TCMTECH Blows It Again

No problem. BP is gathering their crack well capping team used to control the gulf oil spill. They'll be here in two weeks.

Meanwhile 8,200 barrels of crude have been spilled so far. I expect that number to skyrocket when someone other than Oasis quantifies the spill.

Well blowout spills contaminants in White Earth valley - The ...

"The incident was caused when Oasis hydraulically fractured another nearby well, apparently causing this one to blow, even though it had been shut in to safeguard against exactly that outcome, according to Oil and Gas Division spokeswoman Alison Ritter."

That is small peanuts. Check out what happened in western Pa and New York, and southeastern Ohio in the past. I have submitted pictures to this site before, showing the old wooden tanks used to catch oil and water produced and separate it by natural gravitational / density effects. The water was drained manually with a valve to a nearby unlined pit in the ground. When the operator at the control valve saw a bit too much oil in the water, the valve was shut off. Four of these pits are still in the woods immediately out behind my house,and you NEVER want to step into one. I had a dumb dog that found them appealing, but that is another story. There is a one to two foot layer of petroleum still in the bottom of those things. Equipment on the associated well sites dates to the late 1940's, so the field probably operated to the 1960's. Owners shut it down and just disappeared.

The amount of oil intentionally spilled on the ground, through the old drilling and producing methods, in the above mentioned states, would make Exxon Valdez pale in comparison. I don't know of any gross cancer rates or animal deformities in these areas. The animals running these woods know to stay out of those pits. Maybe, and that is an iffy maybe, some trees are not as healthy as could be. We have several tree diseases running through this area currently. Not saying an oil spill on the ground is not a problem, but apparently the after effects of oil on the ground is not as drastic as thought to be. Heck we used to put the oil laden brine on the dirt roads here as a dust control measure. And, yes, I drink the well water around here.

Everyone is down on modern drilling and completion methods, but compared to the near past, they are a thousand fold better. A mistake in completion practices in the past, before fracking, would have involved nitroglycerin and a very large crater.

America sadly has eroded into a collection ps special interest groups that spend half their time whining, the rest of the time suing. everyone is uptight and offended about any number of things

I get that.

But the shear number of wells being brought into service today also dwarfs the "olden days".

No it doesn't. Have you ever seen pictures of any of the fields in NW Pa before 1900? Here is one - they all were drilled this way.

Even that mid 20th century lease behind my house had wells spaced much closer than todays 1500' radius. I can stand at one and throw a rock and hit three more well sites. The sub-field it was in stretches over 10 miles length and 6 miles width.

why do I think there wasn't a geology team working this project?

The nearest geologist in those days was probably at a university in France.

Gee whiz...really? I thought we had been assured over and over again that this could not possibly happen... Oh well...it's not like it's going to ruin the river...

The best part of this is, it is not really a new thing. On a very similar note:

I worked a gas storage field in Ohio for 6 months as a well analyst. The gas company was storing high pressure gas using restored oil wells and some new boreholes. Problem was, this was a very old field, drilled way before record keeping. They found a well that was not on their records when natural gas started filling the basement of an elementary school.

Pressure in a porous formation, and a producing one has to be, will find a way out if it exists, and what better than another well in the same formation?

I've never seen anyone say a frack couldn't reach another open well in the same area. That is an obvious problem. Someone messed up their calculations of extent of horizontal frack effects.

Well hell, they have to some kinda excuse to start jacking fuel prices up again

for the record the image this isn't a pic of the blow out, just a random image I added

update:leaking more than 67,000 gallons of crude so far