Gas leaks from shale wells rare

[theHandpuppet]

Read the whole article and tell me what y’all think. I don’t know.. . it reads like a CYA piece to me.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/08/05/gas-leaks-from-shale-wells-rare.html

Gas leaks from shale wells rare
By Spencer Hunt
The Columbus Dispatch
Monday August 5, 2013 5:58 AM

Minutes after Debby Kline flicked a lighter near a bathroom sink in her Portage County house in northeastern Ohio, she called the fire department.
A sink-to-ceiling flare erupted when she tried to light a candle on Dec. 21, she told a TV news show. State oil and gas regulators are still investigating what caused natural gas to bubble out of the faucet.
Kline’s Nelson Township house is within a half-mile of two Utica shale wells that state records show were drilled and fracked in October and November.
Videos of burning water in Ohio and Pennsylvania households have helped bring attention to shale drilling and fracking, but such incidents are rare. Most complaints associated with oil and gas drilling are about drinking-water wells that run dry or produce water that’s discolored, smelly or clogged with sediment….

[Vincardog]

1. If they are so rare, the industry should not be exempt from the clean water act. Right?

[theHandpuppet]

5. You would think so.

That's why I posted this news article to the Ohio forum:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1071801

Why go to such great lengths to hide something that's supposed to be perfectly safe?

[NickB79]

2. EXPLOSIVE gas leaks might be rare

But the far more dangerous (WRT global warming), slow leaks apparently are not: http://www.nature.com/news/methane-leaks-erode-green-credentials-of-natural-gas-1.12123

Scientists are once again reporting alarmingly high methane emissions from an oil and gas field, underscoring questions about the environmental benefits of the boom in natural-gas production that is transforming the US energy system.

The researchers, who hold joint appointments with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado in Boulder, first sparked concern in February 2012 with a study suggesting that up to 4% of the methane produced at a field near Denver was escaping into the atmosphere. If methane — a potent greenhouse gas — is leaking from fields across the country at similar rates, it could be offsetting much of the climate benefit of the ongoing shift from coal- to gas-fired plants for electricity generation.

Industry officials and some scientists contested the claim, but at an American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, California, last month, the research team reported new Colorado data that support the earlier work, as well as preliminary results from a field study in the Uinta Basin of Utah suggesting even higher rates of methane leakage — an eye-popping 9% of the total production. That figure is nearly double the cumulative loss rates estimated from industry data — which are already higher in Utah than in Colorado.

Anything over 3-4% makes shale gas worse than coal for the climate.

[femmocrat]

3. One is too many. nt

[mbperrin]

4. I worked in the wellhead industry as a manager for 10 years, and this is definitely a

Susie Sunshine CYA piece.

How about some shale gas FIRES?


Explosion Rocks Natural Gas Drilling Well in Marcellus Shale, Workers Seriously Injured
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-10/explosion-rocks-natural-gas-drilling-well-in-marcellus-shale-workers-seriously-injured

Explosion at West Virginia natural gas well site injures at least five
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/08/us-antero-fire-idUSBRE9670Q420130708

Explosion, Fire At Marcellus Shale Gas Well Site Under Investigation
3 Workers Injured In Fire At Chesapeake Energy Site
Read more: http://www.wtae.com/Explosion-Fire-At-Marcellus-Shale-Gas-Well-Site-Under-Investigation/-/9681798/7714474/-/aprc0b/-/index.html#ixzz2b8rvJh7c

3 injured in gas well fire during Marcellus shale drilling
http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20120817/NEWS01/308170021/3-injured-gas-well-fire-during-Marcellus-shale-drilling

plus another 1,620,000 hits from search "shale gas well fire"


Proven technology? NOPE. Old name put on new process.

[Champion Jack]

7. ++++

[limpyhobbler]

6. All wells leak something.

At least they leak into the air. Sometimes they flare it off. Either way it creates air pollution.


But the newspaper article was just about leaks into the water table so, I think at least about about 6% of fracking wells are currently leaking into the ground...

Went to google and typed in fracking well leak percentage

The part of the gas well that they're relying on to protect groundwater is simply cement: about a 1-inch-thick layer between the steel casing and the surrounding rock. Cement is permeable before it sets, subject to cracking afterward and can never be made leakproof. A 1-inch layer could never be adequate when groundwater is at risk.

The gas industry's own documents and case studies show that about 6 percent of cement jobs fail immediately upon installation, and recent experience in the Pennsylvania Marcellus shale has borne this out over and over again.

Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection has tracked gas leaking from wells across the state. They found 6.2 percent of new gas wells were leaking in 2010, 6.2 percent in 2011 and 7.2 percent so far in 2012.

When the cement fails, it opens a pathway for gas and other toxins involved in the drilling and fracking process to migrate into groundwater and to the surface.

http://www.timesunion.com/opinion/article/Fracking-is-hardly-leakproof-3646458.php

Gas and oil wells that lose their structural integrity also leak methane and other contaminants outside their casings and into the atmosphere and water wells. Multiple industry studies show that about 5 percent of all oil and gas wells leak immediately because of integrity issues, with increasing rates of leakage over time. With hundreds of thousands of new wells expected, this problem is neither negligible nor preventable with current technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/opinion/gangplank-to-a-warm-future.html

[mbperrin]

8. And with the new fracking technology which is orders of magnitude more powerful than what they used

to call fracking before, entire formations are being shattered outside the casing all the way to the surface.

Cold Lake, Canada - great example.

[limpyhobbler]

9. Definitely. This isn't "old fashioned" drilling.

I was reading this interview with Louis Allstadt. He's a former Mobil oil VP, talking about some of the dangers of the new techniques. The whole interview is really interesting. Here's a bit.

What's different is the volume of fracking fluids and the volume of flow-back that occurs in these wells. It is 50 to 100 times more than what was used in the conventional wells.

The other [difference] is that the rock above the target zone is not necessarily impervious the way it was in the conventional wells. And to me that last point is at least as big as the volume. The industry will tell you that the mile or two between the zone that's being fracked is not going to let anything come up.

But there are already cases where the methane gas has made it up into the aquifers and atmosphere. Sometimes through old well bores, sometimes through natural fissures in the rock. What we don't know is just how much gas is going to come up over time. It's a point most people haven't gotten. It's not just what's happening today. We're opening up channels for the gas to creep up to the surface and into the atmosphere. And methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short term - less than 100 years - than carbon dioxide.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/17605