Posted on 05/22/2015 11:57:06 AM PDT by tcrlaf
9km (24mi) SSW of Caliente, Nevada 78km (48mi) NW of Mesquite, Nevada 101km (63mi) WNW of Saint George, Utah 107km (66mi) W of Washington, Utah 455km (283mi) SSW of Salt Lake City, Utah
5/23/2015
Rare Kansas 4.7 magnitude earthquake (4.0M revised) @ Fracking operation
May 23, 2015 Michael Janitch
A noteworthy, and rare 4.7 magnitude earthquake has struck South Central Kansas at a fracking operation.
This is one of the larger earthquakes in Kansas state history.
The picture at the link does not show a well being fracced (the absence of the characteristic water tanks, pressure monitoring equipment and frac pumpers is a clue).
It does show 4 of the pretty much industry standard 400 bbl upright tanks used to hold produced oil/water until it can be trucked away, and what appears to be a pump jack. It looks like a producing oil well.
You can see where the hoses have been pulled across the containment dike to pump fluid out of the production tanks (north side berm, by the middle tanks), and the location is too small for frac equipment.
There are no tire tracks around the site indicating anything other than agricultural activity, except for the access road and highway approach.
Considering all that, I'm not sure fraccing has anything to do with the earthquake if this is the closest well.
From the article:
“In my opinion , this was downgraded to save any problems for oil / gas companies. No real reason to downgrade an earthquake this far, other that to make it appear to be no big deal.”
This environmental communist says: IMO, followed by crap.
Well, ahem, IMO, tracking has nothing to do with earthquakes. Fracking operations are forcing oil out from pockets by pressurizing said pockets. It means oil under pressure is being displaced by fluids to replace it.
By the same talking, conventional drilling, hitting an oil pocket or reservoir or lake, drillers hit pressurized underground oil that gushes out and has to be capped until piping, valuing pump stations are put on line to send it to storage tanks then is pumped into pipelines, trucks and rail tank cars, etc. for distribution to refineries or oil tankers to the world.
Now, emptying huge oil underground reservoirs decimates the “natural” pressure and at a certain point in a well(s), pumps are used to siphon out the rest of the oil in the well(s) location.
Reducing the pressure is the same as creating vacuum, relatively speaking. It should “create” earthquakes, according to this idiot’s opinion.
NOT!
Otherwise, Saudi Arabia would have vanished under its sand after 3/4 of a century of oil production. Their eastern seaboard would have joined their empty quarter!l
Idiots like this are trying to scare people to stop us from achieving energy independence. He must have a degree in communism.
Interesting. Copy Barksdale.
To clear up a few possible misconceptions about oil reservoirs, if you think of a pan full of marbles, the marbles would be the grains in the rock, the spaces between them is porosity.
Depending on the composition and type of rock, where/how it was laid down, and the alterations which happen to it with burial and the pressure from the weight of the rock above it, that porosity will either become better developed or degrade or be filled in.
That porosity is almost always filled with fluid at depth, most commonly salt water (most of that rock was laid down in an ocean), and the water is squeezed out of other rocks as they are compacted (or was caught up in the rock to begin with).
If there was a significant amount of organic matter (plankton, really or plants--dinosaurs are only a very tiny fraction), the hydrogen and carbon are present to act as building blocks to make oil and gas.
With pressure and the increased temperature of burial, oil and gas can form, and if the pore spaces are connected, migrate to accumulate in areas which are higher (like the tops of folds in the rock), or even to the surface in areas where there is no cap rock to contain them. Oil can also go lower, into rock with pores from the source layer (like in the Three Forks from the Lower Bakken Shale), but that is less common.
A cap rock is simply rock that the oil cannot migrate through, it has no effective connections between any pores present (no permeability).
We refer to those accumulations of oil as "pools" or "pockets" but for the most part, they are still spread through the pores in the rock, like water in a sponge. Almost every oil producing rock formation has both water and oil, but the concentration of oil, the shape of the pores, and the permeability of the rock all work to make it possible to extract the oil and make money doing so.
Fraccing (hydraulic fracturing) is a production technique which allows us to enhance the natural spaces in the rock the oil moves through on its way to an already drilled hole by cracking the rock the oil is in, providing an easy way for the oil to get to the wellbore and ultimately the surface. It does increase reservoir pressure briefly, as the pressure of the fluid pumped in has to be enough to break the rock. That excess pressure diminishes quickly during the initial production phase, and ultimately, the rock supports the rock above it, as it always did, just with some new cracks propped open with sand grains pumped in to keep those cracks open.
Because the oil is disseminated in the rock, there is no cavity to collapse, so that won't cause an earthquake.
The only possible link to oil wells that may increase seismic activity comes with the injection of salt water produced with the oil back into the rocks in injection wells. If there is a fault in the area, it is possible that the increase in fluid pressure, if it occurs along the fault, can cause that fault to be lubricated and release seismic stresses in the form of minor earthquakes.
The anti-oil lobby has been trying to make this out as if it will cause huge earthquakes on the order of the Alaska Earthquake of the early '60s or 'the big one', but if the faults aren't already there, there won't be an earthquake at all.
Look at North Dakota, where saltwater injection from oil wells has been going on over 50 years.
Not on the hit parade of seismic hotspots.
So, the real problem here, is that in the rush to judgement of the oil industry, other seismic hazards may be ignored which may just be coming to light after we have been keeping records for a mere couple hundred years (a mere eyeblink in geologic time), and ignoring those hazards might prevent understanding potential seismic threats (even relatively minor ones) along previously unknown faults which have always existed but are just becoming manifest.
When relatively recent earthquakes in Southern California reveal faults which had been hidden at the surface, despite the intensity of seismic study in that area, it would come as no surprise that new faults would be revealed in areas of the continent where previously they had not been documented.
The Mineral, Virginia earthquake a few years ago was 5.8. It was near the North Anna nuclear plant which was built to withstand 6.0. Not much margin of error there. Millions have also been spent for repairs in Washington, DC on the National Cathedral and the Washington Monument. I think in DC it was at least 4. Tried to find number but did not succeed.
I was recently reading old family letters, including one from my aunt who was living in Reno when the atomic testing was taking place. She reported that after tests, for several days she and others would feel a little sick. I wonder how much radiation they were getting that the government never acknowledged or even bothered to test for?
Bump.
See my Comment #68 re 1950s testing.
From what I read the material in the Nuke does not last that long.
Thank you for taking the time to explain the geology of oil deposits.
If I may ask, what “chemicals” are injected in fracking oil and gas? Do lefties’ complaints about underground water “poisoning” and smell justified?
NY outlawed fracking without any supporting studies that shows harm to the environment. Exactly the opposite in case of the XL Pipeline where “environmental and State Department studies” CLEARED it but no, it won’t be built until the bastard leaves office.
Asto your comment:
“When relatively recent earthquakes in Southern California reveal faults which had been hidden at the surface, despite the intensity of seismic study in that area, it would come as no surprise that new faults would be revealed in areas of the continent where previously they had not been documented.”
We have undocumented faults and it doesn’t mean that when discovered, it must be our fault, no pun intended.
There is always unforeseen and unintended consequences when we fool around with Mother Nature, that includes extracting oil and gas and changing some physical balances and conditions below surface near an undiscovered fault. However, we do have to live, don’t we?
Again, thanks for taking the time.
The main chemical used in most frac jobs is water. I can't say I am completely familiar with the chemicals used. Those are proprietary, and I'm not doing production work I'm in the drilling end of things.
Halliburton has a website which allows a person to click on an area and see what is contained in their frac fluids (it varies depending on the rock formation being fracced, because the mineralogy and fluid chemistry of the formation will have subtle variations which can affect the frac).
Select an area, click on it, select a frac fluid, and it will list the constituents and what they do. Scroll down for the chemicals present, common uses, and concentrations used.
The big push has been to have environmentally friendly materials that will get the job done, just in the event there is a problem leading to a surface spill.
Because a lot of what goes down will come back up, too, no one wants to have a hazmat disposal problem on their hands.
When the water comes back, though, it is more saline than when it left, and the water usually picks up some oil scum from the formation. It isn't generally ready to re-use in a frac without processing, and it is often less expensive to take it to a disposal well, where it is put back underground along with the produced salt water from the formation.
Sometimes the frac water is held in a lined pit onsite and allowed to evaporate before being hauled to a disposal well, just to reduce volume, although the trend has been away from open pits in the area I work (primarily North Dakota).
I hope that helps.
As for underground water poisoning, keep in mind that there is a conductor pipe set to protect near surface layers (generally not well consolidated). Around here that can go 120 ft. When the Surface hole is drilled (from the base of the conductor pipe to a depth below fresh water aquifers in the area--here, 1500 to 2400 ft.), it is drilled with fresh water to keep from contaminating groundwater sources. Then surface casing is run and cemented in place. Here, that's usually 9 5/8 inch outside diameter casing (the hole is 13 1/2 inches in diameter), and devices are used to center the casing in the hole so the cement layer outside is more uniform.
When that is done, the well is drilled vertically to kick off point, the tools on the end of the drill pipe changed out, and the curve made to horizontal, landing in the target rock formation.
Then, intermediate casing is run and cemented in place, also centralized to get a uniform cement layer between the casing and the rock outside. (Here, that's 7-inch outside diameter casing in an 8 3/4 inch hole). The horizontal portion of the well is drilled (six inch diameter hole), and a production liner run with swelling packers on the outside which will define the stages of the frac job later. That part is drilled using salt water for drilling fluid, but there is a fresh water flush pumped to get the packers outside to swell up once the liner is in place. Those packers form a seal between the liner (which is a 5-inch diameter pipe) and the rock on the outside of the liner.
The liner seals in the intermediate casing as well, effectively dividing the annulus outside the casing into segments (stages), each of which will get its own frac, giving better control over where the formation is fractured.
After that, before any production work is done, a tool not unlike an ultrasound tool is run in the cased hole to verify that the cement bond is good throughout the length of the intermediate casing. This ensures that any problems with the cement can be taken care of by perforating the casing and pumping cement into any voids between the casing and the outside rock, should any voids be present.
Before drilling out of any casing after it is cemented, that casing is pressure tested, too.
So, you have two layers of steel pipe with cement between them and outside to protect groundwater aquifers which have had that cement integrity verified and which have been pressure tested.
All of that is done before the frac job takes place.
Usually, in this area, the target formation is between 6000 and 10000 feet below the surface, (six thousand in the fringes of the Williston Basin--Red River wells near Bowman, ND, and other, McGowan wells near Peerless, MT, for instance--but most in the Bakken and Three Forks formations are between 9000 and 10500 ft. down).
That is where the frac takes place, at depth.
The idea is to prevent any leaks, first, because it would render the frac ineffective (not going where you want it), and second, leaks could mean oil that didn't get produced, and a loss of revenue.
It turns out that many of the complaints (if not all) over smell and contamination may well be a scam. When I lived in Virginia, in the Shenandoah valley, a small area south of the Massanutten Mountain had rankly sulfurous smelling water (tasted funny, too). That was natural. The presence of methane, locally, in groundwater has been known for decades in the Appalachians, too. It turns out that people were lighting their tap (well) water long before any wells were drilled in the Marcellus, for instance, and I think someone was either exploited by the environmentalists or decided to try to get their hands in some deep pockets.
It is my understanding that oil companies are going in and having water tested prior to drilling in some areas now to provide baseline data, and such allegations have died down considerably.
If I had a 'free' methane gas well with my water, I would figure out how to capture the gas and run my fridge and heat off of it! (8^D)
Fascinating! Thank you.
“and I think someone was either exploited by the environmentalists or decided to try to get their hands in some deep pockets.
I always thought that the greenies are called so because of the greenbacks, NOT the green energy and the environment.r
“If I had a ‘free’ methane gas well with my water, I would figure out how to capture the gas and run my fridge and heat off of it! (8^D)”
I know what you mean. Some expensive, power-consuming, explosion-proof motors, instrumentation, piping, etc. might have been good for neighborhoods to split the cost and live happily ever after. The gubmit would have never allowed it, though.
Caveats: if you use too much gas, the water will get into the gas system. You'd have to have a dump valve to use up water to produce more gas with the incoming water or a valve to keep the water out of the gas system. That might mean intermittent service.
If you use too much water, you could have the opposite problem--gas in the water system. That might not be so good either.
I'd also put it in an expendable outbuilding to keep it from icing up in winter, and in case something went wrong. (Make the weak wall face in a 'safe' direction.)
The ban on atmospheric nuke testing was a good idea. President Eisenhower declared a unilateral US ban in 1958. The USSR announced it would follow that lead, but resumed testing in 1961; the Chinese didn’t even bombs to test before then, and did atmospheric tests. The last atmospheric test, I believe, were French, when the dolt then in charge resumed testing in the S Pacific, perhaps it was as late as the 1990s.
Of course, other makes and models of computer can just suck on this:
> In a test called “Apple II,” fired on 5 May 1955, the entire foundation shifted from the force of the 29-kiloton blast. The house has been partially restored to document the historical importance of the above-ground testing period.
http://onlinenevada.org/articles/atmospheric-nuclear-testing-nevada-test-site
BTW, according to John Dvorak, the test was called “Apple II,” because mannikins were placed in sexual positions before the test, just to see how a-bombs impacted various human activities.
“I’d also put it in an expendable outbuilding to keep it from icing up in winter, and in case something went wrong. (Make the weak wall face in a ‘safe’ direction.)”
Explosion panels and all!
Remember, you gotta dry the methane before you use it in the process or your gonna have to have exotic MOC!
Later...
Any link to the precipitous drop in Lake Meade water level?
http://lakemead.water-data.com/
ZeroHedge thinks so.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3292606/posts?page=79#79
Thanks, rockitz!
Smokin’ joe, Any connection?
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