This post represents two milestones for WUWT.
1. It is the first post where a detailed examination of fracking has been offered to the readers.
2. It is the first post I’ve authored from an airplane cruising about 35,000 feet enroute from Atlanta to Phoenix. I’m connected to Southwest’s new inflight WiFI service. Mr. McClenney sent me this post just as I was about to board and I emailed back that I wouldn’t be able to get to it for hours. And then I discovered this new miracle of technology. Here’s my view just before posting:
Guest post by William F. McClenney
I had occasion recently to watch several presentations on environmental aspects of hydraulic fracturing at the world’s largest oil and gas industry conference. To this day I remain dumbfounded as to why the argument I am about to present here has never been mentioned before (at least to my knowledge).
It is fundamental to all arguments which attempt to deal with the effects of oil and gas development to consider the initial discoveries of petroleum: seeps. Seeps are natural leaks from traps where migration of hydrocarbons have accumulated predominantly in reservoir rocks in the subsurface. These seeps represent leakage of these trapped hydrocarbons along predominantly fractures and faults, and to a lesser extent other pathways (such as unconformities etc.). (For a basic video see: http://wn.com/oil_trap)
Until the past decade or so, the search for these traps has been the focus of the O&G industry since its inception. Reservoir rocks are those rocks which have facilitated this migration through the provision of porosity and permeability necessary to allow the movement of fluids and gases derived primarily from the maturation of hydrocarbons most commonly derived from source rocks such as shales and mudstones which lie beneath them stratigraphically. Perhaps the most common reservoirs are sandstones.
Let me repeat that, the source rocks almost always lie beneath the reservoir rocks.
The other necessity for a reservoir rock to be a reservoir rock is a top seal or rock of low to minimal porosity and permeability (often also shales), sometimes in association with a structural discontinuity, such as a fault or anticline, which prevent the majority of the migrated hydrocarbons to keep migrating towards the surface. Stratigraphic traps, which also require a top seal rock, are also targets, such as conversion of limestone to dolomite through the addition of magnesium rich fluids which ideally can result in creation of up to 11% porosity in the dolostone. Where the updip limit of this conversion occurs defines the limits of the stratigraphic traps.
http://www.geo.wvu.edu/~jtoro/petroleum/Review%202.html
So traps, however they were formed, are the key to comprehending not only how economic accumulations of hydrocarbons occur, but also the how and why you literally cannot get here from there with hydraulic fracturing.
http://www.geo.wvu.edu/~jtoro/petroleum/Review%202.html
http://www.geo.wvu.edu/~jtoro/petroleum/Review%202.html
Let’s start with hydraulic fracturing itself. This only recently impinged on the popular consciousness and is therefore “new”. To the petroleum or gas geologist, these arewere new techniques to increase porosity and permeability beginning in the 1960s, with their initial use in the reservoir rocks in mostly vertical wells. Read reservoir rocks, not top seal or much lower source rocks. “New” must therefore encompass the massive use of this technique for over half a century in strata which overlie the source rocks, and in just about every known oil or gas field in the world.
Combine source, reservoir and top seal and you have what we call a “petroleum system”.
http://www.geo.wvu.edu/~jtoro/petroleum/Review%202.html7
Oddly, use of hydraulic fracturing for the last half-century in the reservoir rocks has not caused a groundwater problem anywhere I am aware of. Those of you that can provide examples of where this half-century of intense reservoir hydraulic fracturing has caused drinking water aquifer impacts please chime in.
But the game changed ever so slowly with the development and evolution of directional drilling into steerable horizontal drilling now all the rage. The horizontal evolution spanning mostly just the last decade or so.
What this means is that for the most part, we are now targeting for the first time the source rocks themselves. What that means is we are now going after the much lower, stratigraphically, tight organic source shales etc. This could be the end game for petroleum and gas exploration, for once we have exhausted the source rocks……………..
So here is what has been missing entirely (from what I can tell) from the present “hot” discussion on fracking. So think “source rock”. Lying beneath the reservoir rocks, where fracking has been going on extensively for decades. Now add in horizontal drilling, sometimes for miles away from the drillpad in several directions. As they are “fracked”, enormous lift, on the order of maybe millimeters to maybe inches or possibly a few feet occurs to open up pathways for migration of the hydrocarbon load towards the horizontal well(s).
Do you realize what this means? It means that there is a definite possibility that such radical lifting and fracturing of the source rocks has a very slight possibility of increasing what for tens to hundreds of millions of years was already the natural seeping of hydrocarbons from the source rocks into the reservoir rocks!
Do you realize what that means? That means that meager induced releases of new hydrocarbons from the surfaces of the source rocks could actually “get on the freeway” of the reservoir rocks where they could mischievously, eventually, make their way into the structural and stratigraphic traps where they could literally be “stuck” under the top seals or structural seals, at least until removed by say existing oil field wells in the reservoir rocks, or egregiously eke their way through the labyrinthine natural plumbing of the natural seeps to say drinking water aquifers.
Imagine even a few feet lifting from hydraulic fracturing in the source rocks propagating all the way through the reservoir rocks, literally blasting past all the hydraulic fracturing maybe occurring there for decades before, and even more powerfully fracturing not only the top seal rocks but the miles of sediments and beds above. Very, very impressive, if we could only do it…….. A nuclear test might, repeat might, crack the entire stratigraphic section to1 the surface a mile or two above it, but not much else is likely to.
http://maps.unomaha.edu/maher/GEOL1010/lecture18/lecture18.html
For oil and gas, the migration process could be considered “fast” geologically, perhaps taking from tens of thousands to tens of millions of years to occur due to the density drive which allows crude and gas to “rapidly” migrate into the reservoirs above the formation water. You know, oil floats on water, and so on.
Seismic section image off the coast of California showing sedimentary layering, faults, and other geologic features. Some of the features, especially in the deeper and lower parts, are artifacts of the imaging technique, and it is helpful to be trained in the interpretation of seismic sections. This type of data is crucial and common in oil exploration. Note the vertical scale of depth. Image source: http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/mapping/csmp/data_collection.html
But the fate of the myriad chemicals being employed in today’s hydro-fracturing
regimes is not so sublime. What would drive these chemicals even into the culminations of the structural or stratigraphic traps? Most are water based solutions, with water starting out with a slight density advantage to say salt water (most connate waters are salty, surface seawater today ~1.025 specific gravity), that is until you dissolve said myriad chemicals into them, when the density drive case gets rather murky at best for water-based chemical fracking fluids, if not strongly negative (specific gravities being greater than 1.0).
Shoot these out into the connate water parts of the oil/column/reservoir rocks and voila, there you have it! They might be denser than even the connate waters, but unlike oil, they will dissolve and disperse. Whereas we have natural oil seeps above many known oil finds, we don’t often find brine springs. Why? Well oil is generally lighter than water (gas dramatically lighter) so it floats. If fresh water can “float” atop the denser warm Gulf Stream waters of the Atlantic, and shut down its circulation (according to many), how is this denser, salty or chemically laden, probably denser formation and frack water supposed to rise up, undispersed, through the top seal and structural traps, cascading and being refracted along countless bedding planes and unconformities to arrive, and still be detectable in near-surface (say less than 1,000 foot deep, and that’s being generous) aquifers thousands of feet to miles higher in a geologic instant?
Such that the USEPA can claim that they have found its signature in 3 places, only to later recant that they bungled that badly in each case.
With one exception, the ONLY way to get these “dangerous chemicals” into an aquifer quicksmart is if they
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Possess a density less than crude oils yet greater than methane (assuming they remain water-based solutions and do not spontaneously become a gas at deep formation pressures (ludicrous just to cogitate)
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Have an yet unreported ability to jet through the labyrinth of bedding planes, other shales etc. in order to reach the surface often miles above in no time flat, where we can sample them.
The exception being transmission up the annulus of the exploratory boring/well itself. Now this can be a rather egregious problem as Macondo informs us. Are we not yet to learn the dirty details of Halliburton’s slipshod cementing of Macondo’s annulus? And this is an all too common problem for the O&G industry, driven as it is by economics, often offering bonuses to drilling contractors for completing the well ahead of schedule. Newly drilled wells are all too frequently subjected to anthropogenic pressures “before their time”, i.e. before the cement has been allowed to properly setup. Assuming it is proper cement in the first place.
This egregious problem can readily be addressed with some skillful regulations on concrete formulations (with allowances for evolution of these formulations by rigorous engineering standards which they must achieve), and a permit-specified curing time etc.? At least at the minimum.
That is literally about all it would take. This would not be egregiously expensive to the O&G industry, at least not when compared to blow-outs, extensive baseline groundwater monitoring ahead of and during drilling/production, cleanup costs etc. Environmental considerations, frankly, should be everyone’s first move these days. Would better up-front due diligence have prevented Macondo, Elgin or Frade? It’s just risk management, which Macondo informs us, can be a pretty big part of exploration management, and cost.
Just as “A stern chase after a lie is a long one” so is the trip for natural oil and gas seeps, which have had tens to hundreds of millions of years to do it, and a much more robust density drive than water based, and therefore easily further dissolved/dispersed chemical fracking solutions are likely to ever have. The “hole” in this theory is the exploration/production borehole itself, a relatively trivial and inexpensive problem to solve.
William F. McClenney
Nice job.
It may have been covered but at those depths, the hydraulic fractures are vertical not horizontal as described in your report. Fracturing does not “lift” the over burden it “spilts” the rock along the weak axis.
Most of what is written here about the Macondo well is wrong. It was not a single point failure but a series of equipment, procedural and human failures that let that happen.
The use of the word “fracking” is not generally used in the industry. The correct terms are “fracturing” or “frac” as in “to frac”.
William
I am very interested in understanding more about the fracking controversy particularly from obviously knowledgeable people like you. But I have to confess I could only manage to get half-way through your piece. I don;t mean to be rude but it read as a ‘stream of consciousness’. Please, get your posts reviewed and edited prior to posting. You may have some interesting points to make. Maybe. To convince those who don’t knowyou from Adam you will certainl yneed to use proper punctuation. Leave out the slang. You sound like you might havea lot of knowledge on thi ssubject – please learn how to convey it.
These arguments are usually about power struggles.
The world is littered with examples of outraged resistance of those not in control of the wealth supply changing to advocates when they’ve had their revolution and control them now.
The communists usually turn into fascists if they can get rich.
The ones that don’t get ditched by the ones that do.
I’d focus on talking to the people right now. People are sick and tired of politicians’ lies, so they are educating themselves rather than listening to politicians. My country, the UK, needs fracking badly as we have lots of shale gas potential and a balance of payments problem. The shale gas is found in regions which are currently in need of economic stimulus, so it’s likely to get a receptive audience.
Of course the technology must be used safely. Of course, risk management and prevention of disasters must be proactively managed.
But you don’t stop most of the population copulating just because you have to bang up a few rapists, do you?
So why should fracking be banned due to a few cowboys cutting corners in a few drilling operations, eh? Set the regulations properly, realistically and come down like a ton of bricks on cowboys. Then decent companies prosper and communities get energy at an affordable price.
What’s not to like about that????
Thanks for a very informative article. However, it could be greatly improved by shortening the sentences and reducing the superfluous word count. Remember we are up against some very slick alarmist PR – which uses short punchy distortions and half-truths. Therefore we need to communicate the truth in an equally clear manner.
Take this sentence for example:
“Reservoir rocks are those rocks which have facilitated this migration through the provision of porosity and permeability necessary to allow the movement of fluids and gases derived primarily from the maturation of hydrocarbons most commonly derived from source rocks such as shales and mudstones which lie beneath them stratigraphically.”
This could be reduced to:
“Reservoir rocks allow hydrocarbon fluids and gases to rise up from source rocks such as shales and mudstones which lie below”
Fascinating article! I have read that some scientists say that oil forms spontaneously within the Earth’s crust or mantle(?). Can any of our engineers and scientists comment on this?
Thanks.
That day in early 2009 when I discovered WUWT was one of the most enlightening days of my adult life. This article and the comments is a clear example of why that is. Many times when I have been explaining why the anti energy, AGW movement is insane I have been regarded as some swivel eyed conspiracist so having access to the wide ranging knowledge, skills and logic here has made my life easier and has brought many doubters to see the light.
WUWT . . the gift that just keeps on giving.
This is a bit of a muddled writeup to be honest, and lacks clear direction. I think I’ve seen the word “egregious” enough times for one year…
Peter Miller says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:18 pm
Quite! We have the same/similar issues in the geo-environmental area. For example, we may detect Lead at higher than soil guideline values in sites in Weardale (where there used to be lots of Lead mining) – but it’s entirely natural – ditto for areas of Derbyshire too, or Radon areas in Cornwall, etc, etc. But it is very for some of these greenies/NGO’s to understand that the ground can be ‘contaminated’ naturally!
“I think that there has been much evidence over the decades that where profits are involved, anything can go.”
I think that there has been much more evidence over the centuries that where political power is involved, anything can go.
As I understand the USA takes 90% of its water from the Great Lakes.
Hard to believe, unless you’re counting aquifers which simply pass close to the Great Lakes. The Mississippi basin? Everything west of the continental divide? The south east?
cheapsmack says:
April 29, 2012 at 6:06 pm
RACookPE1978
here is one place where ground water is affected by industry not the G&O industry but never the less
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=tellevast%20fl%20groundwater%20pollution&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.healthandenvironment.org%2Farticles%2Fhomepage%2F3860&ei=COWdT8v5JJGI6AGQnJWiDw&usg=AFQjCNFjmXpZPpZsbhsgvSEg3vw1rsFkPg
———————————-
What’s this have to do with fracking?
Contamination of near surface aquifers by made water at the surface is the real issue.
I nominate Dave Worley as the next head of EPA! Brilliant solution to obvious environmental problem.
Stan Tx: “The use of the word “fracking” is not generally used in the industry. The correct terms are “fracturing” or “frac” as in “to frac”.”
And your usages above make sense. However, in English spellings follow two conventions fairly closely.
1) If the letter “c” is followed by an e, i, or y, it is pronounced with the /s/ sound; otherwise it is pronounced with the /k/ sound, and
2) If there is only one letter separating a single vowel from a suffix beginning with e, i, or y, the vowel is usually pronounced with it’s long sound: baked, baking, crazy, shined, shining, shiny, etc.
Because of the influence of these two rules, words like “picnic” and “panic” that have a suffix like “ed” or “ing” or “y” added to them are routinely converted to “picnicked” and “panicking” and “panicky.” Thus, to make sure that “fracing” does not appear to rhyme with “bracing”, or even with “braking”, the preferred spelling becomes “fracking” or “fracked”.
However, “frac” would be correct compared to “frack”, since the addition of “k” is not necessary, e.g., words like “sac” (The “c” in “sac” is not followed by an e, i, or y, and therefore is pronounced with the /k/ sound by rule) and because, as you state, the industry usage is “frac.”
Summarizing: frac, fracking and fracked could be considered the preferred spellings given that the industry uses “frac” as shorthand for “fracture,” rather than “frack,” and given that the English spelling preferences encourage the additional “k” in the last two instances.
Generally a well written and informative article on the basics of oil geology; however, as former Hallibution Field Engineer with considerable experience in oil field cementing, I would take exception to the implication that we should involve the federal government in “skillful regulation on concrete formulations” or “permit-specified curing times”.
Formations have individual characteristics that make the creation of a “formulation” for concrete rather site specific. So while it’s not at all unusual to engage in laboratory tests when designing a cementing plan (including estimating the set time); in the real world, the set time depends upon the actual conditions down hole.
Like any battle plan, the cementing “plan” is out-the-door once the battle begins. The only sure way to ensure cement has cured is to first “tag” it (if possible), pressure test it, and/or conduct a well log (if in the annulus)… and you can expect some test failures will lead to waiting on additional time for the cement to set or redoing the cement job (usually a squeeze job).
For example, I recall a gas well I helped cement in West Texas at 16,500 feet in the early 1980’s. It was an exceptionally deep plug job at the time. The core problem? The well had encountered molten sulfur in what appeared to be a naturally well- fractured formation. At the time, there was no standard cement “formulation” for this. We had to adapt.
Repeated attempts failed to plug the well. The “problem” was solved when an experienced Field Man concluded we needed plug the “fractures” long enough to allow the cement to set. His solution? We pumped several boxes of tampons ahead of the cement. This “formulation” worked. Now… well good luck getting federal approval for that formulation.
Incidentally, I also worked with the EPA plugging abandoned oil wells in eastern Kentucky while on-loan from another federal agency. I wouldn’t let those clowns anywhere near a well head. To a man they were: all about ego, evaded personal responsibility when-ever-possible, and had no common sense what-so-ever. In my view, the words “skillful” and “EPA” are mutually exclusive; so, I don’t see any possibility of getting “skillful regulation” out of them.
I’d leave it up to the States to independently determine if any new regulations are required; as State representatives generally exhibit more public accountability and generally engage in more common-sense decision making.
Regards,
Kforestcat
>>Chuck L says:
April 30, 2012 at 5:08 am
Fascinating article! I have read that some scientists say that oil forms spontaneously within the Earth’s crust or mantle(?). Can any of our engineers and scientists comment on this?<<
I'm way out of my depth here, but someone earlier in the comments also mentioned oil forming in, I believe, Permian-era deposits and stated that no organic life was present during that era?
I've also read that the Russian geologists have thought for a long time that oil deposits are generated by actions deeper in the earth's crust and are not due to previous organic deposits.
Now, what if that process is true (whatever it is…as I said I'm way out of my depth here) and what if there's a limiting factor involved, such as the existing gas/oil pressures limiting creation of additional deposits, like some sort of saturation effect? And what if, by relieving that existing pressure by the present fracking process, we enable the earth to create oil/gas deposits at a faster rate? Unlimited oil/gas, forever? Or maybe there's just be a huge methane explosion and we'd all be riding asteroids?
As a young teenager in HS, I knew one of the engineers who developed the pressure multipliers and led the effort to use them to improve recoverability. He did a lot of groundwater testing in the initial phases of the project to validate the assumptions in this article. Good piece.
Cohen’s comment about “Contamination of near surface aquifers by made water at the surface is the real issue” is more changing of the subject. Surface water contamination is already covered in existing law.
If people want to see a water problem caused by commercial activities, one good place to start is the Berkeley Pit mine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit
Imagine what this place is going to look like in 100 years. Imagine what a down economy will allow to happen here when funds dry up faster than the lake. This lake is already a source of ground water – image when it fills enough to become a source of surface water.
Abandoned mines from border to border are filling with and leeching seriously polluted water. In some cases this is seen running on the surface. Kentucky and Tennessee have major cleanup operations (public funding, don’tcha know) going on. Living with bottled water is an imposed solution for some: http://www.wallenberg.umich.edu/gunnoe.html
Negative. (I wonder, where do people get such ideas?)
Even Wiki ‘get this right’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_the_United_States#Water_sources
Please, read more at the link above and become educated about water sources in the US, and thank you in advance.
.
Does anyone here have any info about the claims that fracking causes earthquakes, or at least tremors? The article above refers to “lifting and fracturing of source rocks”, and I am wondering whether that would be enough to cause quakes or tremors capable of being felt, let alone causing stresses or even damage to structures. I’m a layman, so this is entirely a naive question on my part.
From March-
http://news.yahoo.com/epa-pulls-order-forcing-driller-water-210806355.html
Amazing that this episode of fraud wasn’t more widely reported.
From your own link, it appears Gaia is ‘remediating’ her own problem, after all, the ‘polluting’ compounds in the old Anaconda Copper mine (A.K.A. the Berkeley Pit, a former open pit copper mine) located in Butte, Montana are not man-made compounds but rather materials and metals (e.g. arsenic, cadmium, zinc) already existing in the earth’s crust:
There may even a ‘cure for cancer’ at some point resulting from this ‘tragedy’ you cite, based on the above (if I read that paragraph correctly) …
.
Anthony:
You can use Google Earth and Flight Tracker and watch your plane fly over the terrain, easily identifying where you are at any particular time.
Try this website. Instructions are given.
http://flightwise.com/flighttracking/
PS: I find looking up the JetStream maps tells me all the time where the worse “bump-ditty bump” is going to be on the flight. Fun to tell someone, “In 20 minutes we’ll have 35 minutes of BUMP, and then completely smooth..”
Max
I stopped reading after the part about ‘several feet of lift’ as the formation is fractured.
This is flat out worng, you are not lifting anything, you are splitting the rock laterally out from well bore and also in a plane along the wellbore, you aren’t lifting thousands of feet of rock vertically several feet. How ridiculous. How about someone from the industry write this sort of thing rather than an obvious neophyte….it doesn’t help matters. The real world comments from engineers, geologists & well site supervisors under this article are far more imformative.