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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Dec 30, 2011 - 08:30pm PT
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Oh man. You start talking energy and Baba just goes off. The Saudis still have excess production capacity. They can dump a few million bbls per day onto the market and kill prices.
Says you with nothing to back it up. The Saudis officially announced they would be keeping the price of oil at $25 for decades but were able to do no such thing, even with Bush begging and kissing them for more production, lower prices
from 2008
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1715308,00.html
Racing between OPEC meetings in Vienna, Saudi Arabia's powerful oil minister Ali Al-Naimi told a reporter that the cartel was "determined" to keep the price of oil at around $25 a barrel, rather than risk a slump in the market by boosting its production.
Wait a minute. $25? Al-Naimi said that in April 2003 — less than five years ago — when a barrel of oil cost one-quarter of this week's whopping $100, and when prices were regarded as high enough to keep oil-rich countries happy......
In fact they said that back as far as 2001 as well
From 2001
http://www.albawaba.com/business/saudi-opec-wants-oil-price-25
Saudi Arabia oil minister Ali al-Nuaimi said Saturday that OPEC wanted the price of oil to be $25 a barrel, avoiding brutal swings either up or down.
"We (OPEC) want it to be at $25, rather than $30 or $38," he said at a seminar at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Crude oil prices are currently around $25 or $26 a barrel.
"Our revenues come from oil and we need to make an accurate assumption of what the oil price will be," he said.
"I am sure that if the oil price should go up or down in a precipitous manner we will work together for a stable oil market," he added.
Al-Naimi said that the recent decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut oil production was taken to prevent a freefall in price and "keep it towards the $25 per-barrel target."
They sure are taking there time stabilizing the old oil market. Didn't seem to pick up much slack when Libya went offline.
OF course you can't be faulted for not knowing whether the Saudi have excess capacity or not because it's a deep secret that nobody knows. The ones with some personal experience say that's it's twilight time on saudi oil abundance
http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Desert-Coming-Saudi-Economy/dp/047173876X
Twilight in the Desert reveals a Saudi oil and production industry that could soon approach a serious, irreversible decline. In this exhaustively researched book, veteran oil industry analyst Matthew Simmons draws on his three-plus decades of insider experience and more than 200 independently produced reports about Saudi petroleum resources and production operations. He uncovers a story about Saudi Arabia’s troubled oil industry, not to mention its political and societal instability, which differs sharply from the globally accepted Saudi version. It’s a story that is provocative and disturbing, based on undeniable facts, but until now never told in its entirety. Twilight in the Desert answers all readers’ questions about Saudi oil and production industries with keen examination instead of unsubstantiated posturing, and takes its place as one of the most important books of this still-young century.
peace
Karl
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2011 - 08:41pm PT
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Karl,
I was insulting to you, and I apologize for that. That is not my nature.
The Saudis are saying the same thing about 100 dollar oil.
I am downloading about 200,000 wells right now just to show you some maps of how many shale gas wells have been drilled in some basins I work. I don't know of any groundwater pollution problems in these areas. I would probably have heard about it.
The big drillers like Chesapeake have huge environmental compliance departments. One screw up is a huge disaster for companies like them. I have consulted for them, and they are dead serious about that. They had a spill on a Marcellus well and the moon suit guys are on a jet in a couple of hours to take care of it.
Halliburton, no matter how evil they are overseas, is the gold standard in well completions. The Macondo blowout had nothing to do with Halliburton. BP was utterly negligent. They make me sick. Nobody likes BP.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2011 - 09:05pm PT
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Arkoma Basin Woodford Shale. This one has been going on for years. I grew up here and it still is pretty country. The bad thing is all of the roads that were put in for the wells. When the wells are plugged the location is cleaned up, topsoil is replaced and you can't spot where they are without a stout metal detector.
There are 46,000 wells in this dataset, but if I print the whole basin it just looks like a buckshot pattern. The lines are the horizontal paths. Depth to zone here is 8,000 to 10,000 feet. The Woodford is a few hundred feet thick.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2011 - 09:08pm PT
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Anadarko Basin Woodford Horizontals. All of the red stars are gas wells drilled in the seventies. They all were frac'd as well. This is all wheat country.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Dec 30, 2011 - 09:48pm PT
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Karl,
I was insulting to you, and I apologize for that. That is not my nature.
At least by supertopo standards, I perceived no insult and hope I wasn't returning any negativity in any of my posting. We're guys who like to argue about stuff..
Peace
karl
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2011 - 10:13pm PT
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This is a horizontal play targeting a low perm sandstone oil reservoir. Each square in these maps is a square mile.
Sorry. I didn't have time to download the landgrid overlay on the Texas Panhandle side to the west.
Every well on the map has been frac'd going back to lord knows how long ago. The horizontal play has been going on here for over five years. This one is beneath the Ogallala Aquifer. No problems I have heard of. This is all farmland.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2011 - 10:23pm PT
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A small part of the Bakken Shale horizontal oil play in North Dakota.
Haven't heard of any screaming here. This play has been going on for well over a decade. Also cropland
Remember that each line is a horizontal well that has been given a big stage frac.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 30, 2011 - 10:27pm PT
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OK. Fracs are nothing new. I don't know how many tens of thousands of these types of wells have been drilled now.
Sorry. I don't have Marcellus data. I just log on to the data server and download the well locations. No secret here. This is all public data, but it is easier to see when run through professional mapping software.
I could do this for the next week.
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alpinethrills
Trad climber
Olivebridge
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Dec 30, 2011 - 10:32pm PT
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I live in NY and follow the fracking issue very closely, including most reports, news articles, studies, what the EPA has done, what the NY DEC has done, what's gone on in PA and the PA DEP, etc. I've been to multiple frack sites in PA, talked and met with a number of families in both PA and NY who are victims of fracking contamination (in NY vertical fracking), met with industry folks and countless environmental and advocacy leaders, and heard hours of testimony from experts on both sides of the issue. At this point there is an enormous amount of misinformation out there about fracking. With that, let me put out just a few things to consider, the bottom line being that fracking as it is going forward right now is a desperate form of fossil fuel extraction, that holistically is similarly bad as coal for the climate given the amount of methane released into the atmosphere (methane being a particularly heavy greenhouse gas). Although fracking has in some capacity been happening since the 1800s, the fracking that is going on now is not like the fracking back then, the fracking in the 40s, the fracking in the 80s, or even the fracking in the 90s. It's a new technology. There is no good evidence that this fracking can be done safely, and there is a very strong case to be made that fracking should not go forward now or any time soon, especially in the northeast.
Some of the many points that are sorely lacking here:
 Official review and regulations of this industry are extraordinarily limited given that it is exempt from the Clean Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Superfund Act.
There is a tremendous amount of evidence linking fracking to well over a thousand cases of water contamination. You don't hear about these and they don't get documented because most of these cases are between relatively poor landowners and the gas industry, and those landowners make a legal settlement with the industry or face over a decade long legal battle. Obviously, pretty much no one who would lease their land for fracking can undertake such a legal battle, and hence settle. Those settlements include non-disclosure agreements, i.e., legal gag orders that prevent those people from speaking out and prevent the EPA or other agencies from pursuing study of those cases.
Yes there are many well casings and it is far down, but over time methane and other (worse) chemicals can naturally travel up to our groundwater and the surface outside of the outer-most casing. You could have 50 layers of casings, but that doesn't seal the space between the outer layer and the dirt that is on the outside of the hole you drill into the ground. And remember, the frack itself, a mile or more underground as it may be, blasts holes in the casing as is necessary to pull out the gas.
Here’s just one example of the technology that is being touted as so great and safe. With extreme pressure used to blast millions of gallons of water thousands of feet underground—enough pressure to push open rock fractures—an enormous amount of faith is put into a one piece of technology called the “blowout preventer.” You'll recall this from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico - it blew out and we all know the rest of that story. The primary company that makes these devices, Cameron International, is considered the gold standard. By Cameron International's own field test results in the wake of the Gulf spill, they reported that their blowout preventers fail 62 out of every 90,000 uses. Doesn't sound like a lot but with the number of wells planned in NY, we'd be looking at well over 60 disasters in NY from that problem alone. Cement casings themselves have much worse rates of failure.
There is no impressive rapid response to problems. There are two companies that can deal with real disasters such as blowouts: Boots and Coots, and Wild Well Control, both from Texas and with names that suggest a cowboy mentality that presumes this destruction is just a wild ride. When we had a massive well blowout in PA, Chesapeake Energy had to fly them in from Texas, meaning it was more than 12 hours before anyone was even on the ground who had any idea what to do, as it would always be.
Every stage of the fracking operation releases known and suggested human carcinogens and volatile organic compounds such as benzene (from the wellheads themselves and formaldehyde (from compressor station engines) that are closely linked to various forms of cancer, asthma, respiratory illnesses, destroy air quality, etc. There are serious concerns to prenatal health, brain development, and countless diseases and health conditions.
The justification for fracking is of course money, primarily jobs. The job creation claims are vastly overstated, and are almost always numbers of "new hires" not net jobs (meaning two people hired on the same day that two people get fired still means two jobs get counted as created). Hand in hand come significant losses to other industries including agriculture, small businesses, tourism, housing values, etc. Furthermore, communities suffer from increased crime rates, transient workers, damage to local infrastructure such as roads and bridges, increased strain on emergency workers, and the burden of having a heavy industrial operation literally in people's backyards. Also in NY for instance, all estimates and projections for economic benefits are currently based on an estimate of accessible gas that is over 400% greater than what the USGS believes is there. Whoops.
We need energy but we have plenty of natural gas in the US right now. The main draw to increasing fracking is to ship it overseas where it is worth generally at least 3 times as much, hence why we are seeing more and more plans for liquefied petroleum gas facilities being built. We should be investing in renewable energy sources, energy conservation, and a smart grid. Doing so would create more jobs and a far better economic boost for regions where gas drilling would otherwise come in.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Dec 30, 2011 - 10:51pm PT
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Interesting (and well-written) post.
I must say, you read like the very narrator of Gasland.
So did you think the documentary, Gasland, presented fairly? Just curious.
What's your line of work? if you don't mind declaring it.
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GuapoVino
Trad climber
All Up In Here
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Dec 30, 2011 - 11:06pm PT
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Base,
Do you know anything about the gas geysers that were coming to the surface out around Okarche, OK and Kingfisher, OK? I hadn't heard anything about it in a long time. Early speculation was blaming it on a well being drilled by Okarche. There was some fear of it contaminating the ground water. There seemed to be a media blackout of it so I never heard anything more about it, just tidbits that I would hear from my friends in the oil industry.
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alpinethrills
Trad climber
Olivebridge
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Dec 30, 2011 - 11:30pm PT
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Fructose, for some time I've been doing environmental work, organizing around various environmental issues. Early in 2011 I left a different job to focus on fracking in NY with Frack Action as it became apparent to me that NY would be terribly mistaken to go down a path of fracking as PA has done. As for Gasland, I think it is effective in getting across many of the significant concerns and yes, even facts, about fracking. At this point it is pretty outdated, given how much new information we learn about fracking each week. Nevertheless, most of what is presented in Gasland is fair, as many analyses have found. The gas industry did put together a smear campaign in an effort to discredit it. Of course it is a documentary, and being limited by the time appropriate for a movie and factoring in a story, it doesn't go into as great detail on every point as possible.
FortMental, I'm not Claire but I work with her and I think I copied two sentences or so - standard points that we bring up as they are rarely realized - from a reference doc that was probably used in that Assembly testimony. If you look more closely, you'll see that I just wrote 95% of my post...just not the one or two lines re stats that I always look up in order to make sure that I not get my numbers wrong.
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Patrick Sawyer
climber
Originally California now Ireland
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Dec 31, 2011 - 12:52pm PT
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Uh, yeah, Base, C is the company operating under our land. Jeez I hope you are correct about environmental standards.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 31, 2011 - 01:53pm PT
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Oh,man.
I haven't heard about gas geysers near Okarche, but I can guess. Back in the mid nineties there was a well being drilled down in the SW part of the Anadarko Basin. They were drilling through a high pressure deep gas zone and gas got into the groundwater. In that area there had been a bunch of seismic exploration going back to the old days and the old shot holes all started spewing saltw#ter around the rig.
The old shot holes were for dynamite shots, and about a hundred feet or so deep. These days almost all seismic is done with vibrators. You get a full frequency sweep with those.
You aren't going to get a true blowout from a shale. The permeability is so low that you can perforate that zone and nothing will come out of it. The problem around Okarche, which is actually on one of those maps I posted is that the Woodford is beneath the Springer sandstone series, and the Springer is overpressured gas. So you have to run an extra intermediate casing string in that area. That would be the map of the Cana area that has a zillion vertical gas wells (red star symbols) in it.
There was a Continental Resources well that blew out around there late last summer. Rig burned, the whole bit. That is really rare any more. Pressure control is a pretty refined art now.
If anyone was going to drill on my land, CHK would be at the top of my list. They have a massive environmental compliance division. HFCS could probably get a job with them for huge bucks. They are super serious about everything. One black eye for CHK just isn't worth it. I will post on what happened on the CHK spill last year if anyone wants a pressure lesson on fracs.
As to the list of stuff Alpine Thrills posted, there is a kernel of truth buried in many of the statements, but they are insanely exaggerated. That is the way it is if you have an agenda. You take a kernel of truth and then build a big house of bullshit around it. Oil companies do the same thing. I saw a BP commercial the other night and it made me ill.
I should go work with one of the anti frac'ing outfits just to nab their heads, hold on tight, and point them in the direction where the real environmental risks are.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 31, 2011 - 05:52pm PT
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OK.
First, why do some reservoir rocks need a frac and others do not?
Permeability of the reservoir rock.
Shales have such low permeability that it can take a year for a methane molecule to migrate five feet towards an induced fracture and make it up the wellbore. These shales are only prospective where they are in the gas thermal maturation window. If it hasn't been cooked to a high enough temperature in the past, it will be oil or heavier gas liquids. They can't make it through a lot of shale reservoirs simply because the molecular diameter is too big to make it through the incredibly small pore throats in the shales.
Shales have such low permeability that they were not even considered to be a target, although it has been known for decades that the mainly devonian shales are the very rocks that source all of the conventional vertical oil and gas wells of entire sedimentary basins. You would drill through the Woodford and get a great gas show on the gas detector present on drilling rigs to look for "shows" of oil and gas.
Many productive basins produce both oil and gas, and they trap in the same way. The hydrocarbons in the basin was in most instances entirely or primarily from these carbon rich shales. Not just any shale will do. They are specific and piss easy to identify and map. That said, there are fairways in all of these plays where the wells are better, mainly due to the physics of the rock. They need to be brittle, and this means a high silica (sand, but very small particles) that will actually fracture.
There are many high permeability zones that do not need a fracture stimulation to produce economically. You drill to the target, hope you hit it, and then simply perforate the casing over the zone and produce the oil or gas. The wells deplete over time, some quite quickly, and eventually the reservoir pressure is so low that the well cannot produce in sufficient quantities and is plugged. Plugging is highly regulated by the producing states, although if you go back to the fifties and sixties, the casing and plugging requirements were poor. That is the primary pathway where subsurface gas can make it to the surface: Old Wells. The regulatory infrastructure in the big producing states are super strict on casing and plugging activities. In Oklahoma, protecting groundwater is the A #1 priority in the entire process. It doesn't cost that much to do it right, and if you read the link to that testimony, they insanely exaggerate problems with modern cement and casing jobs. That is just a fact. A fact, a fact, a fact. No company wants a casing leak or bad cement job. Say what you want about Halliburton, but they are the gold standard for well completions. I have rarely been in wells that used Halliburton because they are super expensive and just not necessary in plain old low pressure oil and gas zones. So company B is usually sufficient for most cementing and frac operations. Not so with the shale fracs. They are super technical, and just finding the appropriate frac recipe in each of these shale zones in various basins has improved to fit each rock.
So. You drill the well and case it for production. I know in the Marcellus that they are now using an extra 2000 foot casing string to cover the fresh water table.
OK. The permeability is so unbelievably low in those shales that you can drill the well, perforate and acidize the perfs (acidizing is where you pump 15% HCL into each set of perforations to dissolve the cement which often invades your formation for a few feet around the wellbore. I have been on tons of acid jobs. The injection pressure is way lower than a frac, and it flows back as CO2, water, and Calcium Chloride. Calcium Chloride is the salt that you see stores tossing on slippery ice at the front door. You can buy it by the ton if you want. So acid jobs are small and are only for cleaning up the perforations.
Back to perfs. After the well is drilled and cased, it is surrounded by an annulus of cement. You lower down a "gun" which is just a pipe with small shape charges to shoot holes in the casing over the specific zone you want to produce. Cementing is now a super refined science. It isn't just any old cement. It is complicated stuff and modern cement jobs are pretty darn good. For instance, I work a lot of limestone reef formations in Kansas. There are stacks of these porous zones on top of each other. You may have a 15 foot thick oil stratum with ten saltw#ter zones within 50 to a hundred feet above or below your target. So you perforate the oil zone and the cement keeps the adjacent saltw#ter zones from flowing into your wellbore. That ruins the well, basically turning it into a saltw#ter well which is plugged. So you only perforate your target. Cementing off the other porous saltw#ter bearing zones is a necessity. It works well, but there are occasionally poor cement jobs that do not isolate your zone and you lose the well and have to plug it. You know instantly when you have a bad cement job. BP should have known it on the Macondo well.
So you now have a drilled well with the target zone isolated and perforated. Shale reservoirs have such low permeability that you can open the sucker up to the surface and all you will get is a puff of gas at the most. The perm is so poor that gas can't migrate to the wellbore without inducing a fracture set.
Frac Process: This is a big industrial looking operation no matter how you look at it. The shale gas wells are frac'd along the 4500 foot to 9000 foot length of the horizontal section, so it is frac'd in stages along the wellbore. What this accomplishes is basically getting the equivalent of anywhere between 4 to 30 vertical wells along the length of the lateral. A vertical well might have a couple of hundred feet of the target shale in a vertical wellbore. If you drill horizontally you have thousands of feet of it in the horizontal leg of the well.
On the shale gas wells it takes a truly huge amount of fresh water. This part of the process is the A #1 problem in the shale fracs. It takes an incredible amount of freshwater (millions of gallons per well), and this puts all kinds of strains on local water supplies. The water had to be very clean from any mud (clay minerals) because those contaminates can clog the fractures. So you are having to truck millions of gallons of water around, and a water truck can only carry about 170 bbls of water per load. So it is an endless supply of trucks taking the water to the site, where it is stored in a pit lined with a thick poly liner similar to what is used in landfills. You have to use a high quality liner, or that fresh water will seep into the groundwater. At this point it is still fresh water stored on location. Nothing added. That happens during the frac job when it all gets blended and injected.
The frac: This involves an incredible amount of horsepower. Not so much to reach the pressure where the failure modulus of the rock to fracture it, but to inject at high rates. After the formation breaks you have to inject at a high rate to propagate the fractures. Since shales have such poor permeability, the aim is to create as many fractures as possible. It is so hard to do this that you can typically only get a fracture radius of a few hundred feet laterally from the wellbore. That is why you see 8 wells per square mile just to drain the accumulation.
Fracs are done in stages. It isn't just pumped in there willy nilly. The wells are perforated in small clusters a hundred to a few hundred feet along the lateral. So in essence, you frac one stage along the wellbore, isolate it with downhole packers, and then move back up and frac'ing a number of stages. The number of stages in some zones is as much as thirty these days, depending on the area and the rock mechanics. These shales are cored first, sent to a lab, and all of the rock physics is worked out to optimize the frac.
In essence, you are creating the equivalent of maybe thirty vertical wells along the length of the fracture for the cost of one very expensive horizontal.
When you frac a low permeability rock, the frac fluid is under high pressure. When you move the frac operation off of the pad, the well is under high pressure. You open up the well and that frac fluid comes screaming back at you. It is now contaminated with salt from the saltw#ter liberated along with the gas, so it needs to be handled with care. Chloride contamination of an aquifer is a disaster. Your water well suddenly becomes a saltw#ter well. You can't fix it, and you are looking at a big time landowner lawsuit.
This fluid comes back and is flowed back to the lined pit to be hauled off and disposed of in a deep porous injection zone. This is no big deal, disposing of the water. The Marcellus unfortunately has no sweet injection zone like we have in the mid continent...the Arbuckle/Ellenberger group.
You won't get all of the frac water back, but you get almost all of it back in a month or so. As the water flows back it begins to turn into a gas well which lifts the fluid and eventually the frac fluid is recovered and you have a gas well. Water in the wellbore creates high hydrostatic pressure and in essence kills the well until you can get that water back.
The high pressure part of the operation is the frac. Shale gas wells have notoriously low flowing pressure which is directly related to the low permeability of the shale itself. So after they go online, they are actually easy to control. The scary part is when you move in a small completion rig and open up the well to flow the load water back.
It is much scarier to drill a 22,000 foot gas well into an overpressured zone. That well might have 10,000 psia at the wellhead. Those are plain un-frac'd high pressure wells. There is infinitely more risk of having gas migrate up the annulus of the casing strings in these types of wells. 10,000 psi at the wellhead is a lot scarier than 1000 pounds of pressure at the wellhead. And shale gas wells have a very steep decline. They are pidly little gas wells after a year or two, sometimes as little as a few months. They will continue to produce for a long time at much lower rates, but the flowing pressure is low and the rates settle down. This is a hyperbolic decline curve, and I can look at a well decline and get an idea of permeability at a glance. I look at that many wells.
You also may need a million pounds of sand, which is also injected as a proppant to keep the fractures from closing after the frac job. Do you have any idea of how many truckloads it takes to put a million pounds of sand on a drilling location? That is why the roads are covered with trucks hauling material around. After the drilling is done in your area this dies back to almost nothing. So these people have to live with what is basically an industrial operation going on in their neighborhoods and they don't like it. That is totally valid and understandable.
The real problem with shale fracs is that this all involves an incredible amount of trucking and puts a strain on municipal water supplies in certain areas. It is no big deal in most places, but I see a lot of bitching in the Marcellus, and I assume it is factual. This is the root of the problem. Drilling and completing these wells is a big industrial process, and if for none other than aesthetic reasons, it is a beehive of industrial activity just hauling that stuff around. Hauling is where the surface contamination is also at most risk simply from spills.
The spent frac water that flows back is usually high in chlorides...plain old table salt, and chlorides in the groundwater will ruin an aquifer. That is why casing integrity is so important. And hey, if you get a casing leak in your production liner, you know it. You have a wellhead on there that connects to each casing string. If you blow your production liner you will see a huge spike in the annulus between that string and the shallower intermediate string. I mean, you know it instantly. A well with that problem is not that common, but if it happens you have to go fix the casing leak or plug the well, as it won't produce properly.
You know instantly of a casing rupture because the wellhead has pressure gauges on each casing string. The pressure gauge on the annulus of the producion string will spike, and the pressure on the production string will fall dramatically. Anyone with two feet can sneak onto a location and look at the pressure gauges. It is simple.
So you inject the frac water, mixing it with sand at the appropriate ratio, and also at that point mix it with the dreaded chemicals which are mainly drag reducers and clay stabilizers. The well will flow almost all of this fluid back. Remember that. Now you have to deal with it. Running it through city treatment plants or spraying it on roads for deicing is crazy, but has been done in the Marcellus. It isn't some cyanide laced deadly mix, but the load water picks up dissolved solids from the actual shale formation which famously includes barium and other things that you just don't want in your rivers and lakes. This is the big problem with the Marcellus: disposing of the frac water that flows back. It is no big deal in most basins because there are deep porous zones that will take zillions of bbls of fluid injection without pressuring up the disposal zone. The Marcellus, from my research, has a big problem becuase it lacks a deep disposal zone that is full of salwater and always will be full of saltw#ter.
It isn't like you explode the subsurface and rip holes in the surface. These zones are very deep, and although it sounds like a lot of fluid, it is nigh impossible for it to migrate through the rock itself to the surface. The obvious and well known permeability pathway to the surface is the wellbore itself. I know that Chesapeake is going overboard on the surface casing, running not only the surface conductor string and the surface string over any aquifer, but tossing in a 2000 foot cemented string for good measure. I heard that this is costing about 800 grand per well. They don't have to do it, and I'm not sure if other operators go the extra mile on this, but Chesapeake realizes that the frac issue is no longer about science. It is about public opinion. Chesapeake has its own rig fleet. Top of the line. I know people who work there, and they are the cream of the crop.
The only place that I know of with a problem of radioactive formation water is the Permian Basin in SW Texas. They had been using old production tubing for fences, playgrounds, you name it. Then they figured out that the scale accumulation in the tubing was loaded with NORM. Naturally occuring radioactive material. So that was a major freakout that was frantically cleaned up by removing all of that tubing. This was discovered in the seventies and is now well known.
Now. How do you actually know where these fractures go? This is something that nobody seems to know or admit. In order to study the fracs and maximize thier effectiveness, microseismic of frac jobs has been going of for over a decade. It is a lot like 3D seismic, where you get a great picture of subsurface features. It is super hot science.
You hire a seismic company for this. They lay out an array of geophones, which more or less listen. As the fractures propagate, they make noise, and the surface array can pick this up and model it. It shows you where the fractures are going. I have seen it up in the 3D room, and it is really cool. The objective is to maximize fractures in the shale and not to let fractures get out of zone. This can be a huge problem in parts of the Barnett in Texas because it lies on top of saltw#ter filled zones in some areas. If you get a fracture height that busts into the water zone, you lose your well. It will produce saltw#ter.
So you can see where the fractures are going. They do this to actually increase the frac effectiveness. On all of the ones I have seen, you may see one or two fractures that get fifty or a hundred feet out of zone..and these wells are 8000 to 10,000 feet deep. The problem is you find places along the wellbore with poor fracture density and hence it won't recover the oil or gas. I have seen it in shale gas wells and normal oil zones that are now being drilled with the big fracs.
I mean, I look at physics. And it isn't complicated.
The problem with the Marcellus is that it was never an oil or gas field and suddenly there is this massive rush of drilling and all of the damn trucking and industry that invades their countryside. I understand this and it is a super valid point. What they need to realize is that after the drilling in an area is done, you will end up with just wellheads producing gas. Not an oil field with wells every forty acres, which would be much worse, but bad enough for some people. Quiet farms are now overrun with massive trucking and huge rigs drilling. I saw the same thing in the Arkoma Basin. The drilling there has really slowed down because the sweet spot has been developed. Now you have a bunch of wellheads producing natural gas, and they behave like any normal gas well. Better in most cases because of the low flowing pressure of the wells.
I read that link above to the testimony that person gave and it is so skewed and crazy. He said that these wells are like thousands of dirty bombs just waiting to go off. Lying and exaggerating are not going to serve these people well.
I was sent a link to a 30 minute lecture from a guy from Princeton or some place. The guy had evidently worked at Schlumberger in the past and was passing himself off as an expert. He had his facts so wrong and it was so full of falsehoods. The guy didn't now jack. Now how are these people going to know the difference?
This is a lot like ANWR. What has happened is that the drilling boom there has caused a lot of concern because of the big industrial nature of these well completions. I can understand that. I don't worry about it in some places, because there isn't an inch of land that hasn't felt the plow or the logger. A corn field is not natural.
The coastal plain of ANWR is probably the most breathtaking wild country that I have ever seen, and most of you know that I have spent whole summers up there wandering around alone.
It is mainly the state of Alaska that spits out the propaganda over ANWR. Only 2000 acres will be disturbed and that crap. Well, the coastal plain will be politely industrialized. That is it. I am rabidly against drilling there for that reason. It is pretty easy to control land spills, so I have no doubt that it can be done fairly safely. I just don't want to see the wildest area in the U.S. to have a ton of production sites all over it. I have crossed that coastal plain at least 6 times on foot. I know what it is like. It is heaven.
Sure, when the wells are depleted it will be restored, but that tundra shows every scar on it for a thousand years. Yeah, it is mainly aesthetic, but the USGS put out a resource assesment inflating the probable reserves and the state of Alaska needs the money from the production, which is taxed in all states I know of except California. Alaska has no visible means of support and since 90% of the wankers never leave Anchorage, they don't give a damn about the place.
So I do understand the feelings over all of this industrialization of the countryside. It is limited to the well pads and pipeline right of ways, but it isn't pretty until the drilling part is over. So I understand it on a purely aesthetic basis. That should be good enough, and the anti frac people only do themselves a disservice when they make crap up.
The state of Alaska funds this outfit called Arctic Power, and they post pictures of all of the happy caribou around Prudhoe Bay. It is propaganda, and I hate it no matter which side is dishing it out. Arctic Power is f*#king evil. Go hit their website someday. It is the worst pro oil outfit that I have ever seen. I believe Exxon even stopped giving them money they are so bad.
I also know that the fresh water in upstate New York is unbelievably high quality. So the onus should be on the industry that they can do it right. They can do it right, but New York just has little experience in this area. So they are scared. I understand this, but the anti frac crowd should stop being stupid about the science and look at it from a factual point of view. The shale gas wells put a big strain on fresh water supplies, and moving all of that stuff around by truck is a nightmare.
Other than that, it is a gas field. The same thing goes on in droves all over the country.
As for Gasland, there was one example of pollution that was very real. The problem was that it was impossible for the average person to tell what was real and what was cherry picked information. I hold that film right up there with the BS coming from the other side in Arctic Power in Alaska.
Phew.
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GuapoVino
Trad climber
All Up In Here
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Dec 31, 2011 - 07:18pm PT
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Below is a link to an article about the gas geysers by Okarche. I want to say that I am not stirring the pot or anything like that. I am fascinated by the oil industry and are genuinely curious about stuff like this. I remember watching the local news one night and they lead into a story about this and was going to come back to it after the commercial, but when they came back they didn't say anything about it. I thought it was odd.
I have a friend who drills water wells and he told me that one of the oil/gas companies was supplying people in the area with drinking water until they determined if the ground water was effected. I asked a friend of mine who is a petroleum engineer about it and he told me that (at that time) it wasn't yet determined what the cause was, but that it was looking like the problem was traced back to one well that had been drilled without following certain precautions that are required in this particular area from some reason. He said that his company won't even drill in this area because it is too risky for things like this to happen. I asked him about it recently and he said that it kind of died down and he really hadn't heard what the final conclusion was. I have always been curious what the outcome was but have never been able to find anything about it other than the initial news articles.
http://enidnews.com/x518641918/Mysterious-Kingfisher-area-gas-geysers-leave-officials-puzzled
http://enidnews.com/x518641990/Corporation-Commission-thinks-drilling-might-be-causing-geysers/print
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 31, 2011 - 08:43pm PT
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That is in the Cana Woodford play. Lots of activity there.
What most likely happened was that they had a problem with the overpressured Springer formation, which you have to drill through to get to the Woodford in this area. There is a ton of Springer production here.
No way is gas in the groundwater natural in that area.
That can happen when you have to drill through an overpressured zone. An overpressured zone is just a gas accumulation that has higher pressure than a normal pressure gradient of around .445 psi/ft. They are scary and you can blow out. This is the area where a blowout occurred this summer, also from the Springer. Rig burned and all that. You don't see too many blowouts these days like you see in the movie "Hellfighters." It does happen, though.
This happened twice back in the late nineties down in the deep Anadarko. It isn't the end of the world for the aquifer, like saltw#ter contamination is, but it isn't good in any way.
Hey, stir the pot on real world issues.
You are also correct that many companies avoid this area simply because of the greater cost associated with getting through the Springer Sandstones to the underlying Woodford Shale. There is an area over to the west in Ellis County where the Morrow formation is also overpressured.
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GuapoVino
Trad climber
All Up In Here
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Dec 31, 2011 - 08:54pm PT
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Hey, I just realized that I know some of your in-laws. I went to school with Michelle since grade school and have known James for years. One of my hiking/climbing buddies lived with James in college and I would hang out over there a lot back in those day. I think he now works with your wife at DEQ. Small World.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Dec 31, 2011 - 09:17pm PT
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That is too funny. James is coming over right now to pick me up to go over to play with his kids. I am still hobbling around from knee surgery.
Otherwise I wouldn't be spending hours on the taco!
Yeah, my wife is a big cheese at the DEQ. That is why I usually hear of any big problems in the oilfield around here.
Michelle is grooving out in Santa Barbara now with her long term boyfriend. She is so cool.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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El Guapo,
I read those news stories about the gas geysers near Okarche. I couldn't place it until I saw the date...2005. That is long before the horizontal play kicked off in that area.
That was a plain jane vertical well that was drilling. Same thing happened down north of Granite in the 90's on a Marathon well.
So that is one of the two famous cases in OK that I have been citing as examples of how gas usually gets into groundwater.
That Okarche well and the one down in Beckham County are famous, and the only big cases I know of in OK since I got out of school back in the eighties.
You ought to read the link posted above that shows the public comment this person gave. He called all of the gas wells dirty bombs just waiting to go off.
If you read nothing that I have said, read this: After the frac the well flows back all or nearly all of the frac water that is injected. It doesn't turn into a gas well until it spits all of that fluid back. Fluid in the well can kill a gas well. The hydrostatic pressure of the fluid column in the wellbore can exceed the formation pressure. So the well won't flow.
After you get the frac load back it is just a gas well. And the shale gas wells are low pressure gas wells to boot.
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