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Higher-risk ‘Shallow Fracking’ More Common than Suspected: Study
Higher-risk ‘Shallow Fracking’ More Common than Suspected: Study
Lessons for BC, Alberta in new Stanford report.
The fracking of oil and gas less than a mile from aquifers or the Earth’s surface now takes place across North America with few restrictions, posing increased risk for drinking water supplies, says a new Stanford study.
The study examined the frequency of so-called shallow fracking, described by the researchers as occurring less than a mile underground. Shallow fracking poses a greater risk to drinking water than fracking that occurs much deeper under the Earth’s surface.
Out of 44,000 wells fracked between 2010 and 2013 in the United States, researchers found that 6,900 (16 per cent) were fractured less than a mile from the surface and another 2,600 wells (six per cent) were fractured above 3,000 feet, or 900 metres.
“What surprised me is how often shallow fracturing occurs with large volumes of chemicals and water,” said lead researcher and environmental scientist Robert Jackson in an interview with The Tyee.
The majority of shallow fracking now takes place in Texas, California, Arkansas and Wyoming. Although the study largely excludes Canada, shallow fracking also takes place in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia, and sometimes at depths less than 500 metres.
Due to poor data reporting by industry and its regulators, “the occurrence of shallow hydraulic fracturing across the U.S. is underestimated in our analysis,” added the study.
During shallow fractures, the industry injects fluids into vertical or horizontal wells to crack rock directly below or into groundwater. In many reported cases, the resulting fractures can travel up to 556 metres into other hydrocarbon zones, water formations or other energy well sites.
As a result, shallow fractures can connect to aquifers used for drinking water.
“Even fractures that do not extend all the way to an overlying aquifer can link formations by connecting them to natural faults, fissures or other pathways,” explained the study.
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Fracking Industry Has Changed Earthquake Patterns in Northeast BC
Fracking Industry Has Changed Earthquake Patterns in Northeast BC
Impact on groundwater and migrating gases mostly unknown, critics say. A special report.
New research and presentations by both provincial and federal scientists show that the shale gas industry, which the B.C. government hopes will eventually supply proposed liquefied natural gas terminals with fracked gas, has caused more than a thousand earthquakes in northeast B.C. since 2006 and changed the region’s seismicity.
The earthquakes, ranging in magnitude from 1.0 to 4.3, include six events higher than 4.0 and more than 20 events that shook buildings and moved furniture in places like Fort St. John. Several events caused casing damage to horizontal wells. Moreover, industry-caused tremors remain an ongoing geological revolution for the region.
Earthquakes with a magnitude of about 2.0 or less are called microquakes and can’t be felt at the surface. Events above 3.0 can be felt on the ground, and tremors just larger than 4.0 can cause minor damage. A great earthquake, capable of extensive damage, typically measures a magnitude of 8.0.
Scientists originally thought that hydraulic fracturing wouldn’t trigger anything more than microquakes. But now that the technology has set off magnitude 4.4 quakes in Alberta, scientists are grappling to determine what kind of hazard industrial tremors might pose to pipelines, dams and other infrastructure.
At Upper Halfway, a community northeast of Fort St. John, residents have described the tremors as a series of crashes and bangs comparable to someone driving “a truck into the side of the house.”
The shale gas industry involves the injection of highly pressurized fluids into wells to crack open difficult oil and gas deposits. The injections create a network of cracks that can also connect to fault zones. The reactivation of these faults can then trigger an earthquake, scientists say.
Due to limited monitoring, industry and government lack a full understanding of how the wave of quakes is changing the flow of groundwater in the region or the migration of gases such as methane, radon and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere throughout northeast B.C.
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Greenwash: Shell May Remove “Oil” From Name as it Moves to Tap Arctic, Gulf of Mexico
Shell Oil has announced it may take a page out of the BP “Beyond Petroleum” greenwashing book, rebranding itself as something other than an oil company for its United States-based unit.
Marvin Odum, director of Shell Oil’s upstream subsidiary companies in the Americas, told Bloomberg the name Shell Oil “is a little old-fashioned, I’d say, and at one point we’ll probably do something about that” during a luncheon interview with Bloomberg News co-founder Matt Winkler (beginning at 8:22) at the recently-completed Shell-sponsored Toronto Global Forum.
“Oil,” said Odum, could at some point in the near future be removed from the name.
Odum’s comments come as Shell has moved aggressively to drill for offshore oil in the Arctic and deep offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, while also maintaining a heavy footprint in Alberta’s tar sands oil patch.
Image Credit: Bloomberg News Screenshot
Shell also recently acquired BG (British Gas) Group, a company that owns numerous assets in the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, transforming the company into what Forbes hailed as a “world LNG giant.”
Winkler quipped in Toronto that due to this major asset purchase, it might be more accurate to call Shell Oil, “Shell Gas.”
In October 2011, BG Group signed a major contract with the U.S.-based LNG giant Cheniere to ship its gas product obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to the global market. That LNG will begin to flow by the end of the year.
Just a week before Odum told Winkler that Shell may take “oil” out its company name, he appeared on Bloomberg News on the sidelines of the Aspen Ideas Festival to boast about his company’s big plans — plans to drill for oil in the deep offshore Gulf of Mexico Appomattox field. At Aspen, Odum called Appomattox a “world class oil and gas project.”
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Another 4.4 Magnitude Industry Reported Quake in Alberta
Another 4.4 Magnitude Industry Reported Quake in Alberta
Chevron shuts down operations following seismic event near Fox Creek.
Chevron Canada has confirmed that “a magnitude 4.4 seismic event was recorded by seismic monitoring arrays operated by Chevron Canada and Natural Resources Canada” in the Duvernay shale near Fox Creek, Alberta on Saturday.
It’s the second record-breaking industry-reported tremor to hit the region in a year. In January, industry triggered a 4.4 magnitude earthquake in the Duvernay shale.
That event forced the Alberta Energy Regulator to adopt a “traffic light system” to regulate seismic events in the region. The system requires companies to report events greater than a magnitude of 2.0, and to shut down operations once a 4.0 magnitude event is observed nearby.
As a result of the new regulations, Chevron reported the earthquake to the regulator and shut down operations at a natural gas well pad located approximately 27 kilometres south of Fox Creek.
However, the regulator has given the company permission to finish securing the well before it temporarily suspends operations at the site.
A spokesman for Chevron Canada, Lief Sollid, said the company “was installing production tubing in a well on the pad at the time of the event. Multi-stage hydraulic fracturing operations were completed on the eight-well pad on June 5.”
Hydraulic fracturing, the cracking of rock with highly pressurized fluids, can trigger an earthquake days after the event.
Sollid added in an email that “no injuries, property damage or environmental impacts have been reported as a result of the event.”
Since 2013, when companies started to fracture the deep shale with one to two-kilometre-long horizontal wells, the region has experienced a wave of tremors.
The Duvernay shale, or what stock promoters have dubbed the “new millennium gold,” covers a 56,000 square mile region and contains natural gas liquids. An average horizontal well may cost $15 million to drill.
Chevron is part-owner of the Kitimat LNG project, which will operate as an export facility for unconventional natural gas that has been fracked and extracted from British Columbia’s Liard and Horn River basins.
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Widely-Used Tool Can Lowball Methane Pollution Rates, Scientists Report, With Huge Implications for Climate Policy
Widely-Used Tool Can Lowball Methane Pollution Rates, Scientists Report, With Huge Implications for Climate Policy
An EPA-approved methane sampler widely used to measure gas leaks from oil and gas operations nationwide can dramatically under-report how much methane is leaking into the atmosphere, a team of researchers reported in a peer-reviewed paper published in March.
The researchers, one of whom first designed the underlying technology used by the sampler, warn that results from improperly calibrated machines could severely understate the amount of methane leaking from the country’s oil and gas wells, pipelines, and other infrastructure.
“It could be a big deal,” study co-author Amy Townsend-Small, a geology professor at the University of Cincinnati,told Inside Climate News, adding that it’s not yet clear how often the machine returned bad results, in part because figuring out whether there’s an error would have required using a different kind of device to independently test gas concentrations at the time levels were originally recorded.
Because of their climate-changing implications, methane leak rates are perhaps the single most consequential issue surrounding the shale gas rush and the push by the Obama administration for a shift from burning coal to burning natural gas for the nation’s electricity supply. Because natural gas is primarily made of methane, an unusually powerful greenhouse gas, if enough methane escapes into the atmosphere, these leaks could potentially make natural gas a worse fuel for the climate than burning coal.
And methane leaks are at their most powerful – 86 times stronger than the same amount of carbon dioxide – in the first two decades or so after they hit the atmosphere. Climate scientists warn that methane leaks risk pushing the climate over an irreversible tipping point where melting permafrost and other self-reinforcing cycles can cause global warming to spiral out of control.
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8 States Dealing With Huge Increases in Fracking Earthquakes
8 States Dealing With Huge Increases in Fracking Earthquakes
A new report, released Thursday from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), identified eight states in the eastern and central U.S. where fracking operations have led to dramatic increases in earthquakes, primarily from the injection of the wastewater byproduct of drilling operations into underground wells. This process can activate faults that in some cases were previously unknown.
“Earthquake activity has sharply increased since 2009 in the central and eastern United States. The increase has been linked to industrial operations that dispose of wastewater by injecting it into deep wells,” the report says bluntly, in a rebuke to the earthquake deniers in the oil and gas industry, such as fracking founder Harold Hamm, who pressured Oklahoma officials to stay silent about the connection.
While Oklahoma, Texas and Ohio have gotten much of the attention for increases in seismicity in areas where earthquakes were once rare, they aren’t the only states in danger of more and larger earthquakes. The USGS report also pointed to Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico and identified 17 zones within the eight states in particular danger from an increased number of what it calls “induced” quakes.
The report, Incorporating Induced Seismicity in the 2014 United States National Seismic Hazard Model, analyzed these seismic activity increases and developed the models to project how hazardous earthquakes could be in these in these zones, taking into account their rates, locations, maximum magnitude and ground motions.
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Rig Count Data Shows Gulf States Cranking Up Pressure On The U.S.
Rig Count Data Shows Gulf States Cranking Up Pressure On The U.S.
The global rig count statistics published by Baker Hughes provide a crucial industry activity indicator and some of the most up to date industry statistics available. This is a short report updating international statistics to March 2015 and US statistics to 10 April 2015.
Figure 1 The Middle East OPEC gulf states continue to confound expectations by increasing their rig count and drilling, evidently intent on keeping the oil market over-supplied and the oil price suppressed. Oil rig count for these 4 countries increased 6 to 161 for the month of March. Saudi oil production hit a new record of 10.3 Mbpd in March. Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi wants price stability and order to return to the market but on OPEC’s terms.
Related: Could We Finally Have A Meaningful Oil Price Rally?
Figure 2 The international oil rig count peaked at 1080 in July 2014 and has since fallen 104 (10%) to 976 units in March 2015. This is as yet a very muted response to what is a full blown industry crisis. It does take longer for offshore drilling to wind down and it is possible that companies with rigs on contract have simply parked them for the time being.
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Shale Gas and Fracking: The science behind the controversy
Shale Gas and Fracking: The science behind the controversy
Anyone looking for a comprehensive review of the controversies associated with fracking is going to be disappointed by this short book. After having ploughed almost all of its 170 pages I found, near the back, the following sentence:
“I won’t go through all of the contested issues, because the chapters in the book provide a basis to carve out your own analysis looking at some of the main peer reviewed papers”.
So the message is that if you want to make up your mind about shale then go to the peer reviewed literature. The implied message in this, made explicit at times, is that many opponents of the shale gas industry don’t do this and many members of the public rely too heavily on rumour and panicked reports leading to what Michael Stephenson claims is a low quality to the public policy debate. The public policy debate needs to be guided by academic scientists in peer reviewed papers…..like him.
As he writes, towards the end of this book:
“In this book I hope I have shown how a controversial subject can be tackled with science. There are various definitions of science around. One that I like is “…a systemic endeavour that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanation and predictions about the universe.”
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Germany’s Merkel Comes Out as Basically a U.S. Agent
Germany’s Merkel Comes Out as Basically a U.S. Agent
On Wednesday, April 1st, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet approved a measure to bring fracking (the patents for which are owned mainly by “large American companies, including Halliburton, Baker Hughes and Schlumberger”) into Germany. This is a prelude not only to U.S. President Obama’s secret Trans-Atlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP) pact with Europe to subordinate national laws and regulations to trans-national mega-corporate panels that will be dominated by U.S. firms and that will override the participating nations’ environmental and labor regulations and consumer protections (and harm European economies generally), but it is also a major step toward removing Europe from Russia’s energy-market, and bringing U.S. and European oil companies to dominate there instead.
German Economic News headlined on April 1st, “Precursor to TTIP: Federal Government brings Fracking to Germany,” and reported that:
The controversial shale gas extraction (fracking) process is coming to Germany: In order not to provoke excessively large protests at home, the federal government highlighted that fracking is initially allowed only for testing purposes. But in fact, the draft law of the Federal Environment and the Federal Ministry of Economics, approved today by the the Cabinet, also allows subsequent large-scale extraction of shale gas….
The American interest in a continuing conflict simmering in Ukraine also causes Europeans to fear that Russian gas could stop and thus drive Europe to give up our still considerable resistance against fracking. Some US politicians have personal interests, such as the US Vice President Biden, whose son works for a Ukrainian fracking company.
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Calls For Immediate Shutdown Of Illegal California Injection Wells As Regulators Host ‘Aquifer Exemption Workshop’
Calls For Immediate Shutdown Of Illegal California Injection Wells As Regulators Host ‘Aquifer Exemption Workshop’
While California legislators are calling for immediate closure of the thousands of injection wells illegally dumping oil industry wastewater and enhanced oil recovery fluids into protected groundwater aquifers, regulators with the state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) were holding an “Aquifer Exemption Workshop” in Long Beach on Tuesday.
Just 23 out of the 2,500 wells DOGGR officials have acknowledged the agency improperly permitted to operate in aquifers that contain potentially drinkable water have so far been closed down — 11 were closed downlast July and 12 more were shut down earlier this month.
Given the urgency of the situation, it certainly does not look good that DOGGR made time to hold a workshop to outline “the data requirements and process for requesting an aquifer exemption under the Safe Drinking Water Act,” when it has given itself a two-year deadline to investigate the thousands more wells illegally operating in groundwater aquifers that should have been protected under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act all along.
Last Friday, state legislators sent Governor Jerry Brown a letter calling for the immediate closure of the wells, writing that “the decision to allow thousands of injection wells to continue pumping potentially hazardous fluids into protected aquifers is reckless.”
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The Shale Debt Redux
The Shale Debt Redux
Shale debt, falling prices and slack demand has tight oil producers in trouble. And yet, there is still burgeoning production. Why? Well, we’ve seen this before. It’s the shale debt redux. Operators did it a few years ago in natural gas and prices have yet to recover. Unfortunately cheap money in the form of debt can mean poor investment choices for businesses and for investors. But it can also lead to an aberrant market because operators deep in debt won’t curtail production even though it is glutted. Debt coupons simply have to be met.
The shale revolution has always been funded by massive debt. Operators who were drilling for gas back in 2009-2011 used debt extensively. And just like now, they overproduced. By 2011, supply exceeded demand by four times. Then prices tanked. It is curious that so few asked the questions: why did they produce so heavily and glut the market; and why did they continue to produce into a glutted market? The answer is really quite simple. Many couldn’t afford to pull back production to help stabilize prices. Had they done so, they would not have been able to meet their debt payments. So they kept pumping…and pumping…and pumping.
And now they’ve done it again.
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Natural Gas Prices To Crash Unless Rig Count Falls Fast
Natural Gas Prices To Crash Unless Rig Count Falls Fast
Spending cuts for oil-directed drilling have dominated first quarter 2015 energy news but rig counts for shale gas drilling are too high.
Investors should pay attention to this growing problem. Bank of America fearssub-$2 gas prices now that winter heating worries are over. Low natural gas prices affect the economics for gas-rich oil production in the Eagle Ford Shale and Permian basin plays as well as for the shale gas plays.
Meanwhile, an orgy of over-production is taking place in the Marcellus Shale. Well head prices are now below $1.50 per thousand cubic feet of gas because of limited take-away capacity and near-saturation of regional demand. Even companies in the Wyoming, Susquehanna, Allegheny and Washington County core areas of the Marcellus play are losing money at these prices.
The rig count for shale gas plays has decreased by only half as much as for the tight oil plays. The reason appears to be that most shale gas companies do not have significant positions in the tight oil plays and must continue to drill to maintain production levels.
Shale gas rig counts have dropped only 19% for horizontal rigs and 25% for all rigs from 2014 highs. The corresponding decrease for tight oil plays is 41% and 46%, respectively, as shown in the table below.
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Has California’s Fracking Boom Already Gone Bust?
Has California’s Fracking Boom Already Gone Bust?
We accelerate down the runway — a tiny asphalt strip next to Taft Skydiving. Our little Piper Cherokee lifts off and as we ascend, I peer out the window.
Below us is California’s Kern County and more than a century of oil exploration — from the gushers of the 1800s to today’s less robust reality. It’s a spider web of dirt roads, drilling rigs, pump jacks, pipes and boilers.
At least I’m pretty sure that’s what’s below us. The air quality is so bad that the San Joaquin Valley we’re flying over looks like the blurred work of an impressionist painter. Our view is smudged by stubborn smog that’s refused to budge for days.
It’s a perfect metaphor for trying to understand the future of oil and gas production in California, which is why we’ve taken flight in the first place.
For years, the biggest talk in California’s energy industry has been about hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) and whether or not the method of pumping sand, chemicals and water at very high pressure to release trapped hydrocarbons will kick off a boom comparable to surging North Dakota.
There was a time, just a few years ago, that most news reports deemed a shale oil boom inevitable in California. But now, it’s not looking like such a sure thing after all.
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“Default Monday”: Oil & Gas Companies Face Their Creditors
“Default Monday”: Oil & Gas Companies Face Their Creditors
Debt funded the fracking boom. Now oil and gas prices have collapsed, and so has the ability to service that debt. The oil bust of the 1980s took down 700 banks, including 9 of the 10 largest in Texas. But this time, it’s different. This time, bondholders are on the hook.
And these bonds – they’re called “junk bonds” for a reason – are already cracking. Busts start with small companies and proceed to larger ones. “Bankruptcy” and “restructuring” are the terms that wipe out stockholders and leave bondholders and other creditors to tussle over the scraps.
Early January, WBH Energy, a fracking outfit in Texas, kicked off the series by filing forbankruptcy protection. It listed assets and liabilities of $10 million to $50 million. Small fry.
A week later, GASFRAC filed for bankruptcy in Alberta, where it’s based, and in Texas – under Chapter 15 for cross-border bankruptcies. Not long ago, it was a highly touted IPO, whose “waterless fracking” technology would change a parched world. Instead of water, the system pumps liquid propane gel (similar to Napalm) into the ground; much of it can be recaptured, in theory.
Ironically, it went bankrupt for other reasons: operating losses, “reduced industry activity,” the inability to find a buyer that would have paid enough to bail out its creditors, and “limited access to capital markets.” The endless source of money without which fracking doesn’t work had dried up.
Quakes in Gas Fields Ignored for Years, Dutch Agency Finds
Quakes in Gas Fields Ignored for Years, Dutch Agency Finds
Safety board’s report a relevant read for any fracking zone.
A report from the Dutch Safety Board has accused the oil and gas industry and Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs of willfully downplaying the risk of earthquakes caused by the rapid depletion of Europe’s largest gas field.
The board’s conclusions offer lessons for other regions coping with earthquakes caused by fluid injection and hydraulic fracturing.
Ever since the shale gas industry changed the seismic record of states and provinces like Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and British Columbia, many industry lobbyists and regulators have been quick to deny and dismiss citizen’s concerns about the seismic hazards.
The Groningen field, which lies under a 900 square-kilometre area in the northern part of the Netherlands, has been drained by a consortium — Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij, or NAM — jointly owned by Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell since the 1960s.
The Dutch government, a minor petrostate, is highly dependent on revenues from gas extraction, pulling in an average of 12 billion Euros or US$16.3 billion a year.
According to anti-drilling group De Groniger Doem Beweging (The Groningen Ground Movement), approximately 60 per cent of the 60,000 homeowners in the Groningen region have recorded earthquake damage to their homes over the last decade. Many homes now remain unsellable in the industry-made earthquake zone.
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