in them.
The Chukchi Sea is the sea north of the Bering Sea. North of the Seward Peninsula, north of the Bering Straits.
It is covered with ice 9 months or so out of the year, and ice can blow onshore at any time of the year. Nobody knows how to clean up a spill on ice. Hell, you need an icebreaker just to get equipment out there in the winter months.
It is probably the most environmentally sensitive and difficult are to drill on the planet. There have been a few true offshore wells drilled in the offshore Beaufort, but none were put into production. You have to find a large enough accumulation to justify putting in a drilling and producing platform.
The Chukchi lease sale brought in billions of dollars. So there must be some really big structures beneath it.
A land blowout, even one like Macondo, would have been put out in a week or less, and it would have trashed a small area. The Macondo well wouldn't have even blown out if it were onshore.
That area has already been shot with seismic, so they know the traps are there. It is now just a question of whether or not they contain oil, gas, or saltw#ter.
Everyone is knee jerking about frac jobs, which have been around forever and are well understood. The geology in the areas is well understood. Yes, you can have problems with anything, but drilling in the arctic ice is spooky. The Canadians have been doing it, but that is mainly gas in the McKenzie Delta. Not fullblown offshore drilling. Just drilling is one thing. Modern engineering is up to the job.
The real problem is with the twenty or thirty years when the wells are producing.
I know of noplace where they are drilling 30 miles offshore arctic, like the Chukchi will be.
The Chukchi is also extremely shallow, so there has always been a worry about dealing with seafloor pipelines. The arctic ice is realtively thin, but it is still god's own bulldozer and scours the ocean bottom like crazy.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Yes, the biggest earthquake problems with injection have been with geothermal. You inject water and it comes back up as steam.
Just on the map I have open right now there are at least 100 saltw#ter disposal wells (no fracs needed in this area). There are tons of old faults. No earthquakes. It is rare and has nothing to do with fracs. Entirely different physical setting.
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tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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While not Arctic, the Kashagon field in the North Caspian is quite similar to the Chucki in terms of being offshore, 70km from Atarau as I recall, but it's been over 12 years since I was there. They are also shallow, as I recall about 10m deep, amazing that far offshore. They do get a fair bit of ice buildup as well during the winter and see -30F. Now that field is scary, high pressure ~10,000 fps, high H2S content, it was estimated 30% of the gas was H2S and high CO2 content, so very corrosive. I haven't kept track of that development, the rig was just starting to spud the first exploratory well the last time I was there.
I agree, cleaning up a blowout or spill on the ice would be very difficult if not impossible, depending on how thick/stable the ice was during the blowout. If it happened during breakup, forget it. It's unfortunate that there aren't more mega fields in easily accessed and developed environments, but alas the easy oil has been produced decades ago. Unfortunately technology and regulations only advance after catastrophes, and sadly have to be re-learned. One would think that after Piper Alpha the industry would not take shortcuts offshore, but sadly the Deepwater Horizon proves that is not the case.
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jfailing
Trad climber
Lone Pine
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It is conceivable that we could trigger a magnitude 8 by injecting into the San Andreas, but it would likely happen anyway.
This was the evil scheme of Max Zorin (played by Christopher Walken), in the 007 film "A View to a Kill."
Zorin's plot was to flood the Hayward fault with water from the bay, which would in turn trigger massive fault displacement and put Silicon Valley underwater... We watched this in Structural Geology in college...
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jfailing
Trad climber
Lone Pine
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But geothermal is forever and always.
Rokjox - the idea of using fracking to open up an artificial geothermal reservoir is amazing. It's almost too good to be true. Folks have been trying to do it for years. It's also known as an "Enhanced Geothermal System." Only a handful of companies have been met with success however, under very particular and restrictive circumstances. Therefore not many are willing to invest in furthering its research and development.
With all the fear associated with fracking these days, I can't see a lot of people getting behind the idea...
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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B104, worth mentioning that the Norwegians and Russians recently agreed on rights in the Barents Sea, south of Svalbard and Franz Joseph Land, and at least some exploratory drilling has started in the Barents Sea, and perhaps the Kara Sea. Likewise, much of the Chukchi Sea is north of Siberia, and there are significant possibilities for oil and gas all along Siberia's north coast - about half the world's circumference. You wonder how well prepared they are for exploring for, let alone exploiting, oil and gas there.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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The Russkis won't be shy about developing it if the moolah is there, of that
you can rest assured. The question will be whether they make a hash of it
as they have for 100 years at Baku and nearly every other site of theirs.
In fact, they are infamous for environmental degradation in every industry
of note.* They made a really good go of polluting Lake Baikal to death until
an incredibly brave bunch of people stood up to the Soviet machine back in
the late 60's and early 70's.
* Hell, in the 50's and 60's the bulk of the Soviet Union's canned food
industry was centered on the Dnestr River in Moldova. Unfortunately, those
plants were downstream from untreated sewage outflows of well over 1 million people!
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tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
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MH,
Statoil is tops for offshore work, rated as one of the top 100 global sustainable companies.
As mentioned, Ruskies record is not so hot, but most of their current development work has been joint ventures with Western firms, so higher evnvironmental and safety standards have generally been employed.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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That has already been covered in depth.
It was a disposal well, not a frac'd well. A big frac injects maybe 100,000 blls of fluid, and you get almost all of that right back as the gas comes in.
A disposal well can take 20,000 bbls of saltw#ter or spent frac fluid for decades.
The disposal wells can overpressure the strata that they are pumping into. Permanently. A frac'd well flows the frac fluid right back and then the gas flows and depletes the pressure in that strata. Disposal or injection wells have a long historic relationship to earthquakes, although there are hundreds of thousands of them that never cause a problem. There is only one good case I know of where a frac job caused earthquakes. Most were mag 1.0 or so. The largest was mag 2. Stopped the next day.
Oklahoma and Texas have tens of thousands of these horizontal mega frac'd wells with no problem. The big problem is getting rid of the spent frac fluid.
Read the thread and you will get a free lesson in subsurface geology.
That is what I do for a living. Sedimentary Stratigraphy.
---happily meeting the hydrocarbon needs of Supertopo since 1987.
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