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tuolumne_tradster
Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
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If it takes "Fracking" then so be it... OK as long is it is done in an environmentally responsible manner. I don't think fracking should be outlawed but I think it should be regulated. Unfortunately most State governments do not have the technical capability or resources to effectively regulate these operations. In some States, including California, the groundwater resources have not been adequately characterized.
IMO, hydraulic fracturing can be done safely with minimal impact to the environment and valuable surface and groundwater resources. Wastewater generated during drilling, hydraulic fracturing and production can be handled properly without negatively impacting the environment but, unfortunately, in practice, it doesn't always work out that way. It appears that primarily the smaller independents trying to cut costs by avoiding regulations are responsible for these violations. At this point, rig counts and hydraulic fracturing operations have declined significantly due to lower oil prices. Hydrofracturing in California has decreased considerably from 2014 & 2015. But let's not kid ourselves, the increase in domestic production, mainly from unconventional hydrofracturing, to offset foreign oil imports and keep pace with our nation's demand for fossil fuel resources comes at a heavy price.
Here's just one isolated example of what I'm talking about...
This photo taken on March 3, 2014, and provided by the North Dakota Health Department, shows bags full of radioactive oil filter socks, the nets that strain liquids during the oil production process, piled in an abandoned building in Noonan, North Dakota.
Reservoir fluids contain elevated levels of naturally occurring radioactivity, generally associated with natural U-238 and Th-232 decay series. These radioactive isotopes are concentrated in filters, know as filter sock, used to filter drilling and frack fluids. These radioactive filter socks ended up in an abandoned gas station.
Another impact has to do with the tremendous influx of oilfield workers into rural areas and the increase in crime, prostitution, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. Here's a video on how the Baaken boom has impacted rural North Dakota. The increase in jobs and money into these areas comes at a significant cost. Rockin' the Baaken...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Lorenzo, you've been at the Kool-Aid stand again.
Companies do NOT prefer to drill for gas at 1000 feet. Gas is a compressible substance, and an identical reservoir at 15,000 feet holds orders of magnitude more gas than a shallow well. I know. I once found a big shallow gas field. Our bottom hole pressure was less than 250 psia because of the shallow depth. We made it work by doing much of the work ourselves. It was simple enough for two geologists to do nigh everything, from running casing through installation of a large low pressure gathering system with strategic CDP's.
Shallow gas reservoirs are small. A big company can't make money at those depths unless the reservoir is very thick.
The original paper regarding the Pavillion Field was just awful. They couldn't read a damn bond log. The authors just had no oil and gas experience. I interpret at least 50 logging suites per day while mapping. I can interpret every vintage of log ever run in North America. That took a good 20 years of practice.
Here is a map of the Arkoma Basin showing only the horizontal Woodford shale gas wells. Do some reading and see if you can find an instance of groundwater contamination. The entire basin was drilled up without a single problem, or one that made the news.
Damage to the Ogallala aquifer, where it has happened, is tiny. Less than a hundred acres, and that was from a surface spill, not a casing integrity problem.
If you have a casing leak, you know it. The annulus will pressure up. If it is in the production tubing, it is easy to fix. The tubing isn't cemented in. However, on horizontals, you run at least one extra casing string (on the landing string), and often two extra strings compared to a vertical well.
How do you deal with a casing leak? Well, if you get one, you are in deep sh#t. Sometimes you can do a successful squeeze, but often you are forced to abandon the well and plug it with cement.
There is a guy at Cornell who just hates fracking. He publishes in some off the wall journal, and hasn't a clue regarding operations and well design. He used a gulf of mexico dataset and used it to compare the likelihood of casing leaks in the Marcellus. The GOM is a tough place to produce, because they often have H2S in their gas, and the oil is high sulfur. At bottom hole pressures and temperatures, it is highly corrosive.
Casing leaks tend to be geographic, and happen to old wells. Parts of western Kansas have the shallow Cedar Hills sandstone above the oil zones. It contains saltwater, but it is very corrosive. The solution is to run a DV tool in your casing string to cement it off. You know what a DV tool or Port Collar is, I assume. Anyway, if you don't do that, you will probably get a leak in your long string within a few years. Shale and drilling mud fall into the hole, and you know it right away. Up there, it is unlikely that you can save the well. You have to plug it.
Major County, Oklahoma has a Council Grove zone uphole that is corrosive. Not nearly as bad as the Cedar Hills, but bad enough for casing leaks to be common in that area. What do you do if you get a leak? You can roll the dice and try to fix it, but if it is an older stripper well, you just lost the well.
These are pumping oil wells in most cases, too. There is nothing wrong with the surface casing, and fluid level in the wellbore is usually less than 2000 feet from bottom.
Now explain to me how a horizontal fracked well, which has low permeability and hence low flowing pressure (typically well below 1000 psia of flowing pressure on the tubing string), is more likely to get gas contamination in the groundwater as opposed to a 20,000 foot Springer well with 15,000 psia of pressure at the wellhead? You can't. Low perm wells have low flowing pressure, and your perm doesn't get much lower than in a shale. Shale gas wells almost all have low FTP's. It is the only way you would be able to guess that a well is a horizontal fracked well from a look at the wellhead.
Horizontal wells are not more likely to have casing leaks as opposed to other gas wells, they are LESS likely, and if you get a leak, you see it on the annular pressure behind the production string. The surface casing is still there.
It is very, very, rare for a gas well to contaminate fresh water.
Here is a map of almost 2000 successful Woodford horizontal shale gas wells in the Arkoma Basin. Get on Google and try to find me systemic groundwater pollution. Hell, try to find a single case. You don't have to stop there. Go over the the Anadarko Basin CANA and SCOOP plays, and show me trashed groundwater over there. It is a couple of thousand more wells.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Unfortunately most State governments do not have the technical capability or resources to effectively regulate these operations.
Sorry, but this has put me in a sour mood. Do you even know who regulates drilling operations in Texas? It is the Railroad Commission. They have been looking at applications and enforcement since its inception. Their technical expertise is as good as it gets.
In Oklahoma, it is the Corporation Commission, Oil and Gas Division. I know geologists who work there, and I've been admitted as an expert witness as a geologist. The division regulates the SNOT out of the industry, both in house and in the field. They also have been around for at least 60 or 70 years, and look at EVERY line of a drilling application, a recompletion application, a plugging application, you name it. They witness every well plugging in the state. They also witness cementing of the surface casing, unless they can't get away. They can walk onto any location and shut it down for no reason.
The feds have never really regulated oil and gas activities. It is done by the states. The rules are strict but fair. Departure from any "normal" procedure takes a hearing, much like a court case. Field operations are overseen by a fleet of field inspectors who learned their jobs from...drum roll please...their own experience in the oil and gas industry.
The EPA has zero experience when it comes to regulating oil and gas activities. I've never heard of anyone drilling a well and having to deal with an EPA inspector. Perhaps because the closest office is in Dallas.
The EPA has been trying to get into regulation using the clean water act for decades. As long as the rules are proper, I see no problem. Their problem is that they would have to hire an entire division to oversee every drilling or plugging operation.
They just don't know how to do it. My wife is a high level manager at the state DEQ. She has a fleet of engineers and geologists working under her, but they work on other things, like RCRA, Superfund, landfills, you name it. Their geologists couldn't read a log unless they had by circumstance worked in the industry before. I doubt one in 20 could, and I can read a log as fast as I can flip it or scroll it on my computer.
They work very hard, but they aren't in the oil and gas regulation end of things. The states regulate the industry, and one thing is certain: the rules are fair and easy to follow. If you do anything wrong, the corp comm can shut you down in 60 seconds. These guys have worked on thousands of wells and know what they are doing.
Again, as I said above, most groundwater pollution happened prior to 1960. Back then, casing requirements were nigh non-existent. Now you have to submit your bond logs within 30 days. If you don't, they will shut you down.
Cement Bond Logs, or most cased hole logs, are not expensive to run. You WANT a good cement job, or as I've repeatedly said, you will lose the well. Modern wells rarely go bad. I know of a case where they burst the long string on a fracking operation in the Hardeman Basin. The casing isn't just there to keep the groundwater clean. It is there to isolate your producing zone from uphole saltwater zones, caving shale, etc. Casing integrity is vital to a healthy well. I've produced a few wells that had casing leaks when we bought them, but eventually we lost the wells. Now you can visit those spots and would never know that they were there. Anyway, when they blew their casing (and this was a very small outfit), they lost the well. Several million bucks down the drain. You know it, too. The annulus pressure spikes, and you shut down the frack. It is rare, but we talk business and something like that gets out.
There have been a few blowouts on Woodford wells. To get down to the Woodford you have to drill through an overpressured zone (in the Anadarko Basin...the Arkoma is all underpressured) and blew out. The rig burns down, you have to call the Hellfighter types in Houston, and within a couple of days they get control of the well.
Blowouts are really rare these days. In this area, you know when you get directly above the overpressured zone, and you stop and put in an intermediate casing string. Then you drill on with 16 pound per gallon thunderf*#k mud. If you didn't run that intermediate string, the hydrostatic pressure of your well would be so high that you run the risk of exceeding the failure envelope, losing circulation (sort of through an accidental frack, only with drilling mud), and losing the hole and the rig.
The shale doesn't blow out. It has super low flowing pressure until you case and frack the zone. Even then, low perm zones have low flowing pressure. I don't know how many ways to explain this.
In a way, I don't blame you guys for being so screwed up over this. There is so much baloney out there that even an intelligent person can't find the truth, which is pretty basic.
They have set up a recycling system in the Anadarko. You can clean the TDS's out of your flowback frack water and use it again and again. It isn't really that nasty to begin with. It is pretty much just fresh water with 3% KCL added to it to prevent swelling of any clays. You could use produced saltwater if you wanted to, but that stuff is heavy, and it would take forever to truck in enough for a frack.
The Shale fracks are pretty clean. I wonder why nobody bitches about diesel fracs with cross linked gel. Certain sandstones require those types of fracks.
In Oklahoma, the majority of wells need to be fracked. It is such a common practice, and has been going on without trouble for so long that it really surprised me when people began to attack fracks. I would have thought that they would be pissed over all of the wells. It takes a lot of wells closely spaced to drain a shale accumulation. The laterals are only 350 feet apart or so. So close that you can drill 6 wells from one pad, with each wellhead less than 30 feet from the others.
It is of vital importance that all cement jobs be done properly, just from an operations standpoint. The shale gas wells cost up to 18 million bucks to drill. A good surface casing job is a pittance. Only a few per cent of total well cost. Modern cement jobs are very different from the ones early in my career. Cement is a big word. There are a zillion types of cement, and modern thixotropic cementing rarely fails. It has never happened to me in my whole career. I've never seen a bad cement job. They can happen, just like you can get struck by lightning, but it is really rare.
I've NEVER seen a well with leaky surface casing. I'm sure that it has happened, but I've never seen it, nor has it happened to any of my friends. Ever.
Drilling shouldn't be allowed everywhere. I'm vehemently opposed to drilling in the Arctic Refuge, where I've spent 3 solo summers. Not because it will be a mess, but because it will industrialize the place, politely, but certainly.
I have no problem drilling on farms, though. I have no problem drilling in a city, either. There are producing wells within just a few miles of my house. They don't cause any problems. They are just dangerous if any high school kids climb the barbed wire and ride the pumping unit..a good way to lose your limbs.
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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What a pack of lies and deception. Base is obviously a paid shill for the fracking industry, spewing bullshit like its toxic waste pumped into our groundwater.
Of course you can't pump toxic waste and chemicals into the water table and expect it to stay in one place. NO F*#KING WAY. It migrates, common sense tells you that. Does not take a Rocket scientist to figure that one out.
And if there is one thing I learned in engineering school,, it's that even very minor hydraulic pressure moves very large things. It's the nature of hydraulic pressure and why you can jack your car up with one hand. Fracking does and will cause earthquakes.
Are we so f*#king stupid that we allow industry to poison our groundwater for a thousand years so some corporation can make a fast buck?
Jesus h Christ, unbelievable.
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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How much do you get paid for each of your bullshit posts Base? Let's hear it.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Apr 10, 2016 - 11:47am PT
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How much do you get paid for each of your bullshit posts Base? Let's hear it.
You obviously don't know me. I'm a very liberal democrat, although it is the liberals who have let their panties get in a bunch over fracking, and the idiotic tacts regarding the Keystone Pipeline. I pretty much despise conservatives, because they have bankrupted this country with irresponsible wars and tax cuts for the rich. They make me ill, and I don't see how they can honestly justify their behavior. The really super rich often make their money in stock and real estate speculation. Their income is mainly capital gains. That is why a billionaire pays far less taxes, by per cent, than a secretary. The capital gains rate is too low. They should do away with capital gains and tax everything as normal revenue. It will never happen. The rich control congress.
The governor of Oklahoma, as well as Brownback in Kansas, both managed to put our states in huge financial holes by handing out tax breaks like candy. Kansas is totally screwed up, and both governors managed to put us in the toilet during an oil boom. Especially in Oklahoma.
Did you know that most states tax the snot out of oil and gas? It is called the Gross Production Tax, and it is exactly that. It comes off the top, withheld by the purchasers. It is 7% in Oklahoma. That is a profit margin for many industries. Here is a list of taxes by state. Oddly, California doesn't have a gross production tax, but in the oil states, tax revenue is one of the main sources of government revenue. It brings in about 10 billion dollars a year, or did when prices were high:
http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/oil-and-gas-severance-taxes.aspx
All you can do is respond with the ad hominem attack. Do you even know what that is? Obviously you don't realize that it makes you look like the village idiot. You can't out argue me, because the data is on my side. All you can do is call me names. Dealing with idiots like you just gets under my skin, and I apologize to the others on this thread. I shouldn't even respond to you, but it is important for people to know that I don't lie. I don't fib on this topic. I'm insulted that you would accuse me of it.
I am a petroleum geologist, with 30 years of experience in all sorts of reservoirs. I've found enough oil and gas to cover everyone here, along with their relatives and friends. Most geologists don't find a drop of oil, or a puff of gas. I've been finding it consistently for my entire career, often by finding subtle reservoirs that prior operators had drilled right through, and missed. I've evaluated at least a million logs by now. You don't even know what a log is.
The royalty I have in my very first well still brings in a couple of hundred bucks per month. I've found billions of cubic feet of gas, and an equivalent amount of oil. I have other interests, so I could have been more prolific, but I know how to find oil. Do you even know how oil traps? Do you understand a petroleum system? Do you understand capillary pressure? Lithology and basin modeling? Reservoir drive? I seriously doubt it. You are merely a name calling idiot.
I am talking to a bunch of meatheads here. I forgive most of you, because you haven't been formally trained. However when people spout bullsh#t, like this as#@&%e, well, it pisses me off. Sorry about that.
I LOSE money posting here. I normally post when my computer is thinking. It can take a few hours for it to grid some datasets, and I have to wait. Otherwise, this place is a huge waste of time. My rate is a lot, and I try to educate you people for free.
I do care about the truth. Any scientist has to be. In this mess, the average person has no clue as to what the truth is. As I said, it really isn't their fault. The media has done a poor job of explaining how fracking works, and there is an incredible amount of poor info out there. Even an intelligent and open person has trouble finding out the truth, because there is simply too much bad info out there. I've seen the New York Times get it wrong. So in a way, it isn't you guys' fault. I really wish that you could look over my shoulder for a couple of weeks. Take a field trip to some outcrops. Visit the core library.
FYI: I've never worked in the "fracking industry." I currently work high perm conventional zones. Vertical wells that we find using 3D seismic in old areas. I do consult on acquisitions and things like casing point elections, when to or not participate in a proposed well, that kind of thing. That often involves a horizontal play, but I lose zero sleep over it. The truth is, natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels, and we should be using it more. The number of undrilled, yet proven locations, is huge. The big fracking companies didn't come close to fully developing before the price crash led to a drilling halt. Right now, everyone is getting laid off. I'm a consultant, so it doesn't affect me or my income so much, but things have slowed down. I had 9 prospects ready to shoot in SW Kansas when the crash happened. All of them are now on hold. They will get drilled, it will just have to wait until prices recover.
In the course of business, I've looked at hundreds of fracked shale gas wells. I understand their decline curves and recoverable reserves and rates. There are thousands of them here, but I don't need to look at every well. I own interests in 4 or 5 fracked Woodford wells. I make less than a thousand a month off of fracked wells.
I map oil and gas accumulations and predict where the next one will be. I've got a good record. Not too many dry holes, but you will drill dry or sub commercial wells. It is just part of exploration.
Shales are different. They cover huge areas. Not everywhere in a basin, but still a big area.
Being small, I find it easier to sell a prospect that costs 400 grand to drill as opposed to a play where it costs 10 million bucks to drill a well. So guys like me tend to play the shallower areas. This often precludes any chance of shale gas production beneath my shallower production. There are "fairways" in these shales where the temp/pressure history is just right. If it hasn't been buried deep enough, the shale is immature and won't produce. If you go too deep, then the shale is overcooked, and all you have is gilsonite, graphite, and the like. You follow these organic rich shales around essentially a certain depth range, because depth directly or indirectly is responsible for maturing those shales into the oil and gas windows. We call it the kitchen. We've been drilling right through the Woodford since the beginning of time, so there is plenty of well control. You don't have to worry about missing it. You do need to find the correct maturity level, and proper lithology. Most shales won't frack. The Caney overlies the Woodford and is also organic-rich. However, it is full of ductile clay and you can pump on it until the cows come home. It isn't brittle enough, and won't fracture. As I've said, you have to steer the horizontals through very specific intervals. It is pretty cool. There is a gamma ray scintillometer behind the bit, and it "talks" to you via pulses in the mud system while you are drilling. Those downhole tools cost over a million bucks. We got stuck and lost one once. It cost me a year's salary. Anyway, the gamma ray tool shows you lithology, and using it, you can stay in a 10 foot thick stratigraphic interval over a 10,000 foot long lateral. I've steered horizontals. You get no sleep and it is high stress. I can do it from anyplace with an internet connection. Hell, right now I am wearing dirty socks and looking at an area 200 miles away from where I am sitting. If I have the data, I can map Greenland in my underwear. It is all software driven.
So. People think fracking is bad. What about Hartshorne Sand wells? They are shallow (3000 ft) and the permeability is low enough that they need a frack. So does the Booch and other zones in the Arkoma, a gas basin. ALL of the zones need to be fracked, other than wells producing from the Cromwell, and most of them need a frack, too. What is wrong with that? They've been fracking wells in that basin for ages. No problems, or no major systemic ones. You are always going to have accidents. Right now you wouldn't believe how tight the rules are out on a drilling rig. They have to wear Nomex in the summer heat. Times have changed.
This has been going on for many decades. Since the forties. Well integrity has greatly improved since then, but I'm not aware of a single case of groundwater contamination in the Arkoma. Not a one, out of 50,000 wells.
Here is how groundwater gets screwed up:
You inject saltwater in a waterflood and within the area there is an old, improperly plugged old dry hole or plugged producer. In those cases, you CAN get cross well contamination. That improperly plugged well is a conduit to the surface. Modern plugging jobs are well done and not too expensive. You shoot off any production casing above the cement, and then go into the well, spotting cement plugs from the base to the surface. The entire surface casing is filled with cement, and in between the plugs you place heavy drilling mud.
Improperly plugged wells didn't even set any plugs in many cases. They dumped garbage down the well, cut off the casing below ground level, and walked away. You would never know that that well existed from just looking. You need to know where every well is. That is what I do. They just did things that way in the 30's and 40's, where most of the groundwater pollution has occurred. It is basically unheard of with modern wells.
We call those old wells "mud plugged." If you want to inject in the vicinity of that old well, the corporation commission requires you to re-enter that old well, clean out the junk, and properly plug it. It is a huge expense for the secondary recovery companies.
That's it. A frack job does not shatter the ground beneath your feet. It does not fracture outside of the target zone. What happens is stuff goes down one well, and comes up an old, improperly plugged well. This is a big deal if you run or want to start a waterflood operation. The Pavillion Field is an attempted example of cross well contamination.
I've never seen a frack go down one well and then shoot up through an unplugged nearby well, but in theory it could happen. That is not regulated. It is the only real way for a frack to contaminate groundwater.
I know of some terrific waterflood candidates that have a number of old, improperly plugged wells in them. Your injection permit will not be issued until you do go back in those old wells and properly plug them.
Most oil wells produce on pump. Some flow for a while, but they all end up on artificial lift. The hydrostatic pressure in that wellbore will never allow fluid to reach the surface, other than through the production tubing, where the pump is set. Most gas wells flow. Some make enough saltwater to require artificial lift, but that is a minority of gas wells. Gas is light. If you don't have any fluid in the well, it will flow.
Gas wells don't normally have pumps, as I just explained. They flow into the sales line. Therefore, gas wells are under pressure. The pressure is lower when producing. When shut in, the well will reach equilibrium, and you can tell how much gas is left in the reservoir through what is called a 4 point test, but really all you need to look at is the pressure gauges on the wellhead. So, yes, gas wells are under pressure at all times. You should be there when they open up a well to the atmosphere. Even a small gas well roars and shoots a 30 foot flame. We flare it. It is unsafe to just vent a large amount of methane.
The roar is incredible. It sounds like a jet. Just let it flow for a minute. You will release about 5 to 10 dollars of gas. Gas is cheap. It is undeniably the cleanest fossil fuel. It isn't as dense as oil, meaning that you can't fly airplanes very well using it, but we are swimming in it and it is dirt cheap right now.
I made far more money from my gas production back in the 90's than I do today. Gas used to be around 3 bucks per thousand cubic feet (mcf). Right now it is less than 2 bucks per mcf. It is a fantastic resource, and we have drilled only a fraction of the number of possible horizontal shale gas wells. With gas, we could cut our oil usage. While oil is a truly international market, gas is almost a wholly domestic one. You can't put gas in a bucket and carry it around. Yes, there is LNG, but it is expensive, and the LNG market is small.
Let's look at Iran. Iran is a mature area. That means that it has been fairly well drilled. They have found the big oil fields. Since exporting oil is their main source of income, it hurts when their citizens use the oil at cheap, subsidized prices.
Iran happens to sit on some of the biggest gas fields on the planet. Truly huge. They are just sitting there, stranded with no market. Iran has led the world in converting their vehicle fleet to natural gas instead of gasoline. This way they use their plentiful gas at home and are able to export more oil.
Now it is odd indeed, but Iran is ahead of the rest of the world here. We should be switching to natural gas as a transportation fuel, and people need to stop worrying about fracking. It is a red herring.
Wouldn't that be a good thing? To use a cleaner fuel? There is no Pavillion Field in Oklahoma. Does anyone here know about the oil seep in the Wind River Basin? Back in the 1800's, when mountain men and Indians roamed the plains, they knew about an oil spring there. It was a major seep. Later, when the area was drilled, the seep stopped flowing.
I can show you places that have live oil at 50 feet. I can show you gas at 300 feet. It isn't worth drilling, because the shallow depth has low pressure (and hence less gas). It is there, though. If you are sitting on a deep sedimentary basin, one that has all of the hydrocarbon ingredients required for accumulations, it is likely that you will also have surface seeps, or gas in the groundwater.
I guess I can name one of my clients, though. I spent a year working with their New Ventures wing. It was Chesapeake Energy, one of the top frackers and natural gas producers in the country. I was involved in non fracking project. Still, even though I was compartmentalized, because I was an outside consultant (although I had an office), I noticed how the company did things.
Whenever a new hire happened, you would get an email. I was surprised, because they were hiring in a groundwater group. I didn't know this, that Chesapeake has been, for years, sampling every water well in an area, and drilling their own water monitoring wells, just to verify that if there was gas in the groundwater, it wasn't them who caused it. I have never heard of another company regularly doing this, but apparently it was just part of the workflow in the company. They knew that they weren't causing groundwater contamination, so they drilled baseline wells to have proof. A landowner lawsuit can cost millions of dollars, and greatly tarnish a company's reputation, so CHK was doing this. God knows how much they spent in the Marcellus, but they had an entire group mapping the naturally occurring gas in the groundwater of the basin. A massive basin, with probably a million water wells. Yep. They were mapping that, just like the rest of us were mapping oil and gas accumulations.
Landowner lawsuits can be baloney. In some areas, they have always had gas in the groundwater, yet try to blame the big company when they show up. It is a cottage industry, like drug lawsuits. Attorneys troll for this stuff.
So Chesapeake set about proving groundwater quality pre and post drilling. An expensive decision, and not one that many of you have heard of. They weren't advertising that they were doing this. I wish that I could have spent a week in that division, just to see the cool stuff that they found out.
Why would they do that, if they were trashing the groundwater? How many smaller companies didn't go that far in pre-drilling sampling? I had never seen such a division. It must have cost a pretty penny. A geology group who found nothing commercial. Whose sole existence was due to bullshit lawsuits over gas in the groundwater in Pennsylvania.
Then you have the frack fluid. People act like it is poison. Well, it isn't. Do you want to know what is in frac fluid? It is freaking online:
https://fracfocus.org/
They now have totally green frac fluids. Nothing that could hurt anyone. They are now doing green completions. That is not venting any methane to the atmosphere during initial flow testing, prior to pipeline connection. Also, if any methane is released, it is flared. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and yes, most oil company execs think that global warming is a bunch of hooey, but in the science divisions, we all agreed with the climate science. Anyway, although Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it has a limited lifespan in the atmosphere. It breaks down in a decade or so. Nothing permanent, but the companies reacted to complaints and accusations. It costs nothing to test a well down the sales line as opposed to venting or flaring, so all it required was a change in technique. It didn't cost any extra to prevent fugitive methane emissions during completions.
They have bent over backwards. There is no systemic problem with fracking. Pollution cases are rare and not that serious. Certainly not as dangerous as having Radon in your house because you live on granite.
You see, natural gas is commonly found in the groundwater, just as oil seeps are common. Not everywhere, but Pennsylvania does have a place called Burning Springs. A spring, long known, that you can set on fire.
That is how groundwater is contaminated. It is already there. There are other ways to get methane in your water well as well, unrelated to any oil and gas activities.
That guy who did Gasland did the world a huge disservice by stirring up hysteria where no reason existed. That entire film has been discredited, I believe. There was one real case of pollution, and it was a surface spill.
Here is a little snapshot of the Woodford play in SE Oklahoma. The green horizontals are Woodford wells. The yellow ones are Hartshorne wells, a shallow zone. They drilled a ton of shallow (3000 feet) coalbed methane wells in the Hartshorne coal. There is also a Hartshorne Sand, but you can drain that with verticals (it does require a big frack, though). These verticals go back to the 60's in this area. The red wells are Booch Sand gas wells. The Booch is a really shaley sandstone. Super fine grained. The pore throats are so small that the zone has just awful perm. You would have a lot of trouble getting oil out of it, but the Arkoma is a gas basin. You frack the Booch Sand. All verticals. Big fracks for verticals, though.
I can mine data throughout the mid-continent. I can show you any well in the state of Oklahoma, it's production decline, you name it. I pay about 20 grand a year in software and data licenses.
In a way, this is a silly argument. Although the price crashes have killed drilling, and many companies will go bankrupt, fracking has been steadily occurring. There is no law against it, except in New York, and the only thing standing in its way is the great expense of the wells. Some wells cost as much as 18 million bucks. As I have hopefully shown, out of that cost, groundwater protection costs nigh nothing. A good, deep, surface casing string doesn't cost much. Every well does it, vertical or horizontal.
I've done a lot of wellsite supervision, and the surface casing is just a part of the operation. Like paying the rig contractor. It is necessary, highly regulated by the states, and frankly inexpensive. Also, horizontals have at least one extra casing string. Often two. There has been no common groundwater contamination, and the number of fracked wells is in the hundreds of thousands now. Tens of thousands of those are horizontal stage frack operations.
If you want to see systemic groundwater contamination, look at filling stations. For decades they had leaky tanks, but the EPA cracked down on this via the Clean Water Act and forced their cleanup. Pulling tanks was a big industry in the 80's and 90's. Now, most of the contamination has been cleaned up, or at least been contained.
Again, regulation is carried out by the states, and in most of them, they have many decades of regulation. The regs are strict but fair. Nobody bitches about them. It is just the cost of doing business. The feds have never been involved in onshore regulation of the industry, and frankly, they don't have the know-how. The OCC and the Texas RRC are both huge agencies with lots of rules and many field inspectors, as well as in house scientists and engineers.
Again. The rules are strict but fair. The number one priority is always groundwater protection, and it isn't expensive to carry out properly.
Here is what I've been looking at. Horizontal Coalbed Methane and Shale Gas wells in the Arkoma Basin. Look at the wells. In this map there are 2250 wells. Over 1500 are horizontal fracked wells. No problem.
Now hop to it and find me a systemic problem in this dataset. Answer: One doesn't exist. Every well on this map, vertical or horizontal, was fracked. The sandstones all need a frack, as well as the much deeper shale gas wells.
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overwatch
climber
Arizona
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Apr 10, 2016 - 11:52am PT
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I would like to read this thread and get up to speed but it is a crazy amount of words, just this last page
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Apr 10, 2016 - 12:12pm PT
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Yeah, I try to explain too much.
A friend of mine makes fun of me. He says that when somebody asks me what time it is, I tell him how a watch works.
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tuolumne_tradster
Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
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Apr 10, 2016 - 02:19pm PT
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Well integrity in the stimulated well and wells within close proximity to the target zone (e.g, within 2x the expected stimulation volume) and the vertical separation between the hydrofracture stimulation target zone and the protected groundwater are the main issues that I see that need to be addressed in regulatory oversight of hydrofracture operations. The other regulatory oversight issue, of course, is proper handling and disposal of subsurface fluids into pits, underground injection wells, etc.
FYI, here's a 2011 (updated in 2014) National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) report that summarizes over 35 incidents in several different states where hydraulic fracturing is suspected of contaminating drinking water. The key word here is "suspected" because it is difficult to prove unless a unique tracer was introduced with the frack fluid and that tracer is detected in the drinking water aquifer. There are multiple mechanisms by which this can occur that are directly related to the hydraulic fracturing or handling & disposal of subsurface fluids during drilling, well stimulation or production.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/amy-mall/incidents-where-hydraulic-fracturing-suspected-cause-drinking-water-contamination
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This 2011 study,
State Oil and Gas Agency Groundwater Investigations And Their Role in Advancing Regulatory Reforms - A Two-State Review: Ohio and Texas
claims that from 1983 to 2008, 16,000 horizontal shale gas wells with multistage fracturing operations in Texas were successfully completed without any evidence of groundwater contamination.
http://www.gwpc.
org/sites/default/files/State%20Oil%20%26%20Gas%20Agency%20Groundwater%20Investigations.pdf
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Here's a 2015 joint study by the California Council on Science and Technology and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
**An Independent Scientific Assessment of Well Stimulation in California Volume II
Potential Environmental Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing and Acid Stimulations**
Incidents of potential water contamination related to hydrofracturing operations are summarized starting on p 129.
2.7.1. Studies that Found Evidence of Potential Water Contamination near Stimulation Operations
See Table 2.7-1 Examples of release mechanisms and contamination incidents associated with oil and gas activities, including hydrofracturing, in the United States.
https://ccst.us/publications/2015/2015SB4-v2.pdf
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Here is an example where the operator accidentally peforated surface casing at 136 meters and injected
toxic hydraulic fracturing chemicals, including the cancer causing agent known as BTEX (benzene, toulene, ethylbenzene, and xylene) into a protected aquifer.
According to the ERCB report, misinterpreted information related to a collapsed tube (pictured below) caused “off-depth perforations” at the shallow level. Crew employees were meant to perforate the surrounding rock at 1486 metres.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/12/22/alberta-finds-mismanagement-errors-causes-fracking-water-contamination-alberta
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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Apr 10, 2016 - 04:17pm PT
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Base, I asked how much you get paid for making your posts, and you danced around the question. How much?
Nuclear power is safe also right? Until Fukushima and now its poisoning the Pacific Ocean thanks to shills like you. So whos the bigger ahole? You or me?
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Apr 11, 2016 - 09:38pm PT
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Yes we are nuts, it is just another gold rush and those are always bad.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Apr 12, 2016 - 08:06am PT
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Studly, I lose money wasting my time posting here. Who on Earth would pay me to lie? On Supertopo? And you had better not say any of this crap to my face.
If you had read my posts over on the science and religion thread, really the only thread I pay much attention to here, you would see that I am a rational and consistent science type.
16,000 wells and 35 pollution cases is a pretty good record in any industry, as long as spills or accidents are small and get cleaned up promptly. I don't want to tell anyone that it isn't an industrial type process. However, if you visit a gas field that has been fracked, you couldn't tell them from the unfracked wells. You would have to have a log.
The only clue would be low flowing pressure, and high shut-in pressure, a tell tale sign of a low perm reservoir.
Still, I often can't distinguish a horizontal shale gas well from a fracked sandstone well from the 70's. Not from the decline plot. All I can say is I see low perm, and I need annual 4 point tests to even do that.
You know, P/Z data.
Anyway, I don't make a penny trying to educate any of you guys. That is a stupid question.
Perfing the surface casing is just incompetence. That shouldn't have happened. I've seen oil and gas zones behind surface casing, and it is cemented over its whole length, but that isn't typical. If you've run a bond log over your surface casing, you can perforate it and produce, but it must be cemented to surface (they basically all are).
I found a big shallow gas field once. It was in an area that had been previously drilled for deeper oil, and they just missed the shallow zone, which was between 550 and 750 feet, which is super shallow, especially for gas. We would run 2 joints of 7 inch surface casing and then cement our long string of 4 1/2 to the surface. Then we would perf that. It took special permission to use that casing plan, but we had to show our bond logs over the string. We never had a problem. Not one, but in this area there was no fresh water. The wells drilled dry as a bone. An air rig looks like it is blowing smoke, but it is actually dry shale fragments. If there is water, it looks more like a fire hose.
We did 40 or so of those shallow wells, and by controlling costs, made a ton of money. We did it very cleanly, though. We were involved with all of the surface owners in the area, where the minerals weren't severed, and everyone was happy. It was a lot of fun.
They are depleted now. Barely producing at all.
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Studly
Trad climber
WA
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Apr 12, 2016 - 08:36am PT
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And how long does it take for toxic waste to leach into the ground table in so many of your "successful" sites. 5 years. 10 years. 30 years, 100 years. nobody really knows, contrary to your hypothetical musings. It's the nature of the unseen. What I do know is that the toxic poison you have injected into the ground will be there leaching into ground water for a thousand years and it's irreparable and irreversible. Your industry and you and your associates are criminal to the people of the future and to children yet unborn, that's your legacy. You call it a success story without any idea of the repercussions down the road, and knowing that in so many of these sites if not eventually most of them, that fracked toxins will migrate under hydraulic pressure.
And buddy I will say it to your face anytime. Your threat doesn't scare me anymore them a turd on a sidewalk. You think you have a right to the destruction of our children's future, simply because big money encourages your activities now. But it's bullshit and it's evil and I will not stand down pal. Go frack yourself.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Apr 12, 2016 - 12:39pm PT
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That is absolute horse sh#t.
The ad hominem attack is the refuge of the mentally incompetent, and Studly certainly qualifies. I recommend that he read Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World, about junk science. I assume that he can read books, but who knows? Most people don't.
I can understand it if people don't like seeing oil and gas wells dotting the landscape. Who likes it most is the landowners, if they haven't already sold the minerals. They get a royalty of 3/16 to 1/4 of all oil and gas produced, right off of the top. Lots of farmers are millionaires because they first leased their land for thousands per acre, and then began receiving monthly royalty checks, which can be huge, if it is a good well and you own most of the minerals.
I don't agree with drilling just anywhere. I'm vehemently against drilling on the coastal plain of ANWR. I have spent three summers up there alone hiking around. One year I hiked across it, re-supplied at an eskimo village on the Beaufort Sea coast, and hiked back. Alone. 10 weeks. I've even published against drilling there, which led to me losing one huge job. The geology of the place has also been overhyped. It won't give us another Prudhoe Bay:
http://search.proquest.com/openview/a3e555f6f11cbb99168dd3e8de0e557b/1?pq-origsite=gscholar
I could go on for days, posting real data. Unlike the poster above, I'm a scientist and tell the truth to the best of my knowledge. I have no axe to grind. Right now I'm drilling high perm prospects in SW Kansas, where you don't need to frack the producing zones. Their permeability is incredibly good already. I've never worked on a horizontally drilled mega fracked well, although I own some mineral interests where a company drilled them on me. I get some small checks from those wells. Not much.
I've done many verticals with much smaller fracks. We have never had a problem, and these weren't the clean slick water/sand fracks that we see in the shales. I've done CO2 foamed diesel, Nitrogen foam, cross linked gelled water, you name it. There are many types of fracks, but the ones involved in the shale plays are mainly just sand and fresh water. That is why this hysteria baffles me. I can understand not wanting to see the landscape covered with gas wells, but fracking? It never occurred to me that people would latch onto that, and I'm deadly serious.
The fracking companies disclosed the full list of chemicals used in fracks, or at least the shale fracks, several years ago. You can find the chemical disclosure list, along with a lot of accurate information about cementing and well design here:
https://fracfocus.org/
There is no reason to lie. Despite the hysteria in some places, fracking has been going on without halt in most sedimentary basins around the country. The only thing that has slowed it down has been oil and gas prices. Natural gas is nigh free, the price is so low. Drilling has almost totally stopped. The wells won't pay out at these prices. They found so much oil and gas that it crashed the market. Victims of their own success. We will see some of them go under soon. Most have already layed off huge numbers of employees. The wells will continue to produce, though, totally uninterrupted.
They now have green frack fluids. All you need is water and sand, and the additives are all non-toxic, but even with the older recipe, it was mainly just sand and water. Additives are a very small amount of the total fluid anyway, and are there to control viscosity (guar gum, slickening agent) and prevent swelling of any Smectite or Illite clays in the reservoir. For that, you use Pottassium Chloride. A salt. You could use plain old table salt if you desired, but fresh water can cause these clays to swell, and it will destroy your permeability. We've been using KCl water on reservoirs since the 40's to prevent swelling clays from slamming the perm shut on you and ruining a well.
I've already firmly stated that the zones that are fracked are deep and confined by thousands of feet of overlying impermeable, ductile shale. You can't frack just anything. It has to be brittle. Most shales are not brittle, but the Devonian/Mississippian, and Cretaceous organic rich shales are prospective if brittle enough. Some are. Some are not. In Oklahoma, we have the Caney Shale which is carbon rich in places. You can't frack it because it has too much clay. With the Woodford, you can. The brittle shales are more like ultra fine grained sandstones. They are rich in micro quartz grains. The Woodford sourced most of the oil and gas in the mid-continent. We used to drill right through it. You would get a gas show, but there was no way to produce something with such low permeability until horizontal technology came around.
When you steer the lateral, you must keep the wellbore in this brittle layer. If you get out of it, your frack stage will fail. The rock just won't accept the fluid no matter how long you pump on it. You steer the well by using instruments about 50 feet behind the bit. They transmit information to the surface while drilling by sending low frequency pulses through the mud system. It is pretty cool. A good steerer could hit a beach ball 12,000 feet deep and a mile away. If you want to know how you cause the bit to steer, I can explain that. I've steered horizontals. They weren't fracked, though.
Is this clear? When you drill a horizontal, you then cement a production casing string over the lateral portion. You then selectively perforate a few holes at regular intervals. Each cluster of perfs will be its own frack stage. When you frack it, you isolate that cluster of perfs and frack that stage. Then you come back a little and frack the next stage. It is equivalent to having a fracked vertical every hundred feet. A frack can have 50 stages. Each one is like its own well. That is the brilliance of the idea: You drill one well, but you get the equivalent of 30-50 vertical wells out of one wellbore. Not every stage will frack. Sometimes you steered outside of the brittle layer and that stage will fail. Failure is defined as not being able to displace the proper amount of sand, or proppant. That's it. That's how it works. There is nothing knew about slick water fracks. We have been doing that for almost 75 years. There is a TON of experience when it comes to fracks.
Nuclear weapons won't fracture that ductile rock capping your zone, be it a tite sandstone or a brittle shale. Yes, that has been tried. The DOE had the bright idea of looking for civil uses of nuclear weapons in Operation Plowshare back in the early 60's. They detonated 2 in western Colorado and 2 in NW New Mexico. The Russians tried it far more times, and in at least one case they were successful in breaching the surface. I'm not sure how deep it was, though.
Read about it. It is a hoot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare
Anyway, one of the nukes was tried on a low permeability natural gas sand near Rifle, Colorado. They placed cement plugs above it, and no, they didn't blow out. So cementing has withstood nuclear weapons, yes. It didn't work. Fracturing slowly, using water and sand, worked much better. That basin is covered with gas wells. All fracked ages ago.
OK. I've wasted enough time on this thread. You guys should be able to figure it out on your own from here. I will leave you with this recent NYT op-ed:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/opinion/can-liberals-frack.html?emc=edit_th_20160411&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=53217305&referer=&_r=0
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ontheedgeandscaredtodeath
Social climber
SLO, Ca
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Apr 13, 2016 - 05:55am PT
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I've been involved in environmental litigation for about 15 years and deal with clean ups all the time. The main culprits to ground water contamination are those that operate storage tanks in various industries. Dry cleaners are very frequent flyers. Probably the biggest threat to surface water is storm run off from agricultural and urbanized areas.
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couchmaster
climber
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Sep 17, 2016 - 09:02pm PT
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UPDATE:
Soooo, I haven't been against fracking. But now I read that some states are spraying the salty fracking wastewater onto roads to act as a de-icer.
Are we nuts? Base, are you familiar with any of this?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/road-de-icing-fluids-may-contain-unhealthy-chemicals/
"Road De-Icing Fluids May Contain Unhealthy Chemicals Some of the salty liquid comes from oil and gas wells, and regulations controlling its contents and use vary widely between states and localities"
"The tricky aspect to regulating produced brine, Howarth says, is that there are no federal specifications for the standards it should meet before it is spread on roads. "It's a state-based process, and that's what concerns me because some states have taken the posture that they will not regulate [the oil] industry," she notes. "If unregulated, then we may be putting petroleum products, diesel fuel, solvents, known carcinogens on our roads and increasing the risk of cancer and really serious health effects to people.""
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