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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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not that i would ever have the final word. ....capitol,including the billions of dollars of outdated and perverse subsides of oil,coal,tar sand, and pipeline companies must be reduced and re-invested towards the development of enviromentally sustainable energy generation.... .it is the way out of this. .... sorry,base104,i am against fracking,fully, completely,and all drilling....we are second in oil production in the world.it is still not enough to sustain.alt fuels,bio,hydrogen,elec,wind,solar, are the new economy. ....you could be the guy sitting on the horse,yelling at the model ts rolling by,or,be the one looking forward....helping create a new economy,one that is in the new millenium
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 7, 2012 - 10:27am PT
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Even Neil's gettin' into it, here's a snip from his blog:
It is clear that we are not going to be able to survive a constant barrage of "Sandy"-like global warming super storms. By the time we finish rebuilding from one there will be another and another. We need to address the cause with reasonable laws that encourage change and responsibility.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-young/carbon-emissions_b_2254162.html
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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But we should also consider the possibility that it will be only the next decade that looks like the last.
I think a lot of folks believe it's a long-term scenario that unfolds over many, many decades. However, I think that long view suffers from the unknown cascading effects of an Artic devoid of summer ice - that a drastic and permanent (for contemporary societal purposes) loss of Artic ice cover represents a serious tipping point whose consequences we don't as yet fully understand and may result in more rapid climate change than otherwise predicted.
12/8 Edit: the topic must be percolating as I'm just today seeing this:
Ticking Arctic Carbon Bomb May Be Bigger Than Thought
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 10, 2012 - 01:52pm PT
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I suppose this is to be expected:
New Study: Scientists' Early Climate Predictions Prove Accurate
The latest scientific report, which comes on the immediate heals on what campaigners called a "sham" of a climate summit in Doha, shows that the climate study released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990 has proved remarkably prescient more than twenty years after its initial release.
As is this, I suppose:
Despite the accuracy of early IPCC studies and the mountains of scientific evidence that have followed, it is startling to see that politicians around the world are unable to craft treaties and confirm commitments that acknowledge the seriousness of the problem.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 14, 2012 - 05:20pm PT
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Before The Chief gets his wind tunnel going, I'd like to put forth this quote:
Michael Mann, a climatologist and the director of Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, elaborated in an email message to HuffPost:
There is nothing in the new IPCC report about solar forcing that isn't already well known from the peer-reviewed literature.
...
But my work, and indeed all work that I'm familiar with in this area, shows that solar forcing cannot possibly explain the warming of the past half century. In fact, solar forcing has been flat over the past fifty years during which we've seen the greatest amount of warming. There is NOTHING in the new IPCC report that in any way calls that conclusion into question. |
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 18, 2012 - 12:55pm PT
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WB,
I have been preaching from the rooftops to get off of hydrocarbons for most of my adult life.
Our economies are so wrapped up in these energy sources simply because they are very good fuels for cost vs. horsepower.
Replacements for fossil fuels have always lagged behind, mainly because there is more energy in a cup of oil than a whole gaggle of solar panels. The stuff is that energy dense, and far cheaper.
I was for a carbon tax long before climate change became a problem. As the U.S. production has declined, we have, by necessity, become chummy with some of the nastiest dictators in the world. People talk about blood diamonds, but oil probably costs about 1/10th of its weight in blood.
Now that climate change science has finally come around to the point that only the most ignorant oppose it (a generalization), it is obvious that we can't keep pumping sh#t into the atmosphere.
We will never stop using hydrocarbons as long as it is cheaper. It is that embedded in economics. About the only thing that I can say is that natural gas is by far lowest carbon emission fuel, and we should be doiing what Iran has been doing, convert the transportation fleet, or at least trucking, to natural gas.
Natural gas has always been the stepchild of coal and oil. Almost every oil well produces natural gas, and many gas wells also produce oil. They accumulate in the same way, other than the shales, and we are swimming in it.
Iran's revenue comes from oil sales. Iran also has a couple of the largest gas fields in the world. The gas is stranded too far from the market to be profitable, so the fields just sit there. Iran has been converting to NG and selling the oil that the population would guzzle at super low prices.
It makes sense.
Coal is more efficient and cheaper than natural gas for electricity. We have coal fired power plants sitting directly on top of some of the biggest natural gas deposits in the country.
Fracks are a red herring. It is too bad that they have been painted in that light, but they are a big industrial process that may last for a week, but then it eases up. When a shale gas play is going on, the countryside becomes industrialized. After the drilling is over, you just have a wellhead out there.
They have also been studied to death. Areas with methane in the groundwater have been studied to death.
I try to be a straight shooter. I don't even work gas shales. I know a lot of guys who do, and even my liberal deadhead old boss shakes his head in sorrow over the lies about it.
The northeast hates it. In the states with more production, it is literally no big deal.
The best idea is to transition to natural gas as a transportation fuel. It isn't as energy dense as oil, so you have to fill up twice as often, but fleet vehicles like busses and UPS converted to natural gas a long time ago. It costs about half as much as oil for the same distance traveled. You just have to fill up twice as often.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Dec 19, 2012 - 09:05am PT
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you know base,i do not hate fracking,its just that our groundwater here in wny is precious,i live on a creek where a chem dump happened in the 70s,you and i are still paying for its cleanup."the only thing left is a well head".you mentioned before that the wells are protected by layers of cement.that is my point of contention ,being around concrete and cement for over 30 years ,i know the moment you pour concrete in the northeast,is the moment it starts failing.if the fracking people came clean with its methods ,more people would get behind it,till then,many ,will and should question it.the finger lakes here are connected by groundwater,they do not even know where the bottom of seneca lake is.ny has a wild hydrologic identity,if that was comprimised ,bad things could happen.its nothing personal.just come clean w/the science.natural gas is a great fuel,i agree,i would rather see it being produced than mountains being mowed down in wv and pa ,for coal.not to mention coal,and its use,obvious affect on our atmosphere.w/respect,terence wilson
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 19, 2012 - 11:11am PT
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Cement used in modern wells is very, very, high tech. It is rare to have a channel behind the casing. It hasn't ever happened to me.
What you need to worry about is the old wells drilled up to around 1970.
The Appalachian Basin is covered with shallow gas, some of it overpressured. There are a zillion old wells out there that were not properly plugged.
The shale gas wells are so deep. For instance the Woodford is beneath 10,000 feet of rock, most of it other shale, and shale is very hard to frac.
I've also seen a lot of microseismic. That is where you lay out a 3D seismic array around a well, with long enough offsets to image the lateral, and passively listen to the frac job happen. From that you get a 3D model of every fracture popping. I've never seen one get more than a hundred feet out of zone. We use that technology to improve the amount of the gas shale that is getting fractures. It can take a year for a methane molecule to migrate five feet to a fracture, and this is with 6000 psi or so of pressure behind the molecule. The pores and pore throats are that small.
A modern oilfield cement job has to handle great pressures and high temps. It is not any kind of cement that you have seen. We also run cement bond logs over the wellbores to make sure that we have a good bond.
Fracking is just a huge industrial process. It's footprint has greatly improved in the last couple of years. Buying fresh water is a huge expense, so the recovered load water is now recycled. Even in areas where there is plenty of fresh water, it is now cheaper to just recycle it into the next well. This alone is pretty high tech, because you have to filter out all of the solids. I can't remember the company's name who came up with this, but they are stinking rich.
Old wells are the source of almost all hydrocarbon contamination. Methane in the groundwater is extremely rare. I've seen it happen twice, and those were vertical wells drilling into super high pressure gas zones. 10,000 psi and great permeability zones.
I do know of plenty of old fields which have saltwater contamination in the groundwater. In the really olden days, they would just let the groundwater run down creeks, and saltwater in the groundwater pretty much ruins it permanently.
How it usually happens is in old waterfloods. You are injecting saltwater into your oil zone and there is an old well next to you that wasn't plugged by modern regs. This old wellbore provides a perfect conduit straight up into the groundwater.
To get a waterflood permit these days, you have to have core data providing permeability and required injection pressure data. If there is an old well even close to you then that well will have to be re-entered and plugged properly. It is very hard to get a secondary recovery permit today, and trashed groundwater lawsuits in the big producing states cost millions. So it isn't something you want to risk.
It is cheap to protect groundwater with modern wells. Groundwater protection is the #1 regulatory issue in Oklahoma and Texas. We have really stout casing requirements now, and they actually aren't that expensive to follow.
Dude, if you could look over my shoulder right now, I could calm your nerves completely over casing and cement job integrity.
For one thing, you have multiple casing strings in any well now. If you blow the backside cement during a frac, you see it instantly in the control truck. The wellhead has gauges on the backside of every casing string. I've never seen it happen, but if it does you can usually fix it. If you can't, you will have to plug the well. The main purpose of the innermost production liner is to isolate your producing zone from zones above that contain saltwater.
Contamination happens in the transportation process, not the drilling. Imagine how many trucks it takes to bring 3 million gallons out on location. After it flows back it is high in chlorides and if you spill saltwater, the salt binds with clay minerals in the soil and absolutely nothing will grow. You have to report any spill over 40 gallons, and you have to dig up the soil and replace it.
As for methane in the groundwater, ala Gasland, there are huge areas of the Appalachian Basin that have methane in the groundwater already. One of the guys who lit his tap looks pretty bad. What the filmmaker didn't do is go to the other 5000 residents of the town that have methane in their groundwater.
When I was working up at Chesapeake, they have been doing pre-drilling groundwater sampling for years now. They have a whole division in geosciences which is nothing but groundwater hydrologists who map the groundwater of the whole basin. They know where the methane already is.
We have tens of thousands of fracked gas wells in Oklahoma, and probably triple that in Texas, and we don't have a problem.
The problem with the Marcellus is that there is so much bullshit out there. The general concessus is that the PR campaign has been lost and many companies won't even play up there.
The rest of the country is fine with it. I could drive you around areas where there are hundreds of shale gas wells, we could knock on doors, and ask every landowner if their water quality has changed. Nope.
We have the regulatory history to protect groundwater. The same methods are used in the Marcellus, but there is one problem up there: No suitable disposal zone.
I'll go into that if you want, but it will take another thousand words.
I should start billing you guys....
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 19, 2012 - 11:20am PT
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And I know how amazing the upper New York watershed is. The water quality is nigh perfect.
In that area I would be super duper on top of the trucking of the load water. One spill isn't going to ruin it, but any spill isn't allowed here. If you don't report one, you can go to prison.
In the early days of the Marcellus, they would take the load water (AKA flowback water) and spray it on roads to salt them in the winter, run it into rivers through municipal treatment plants, etc. etc.
You can't do that here, If you sprayed produced water onto a road to get rid of it you would end up in jail.
Hence now the recycling, which has just caught on around the country.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 19, 2012 - 11:29am PT
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hahaha... I know I can't bill.... you guys couldn't afford it...
Same here. You would choke at what they pay us right now.
When oil and gas prices collapsed in the early eighties, all of the geoscience majors switched to something else.
400 students tried to get in when I did. 200 were punted from ACT and GPA scores. Another 100 were weeded out in Mineralology. Hardest class I ever took. Way worse than any graduate course.
So they would let in 100 per semester. When I graduated with my Bachelor's there were 30 left for the whole year. Out of those I only know 4 who stuck it out and stayed in the petroleum business. A whole generation is missing.
So all of the old farts died, the new kids are blisteringly smart but inexperienced. So those of us with 25 to 30 years in get brain surgery money.
Resource prices are always cyclic....gas prices have cratered to the point that shale gas has slowed to a creep. Oil is high, so everyone is drilling for oil, which we are running out of onshore.
Work, though. It is everywhere...for now.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Dec 19, 2012 - 12:34pm PT
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"when oil and gas prices collapsed in the eighties,everyone in geosciences switched to something else". base ,that would describe me,after an interview with sunoil,where i would be monitoring wells in west texas,my dad ,picked me up at the airport.i said,i really went to school for that,he said the best thing about texas,is leaving there.i never went back to school and continued to be a carpenter.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 19, 2012 - 01:45pm PT
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I get job headhunters bugging me fairly often, but most of the jobs are in Houston. No way. That place is so hot that only sadists live there. Meaning around Midland.
Kansas is actually quite nice. Big blue skies, beautiful sunsets. NPR stations every fifty miles.
Not much for climbing, but western Kansas is quite pretty. Parts of Oklahoma are as well.
I actually go out on a well about once every couple of years. I just finished steering a horizontal for three weeks from the office. Everything is wired now. The entire rigs are covered with sensors. It is pretty cool. I wish that I could give out the rig password sometime to you guys, but that would get me fired for sure.
There is no great mystery to fracks or casing burst strengths or casing leaks or any of that. You know it when you get a casing leak. You know it if you have a bad cement job.
Since a functioning well depends on all of those factors, they are engineered that way, with a lot of extra room for good measure. If your well costs 8 million bucks and you get a damn casing leak, that is a huge deal. That is why they are prevented in the first place.
Casing leaks happen in certain areas. Western Kansas has a shallow sandstone called the Cedar Hills which is saltwater bearing. I'm not sure why it is so corrosive, but you have to put a second cement stage over that or your casing will get devoured in only a couple of years. We know this, so we run a DV tool or port collar over it and cover it with cement, although it is wayyyyy up the hole.
There is another zone in the northern Anadarko Basin in the Permian. That one isn't as bad. The only wells that get leaks up there are from the seventies and eighties when there was such a shortage of casing from the ongoing boom that they ran crappy steel.
Casing is drifted, tested to a high pressure, and the threads are electronically inspected. That is a small price to pay to avoid a casing leak. A casing leak will ruin the well. Shale and all kinds of crap fall in and you have to try to patch it or you plug it.
Millions of dollars and billions of dollars of engineering experience go into wells now. Wellbore integrity is crucial.
I think everyone knows that I am a screaming liberal greeny environmentalist, because I am. So are many of my co-workers. If it was trashing the environment to drill in some place, I wouldn't to it.
I would never work on anything around Moab or southern Utah, for instance. Out of principle. Same with ANWR, where I have spent three summers wandering around alone in.
Right now, southern Utah isn't really a hot place. I've seen seismic and maps over it.
The only real case of pollution in Gasland was the stream that had been sucked dry. The company that did that isn't one of the big players, and it was very real. Nobody will partner with them unless they have operational control now.
The Marcellus is settling down now.
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 19, 2012 - 02:13pm PT
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You know it if you have a bad cement job.
This makes me wonder about the Horizon catastrophe. Wasn't that caused by a bad cement job?
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Dec 19, 2012 - 02:21pm PT
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not to argue,but i worked for a large construction company here in rochester some years ago.they built very large commercial buildings here in nys .a lot of very high tech reinforced concrete.our crew did tons of core bar sample testing of spancrete,slab and pillar work.8000psi concrete.5000psi concrete.high tec mixes.everyone had problems.that company has migrated away from commercial construction.its not that i dont trust your word base,but those wells have to last.i dont even have kids,we married late,but my good friends do ,and they are against this way more than me......the reservations around us are already fracking,pa just south ,as well.i wont fight it much longer,its getting to be a lot like the gw/climate change arguement.the facts are clouded by greenwashing,politics and ideologues.....i have been through a lot of oklahoma,kansas,and nebraska.when going west me and friends would swing through the ozarks ,black hills,bighorns,pit stops on the way,but west texas,man.....
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 19, 2012 - 02:25pm PT
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Casing leaks happen in certain areas
I'd say it's the combination of an inevitable percentage of casing leaks in combination with shoddy flowback disposal that are the problem with fracking. I'm guessing the former happens infrequently but can have fairly serious consequences, but having worked around the mid-south and having a pretty good feel for the kind of fly-by-night operators who are out there leaves me with far greater concerns with the latter.
So to the former, how pervasive are casings failures and how often are there serious environmental / health consequences as a result. To the latter, how many bad players are there and how big a problem is shoddy or criminal flowback disposal?
And are you saying the gasland flaming faucets is a fiction or a pre-frack phenom?
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Dec 19, 2012 - 02:37pm PT
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base is right ,the alleghenys or the appalachains groundwater is full of methane,mostly sedimentary rock,natural gas.but gasland,is not completely unfactual.nor is the sky is pink.
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