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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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I know that when I was working at Chesapeake, they installed baseline groundwater monitoring wells pre-drilling.
They had a small division that wasn't exploration geologists. They were groundwater hydrologists who knew all of the aquifers.
I will say this. There is so much bad info out their on fracking. Even a reasonable person who spends an afternoon on the web can't find the truth.
So I understand the frustration. Unfortunately the frustrations are mainly base on terrible information.
In Oklahoma, there has been tens of thousnds of horizontal stage fracking. I've not heard of a single problem. Like any complicate engineering process, there will be accidents, but modern drilling is far more than poking a hole in the ground.
No. the fractures do not come even close to making it up to the water table. Too much ductile shale in between.
I was really surprised that frack jobs became the focus of attention. There are other things that I would have thought would be worse.
Almost all frack jobs go well. The problem is moving all of that water and sand by truck at the surface, and recovery and disposal of flowback water. Some basins have great deep diposal zones. The Marcellus doesn't have this. That is the only difference in the Marcellus.
I do this for a living, and I don't lie. It is overblown.
There are problems with saltwater in the Mississipi Lime play in northern OK. We are seeing this induced seismicity. Actions are being taken. Wells are being plugged back several hundred feet above crystalline basement rocks.
Interestingly, the first, and biggest, earhthquakes take place in the Hunton de-watering play. The zone is high perm, so isn't fracked. They move a ton of saltwater with the oil, and it required a network of disposal wells. That was the area of the stongest induced earthquakes.
Fracking doesn't cause earthquakes other than super small ones. Too small to be felt.
It is the disposal wells that cause the induced seismicity. Right now trouble wells are being plugged back from Basement, where the quakes happen. Other wells have been reduced in volume injected.
It is a big deal in Oklahoma, but happens in areas where the wells make tons of saltwater. The Mississippi lime has always produced tons of water along with the oil, requiring regular injection wells.
Basically what you are doing is taking water out of the shallower Miss and injected into the underlying Arbuckle Formation.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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BASE104, there you go again - confusing us by providing facts.
I really appreciate your contributions on this thread. They form a nice counterbalance to the postings of the fanatics.
john
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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G#dam facts. They just get in the way.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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"The problem is moving all of that water and sand by truck at the surface, and recovery and disposal of flowback water. "
Don't forget the use of millions of gallons of water in arid drought stricken regions (ie california). who cares! it's a gold rush!!
Exactly; along with all the other problems, like your neighbor selling there farm so you can have a gas well next door. Not only is it an environmental issue it is a social issue.
As I have said numerous times it is another gold (gas/oil) rush and don't you dare get in the way of all that money.
Like you really could . the oil and gas industry is so powerful they will and are bulldozing over the opposition. Doing everything they can to be exempt form CEQA in california ( didn't help there cause that they were FingUP in Bakersfield area a few months ago). Enough ranting Just think it is big business as usual not watching out for the social good.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
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I do not hate fracking.
Greenland,Iceland and Ireland all frack,yet only use water,no injected chemicals.
I am not a fanatic,Mr. Transparent stockholder.
You believe what you would like to believe,this "report" is flawed in many ways.No baselines were used or made.Here in NY they have.There will have to be a confident company who would want to drill here now.
They did no tests in the Marcellus play for this "report".
The report will be released to the public and we will see.
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/05062015/fracking-has-contaminated-drinking-water-epa-now-concludes
A blind squirrel has twice the sense of smell.
You do not have to be one to smell this .
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
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Fanatic^^^^^^^.Laughing.
You are correct,locker.
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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Fracking is causing some magnitude 3 and 4 earthquakes in Alberta and BC.
The only big downside of the whole business is acquiring the water. My company has no disposal issues because we have disposal wells near our major gas plant.
Ground water contamination has probably occurred in a few cases in the US but this would be due to poor surface casing well design and cement jobs. A frac job could never break through to the surface unless there was a major fault running through the entire strat column (highly unlikely) and we would know about its existence beforehand (I think there was a case in England a few years back).
I was at Burning Man a few years back and one guy asked, upon hearing I was from Alberta, what I thought of fracking. I said "Its awesome"
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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PSP, there is no horizontal fracking play going on in California. I would suspect that some zones in vertical wells need to be fracked, but these are very small. Not the 10 million gallon jobs needed for a 10,000 foot Bakken lateral.
I flew in and out of Denver over the weekend and saw a couple of rigs, but no vast boom. Most people don't know that just NE of Denver and just east of Boulder is the Wattenberg Gas Field. It is a huge gas field that has seen large fracks for the last 45 years.
There have been some small aquifer problems there, most likely the result of casing leaks.
Normally you just run one casing string over the freshwater, sealing it off. Then you drill through your zone with a smaller bit and case and cement it off. Then you selectively perforate the casing across your pay zone. In most of the areas that I work, you drill through maybe a hundred porous zones containing saltwater just to hit a 20 foot thick porous zone that contains oil or gas. This is what the cement job is for: opening up only the producing zone, and not the host of saltwater bearing zones adjacent to it. Modern cement jobs are very high tech and almost always work fine. If they don't, it usually means that you've lost the well and will have to plug it (if anyone wants to know how that is done, just ask).
Right away you need to rid your mind of the notion that induced fractures reach the surface. This is physically impossible.
Any pollution from a producing well is either a spill at the surface equipment, which can happen just like any other accident, or a casing leak that somehow manages to migrate around the annulus of the surface casing cement jobs. Horizontal wells require three cement jobs.
There are cases where this has happened, but if you can't fix it, you have to plug the well. Leaking methane is too dangerous from a fire hazard to allow it to continue.
You see some lawsuits over this. I know of two cases where, in Oklahoma, gas got into the aquifer. What happens next is the operating company gets sued for millions for contaminating the groundwater. No operator wants that to happen, period. A landowner lawsuit can take a small company down.
The worst type of contamination is saltwater getting into the fresh water. There are a number of cases where this has happened, pretty much all a result of wells drilled prior to 1950, when they didn't case off the groundwater completely. Saltwater ruins the aquifer. You see it most often in old oil fields that are undergoing secondary recovery, also known as waterflooding.
Getting a waterflood permit these days is hard in this state. There cannot be any improperly plugged old wells that could provide a conduit to the surface. If you want to go ahead, you have to successfully re-enter the old borehole and set a number of large cement plugs in it.
Groundwater protection is the most serious and enforced regulation that producing states have. They have all seen it in old fields. It isn't difficult to prevent, and it is just another expense, and not a big one at that. It is taken very seriously. The neat thing about groundwater protection is that it is cheap. One surface casing string costs maybe 50 grand. You can set a second, deeper one, for another 50 K. When a well costs 7 million to drill, 100K for groundwater protection is a drop in the bucket.
Modern well construction is highly refined in 2015. Back in 1950, it was crude by today's standards.
Anyway, you can actually monitor a fracking operation in real time, and while it isn't done on every well, it is used fairly frequently.
It is called microseismic, and it is similar to a seismic exploration project, where you lay out thousands of little geophones and then have these giant vibrating trucks shake the ground. That sound then travels deep into the ground and from that you can see folds, faults, even buried river channels 10,000 feet deep and 350 million years old.
With microseismic you listen to the fractures propagate, and then run it through some zillion dollar software on huge computers and you get a picture of every fracture as it propagates. The goal is to fracture the target zone, which is usually a particular organic rich shale, such as the Barnett, Woodford, Haynesville, or whatever. Most of these are Devonian black shales that are high in organic carbon. Their thickness varies. The Woodford can be 100 feet thick or 500 feet thick depending on what part of the basin you are drilling in. They are deep, too. Normally over 8000 feet (this has to do with thermal maturity which is another topic), where the shale is in the gas or oil window.
Anyway, I've seen a fair number of microseismic sets, and I've never seen a fracture more than a couple of hundred feet out of the zone. The reason is simple. These shales are high in silica, and you can think of them as ultra fine grained sandstones. The normal shales above them are clay rich and ductile. You can't frack that if you even tried. The target shale has to be brittle enough to frack, and often these Devonian shales are, at least in part brittle. Just go to Wiki and read about Young's modulus or Poisson's Ratio for the basics that you need to effectively recover gas from a shale.
PSP brought up the topic of water. This is a big deal in some areas, and not in wetter areas. I'll give you an example of what is starting to happen: Continental Resources is fracking the snot out of the Woodford in SW and S Central OK right now. They have built two recycling plants to re-use water. You don't need drinking quality of water to frack a well. Actually, fresh water is bad, because it can cause certain shale minerals to swell, sealing off flow paths. So you add KCL to the water to bring the salinity up to a safe level. You can frack limestones with fresh water, but in clastic systems you must add enough KCL to bring it up to about 3%. To protect against swelling clays.
Anyway, Continental is drilling this area up like crazy and is recycling the water, because it is a big expense. I believe that this has been going on in the Marcellus, but up there there are so many different companies, that it becomes more difficult. It is being done now in certain places, though.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Great scientfic debate regarding the facts of fracking on, RT.com
Sounds like those Frackers are holding on tight to their Willful-Ignorance!
They argue that there isn't enough substantial evidence proving that fracking is turning drinking water brown, or causing earthquakes. Their denying argument is is obliviously a ploy to continue kicking the debate down the road while they keep on making their Billion dollars a day. Who are these deniers Shell, BP,etc. they're not even American owned company's. Yet they say their helping the USA be less dependent on foreign fuel. But that's not even true. 80% of the fuel America produces goes to Texas and is sold on the world market. Then there's the whole "it's making more jobs" speel, another job well done by the lobbyist of throwing a little money at the sheeple to keep a blind eye.
Member when they told us smoking didn't cause lung cancer and wasn't a health risk! Pffft
Seriously, how are we gonna stop the Big money dudes from using unsubstantiated, unproven to be safe sciencetific techniques that are killing our environment and causing climate change???
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 9, 2015 - 06:38pm PT
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[quote]Frack!
I don't know enough about hydrofracturing to get oil out of the ground to determine whether it is alright or not. But injecting chemicals into the ground to aid it? That is nuts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/science/earth/17gas.html
WASHINGTON — Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats.
Companies injected large amounts of other hazardous chemicals, including 11.4 million gallons of fluids containing at least one of the toxic or carcinogenic B.T.E.X. chemicals — benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylbenzene. The companies used the highest volume of fluids containing one or more carcinogens in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas.
Millions of dollars have been spent remediating older leaking underground storage tanks used at gasoline stations. the primary contaminants were BTEX.
[url="http://www.egr.msu.edu/tosc/akron/factsheets/fs_btexpdf.pdf"]
http://www.egr.msu.edu/tosc/akron/factsheets/fs_btexpdf.pdf[/url][/quote]
I reposted my first post. This thread has all kinds of info on it but I wanted to reiterate that why I started this is because we should not be injecting unknown chemicals into the ground at even extremely low concentrations. I am not basing this on fear. I have spent 25 years cleaning up the worst waste sites in the USA. 10 different states, multiple different superfund sites including radioactive waste and nerve agents. Multiple groundwater pump and treat systems from Connecticut to New Jersey to Nebraska and Utah.
It is a fools errand to trust companies searching out profits and a bigger fools errand to trust the government.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jun 19, 2015 - 11:14am PT
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This is how the general public now perceives fracking. There is so much bad info out there that it is, and I've said it before, nigh impossible for even an intelligent person, to understand the truth and how it works.
First, "in the ground" makes it sound like it is just pumping it into the dirt beneath your feet. This is a gross mischaracterization.
The zones are deep. Usually between 8000 and 13000 feet deep. 5000 is the shallowest depth that I know of for a horizontal play.
The zones are discrete. Above them lie a mile or two of younger rocks, mainly shale. It is not possible to frack normal, ductile, clay rich shale. The organic rich, mainly Devonian black shales are not typical shales. The zones that are targeted need a high silica content to make them brittle. If you steer the wellbore above or below the brittle layers, which are generally relatively thin, 100 feet or so feet thick, if the perforations in the casing are not in the brittle layers, you can pump on it all day long at 10,000 psi and never be able to break the rock. It is too plastic.
So it isn't like a leaky gas tank at your local convenience store. Those tanks are literally in the ground. 20 feet or less deep. They leak into the aquifer, which is shallow. Pulling leaky tanks was a huge boon for environmental companies, and they did zillions of those tanks back in the 80's.
Fracking takes place in an entirely different environment than "in the ground."
Here is a snippet of a well log showing the Woodford Shale, which is the main target in SE and SW Oklahoma. To show the entire section of overlying Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, and Permian rocks would be way too long to post in this format.
If anyone is interested, I can email you a log showing how much rock sits on top of them. The Woodford is overlain by numerous zones which produce oil and gas in their own right. They are drilling horizontals beneath conventional oil and gas fields.
It is illegal to dispose of hazardous waste in injection wells in the oil and gas industry. That said, crude oil that is in a tank next to a pumping unit that you might see when you drive across the country contains Benzene and other nasties, just like the gasoline that you put in your car is filled with nasties. The EPA doesn't regulate produced product. The states do that.
Here is a log showing the Woodford Shale. It is overlain by the Caney Shale, which is too ductile to fracture even if you wanted to. It is underlain by the Hunton Group, which is one of the main producing zones in Oklahoma. The Woodford is colored yellow. A horizontal must be steered to stay in the Woodford, which in this case is a thin target:
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jun 19, 2015 - 11:21am PT
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The discussion on this thread reminds me of an incident that I observed 43 years ago in Berkeley. We were vacating our apartment and decided to throw a going away party. The metal door jambs provided a perfect medium for doing fingertip pullups. There were several young climbers (and several attractive young women) there, and as the climbers were on their way to getting hammered, they started doing a fingertip pullup contest (obviously in full view of the young women).
The first one did four. Eventually the high was six. About that time my roommate, still sober, proceeded to rattle off 15. When he left, the group resumed "Seven! Can anyone do seven?" Lest you think this was just a bunch of wimps, several of those participating went on to find glory in the Valley, Meadows and elsewhere.
BASE104 provides solid facts, which, like my roommate's 15 pullups, get ignored. Everyone goes back to repeating their quasi-religious nonsense about the topic. If nothing else, it forms an interesting insight into human nature.
John
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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Jun 19, 2015 - 04:41pm PT
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I don't need anyone to try to explain to me how "safe" it is to pump toxic chemicals into the ground to dispose of them. It's f*#king insane. A load of bullsh#t. Sure it's all sealed up, oh yeah, until the next earth movement or maybe just tomorrow when it leaches into the water table. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a engineer to figure it out, but if the folks selling the program talk enough story line, maybe we all will buy it. Hydro tracking is nuts, plain and simple, and just another bug business method to make money while they destroy the environment as well as our drinking water.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Jun 19, 2015 - 06:19pm PT
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It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a engineer to figure it out
Obviously it does.
You need to stick to the
bug business method
Is it Friday yet?
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jun 19, 2015 - 06:26pm PT
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IMO Oil and mining business as usual has been out of the public view; because usually it is in remote areas. The new fracking isn't remote it is in the neighbor hood next door to farms infiltrating small towns that never had oil business. And big oil is so clueless they think their "standard practice "in remote areas is OK in residential areas because they are blind to the residential concerns.
an example would be lowering the local water table to do their fracking. Or setting up shop next to a farm where it used to be quiet and now the quiet is gone.
Now add on top of it that they are carting around large volumes of haz waste and taking the haz waste to other states that have more lax laws to inject it there .
It just isn't meant to mix with the general public; and hasn't been addressed or scrutinized by the general public until they decided to try to change the landscapes in Pennsylvania and many other places in the US.Now their "standard practices" are being exposed and the general public is surprised they can do crazy sh#t like injecting haz waste deep into the ground.
reminds me of when the gold miners filled the sacramento with sediment from the hydro mining and finally the public had to make laws against it.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
Terence Wilson greeneck alleghenys,ny,
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Jun 19, 2015 - 06:51pm PT
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He is RIGHT,It is not in the ground,it is much deeper.[So are fissures and faults,hell there are spots in Seneca Lake where they cannot even determine the bottom]
HS.
That methane that leaks ,it is not in the atmosphere ,it is much higher.
Those earthquakes......never mind.
You should do some greenwash commercials to convince us quasi-religious types.
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Social climber
SLO, Ca
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Jun 19, 2015 - 08:42pm PT
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Fracking is no big deal,and lots of the produced water that gets injected back down is shitty to begin with, and has been for decades. The real problem with O&G exploration is air- they split emissions up to avoid the 10 tons per year NESHAP requirements, and water- they avoid water use restrictions (typically a state issue) and the clean water act, which exempts O&G from tons of requirements. CERCLA also includes the famous petroleum exclusion, meaninig your standard historical tank farm sh#t show is exempt from federal cleanup laws, leaving the generally poor surrounding landowners to resort to innefective state tort law to obtain any relief. Often after decades of expensive litigation. Produced water management companies illegally dispose of water all of the time. If it were all left to engineers like Base we would have few problems, but it is not.
Oil is what it is, but there is a very real human and environmental cost. Maybe it is worth it but the real impacts should be considered. I think what really has happened is that the general public is being exposed to what goes on to extract oil and gas in their own neighborhoods.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Jun 20, 2015 - 12:19am PT
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I don't need anyone to try to explain to me how "safe" it is to pump toxic chemicals into the ground to dispose of them. It's f*#king insane.
Evidence? We don't need no stinkin' evidence! As I said, quasi-religious arguments here.
John
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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Jun 20, 2015 - 03:36am PT
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Common sense goes a long ways John. F*#king over future generations for the quick buck. Sorrry to say it, but it's deniers of logical thinking like yourself that have brought our ecosystem to the state its in today. I'm sure your kids and grandkids will be so thankful for your willful ignorance.
And there is no evidence for safe fracking, it's propaganda bullshit by big business, but if you deny it long enough, maybe your Petroleum stock will go up.
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