COULD THIS HAPPEN IN PA?

Yes and no.

Yes, there are likely places where you can already light the methane release. Some natural, some from very old wells and some from mining.

Will the deep well fracking result in more of it? Likely not, but I won't say definitely not.

This is apples to oranges.

In Australia, it is coal seam fracking to release the natural gas and those coal seams are very shallow (meters below). In most cases, it is the top layer of impervious rock and screws up the ground water as well. Common sense tells you that it is definitely going to happen in that situation.

In PA and Ohio the latest boom involves horizontal drilling thousands of feet below and shale those shale seams kilometers below the surface with many layers of impervious rock between the target shale seam and the surface. Plus, there is casing that extends further down the wells here than the entire depth of the Australian wells.

If done right here, there is very little chance of additional gas migration to the surface. In Australia, it can't be avoided, but the Government is getting rich off if it, so they chose to ignore the obvious.

In Australia, it's a big cash cow for the Government. If your farm sits on a mineral deposit, they can come on your land and extract it and there is nothing that you can do about it. Apparently the landowners don't own the minerals, the Government does. Landowners are screwed and get only about $1500 bucks a well. I did have a link to video explaining that, but now I can't find it.

So much for Socialism being for the people.

I could go on and on.

 
Early well drilling here was shallow and basically drilling through an impervious cap rock to get to oil and gas trapped beneath in a permeable layer. That oil and gas migrated there over time from oil and gas bearing impermeable or semi-permeable layers further below.

Shallow well drilling has been going on for over 150 years. Drakes well was only about 70 feet deep with about 30 or 40 feet of cap rock above it. That cap rock that he drilled through was the only separation of the oil from the ground water.

Below that was sandstone where the oil had migrated to. Punch a hole through the cap rock, and you get oil and gas which was trapped underneath. Very easy to get to, but likely more hazardous to the environment.

Not long after that first well they figured out that fracturing that sandstone with explosives would increase production.

I can only imagine the damage done by this and to this day there are areas where natural gas escapes to the surface. Not to mention abandoned wells.

Hydraulic fracking has been going on for over 60 years now and more or less replaced the explosive fracturing. I'm thinking better than explosive fracturing, but still fracturing.

Since the development of horizontal drilling, the play is for the deep shale deposits that have long been known to contain massive amounts of oil and gas. If they can drill that and then bust it up, it will produce well enough to be profitable. Between those layers and the surface are many sandwiched layers of permeable and impervious rock. By fracturing that shale, 2 kilometers below the surface, quite a bit of oil and gas will likely start to migrate upwards. However, it will likely be stopped by the layers of impervious rock which separate the oil and gas from the ground water, just like the natural migration of the past. That is not the case with the coal seam gas in Australia. It's very close to the surface. But the Australian Government wants it to sell to China.

Will some of that gas and oil from the deep shale migrate to the surface in PA? It is possible, but unlikely if it is drilled correctly and there are no major faults extending through all impervious layers.

My bigger concern is the fluids used. Push it down there and it will come back up through the pipe over time and have to be disposed of. Right now they are shoving it back down into injection wells. Not a fan of injection wells. I feel that eventually it will be switched over to injecting a petroleum based product so it can be extracted and used. We already have the technology.
 
Maybe if the landowner posted his property. ;-)
 
That wouldn't help you in Australia.

Maybe that is why they took all the guns away.
 
The thing that struck me is that the stream was not on fire until they purposely lit it.
 
LOL!

I just learned that Dr. Pepper coming out my nose burns more when eating hot & spicy peanuts.
 
http://www.newsweek.com/fracking-wells-tainting-drinking-water-texas-and-pennsylvania-study-finds-270735
 
Good article Afish.

"The paper also offers new insights into how, exactly, the methane can escape.The researchers say the source of the methane in homes they surveyed in Pennsylvania and Texas was not the act of hydraulic fracturing itself, but was due rather to cracks in the steel casing or flaws in the cement of the wells that are meant to protect groundwater sources from contamination. In other words, with adequate safety measures, these contaminations could be prevented."

Like I said, if done right, shouldn't happen. Wasn't done right.

I think there were a lot of shortcuts and mistakes made early on. I'll let pcray address that because he did it well in an earlier discussion.

The industry slowdown was likely a good thing in that respect.

I'm for this country moving towards energy independence which unfortunately requires more sources of conventional fuels whether we like it or not. NOTHING is completely safe, but it should be made as safe as possible.

I'm personally keeping an eye on the permitting process. As soon as I see a new permit applied for around here, I'm having my well tested for everything before the drilling commences. That way I have a baseline.

 
Ohio beat them to it-
 
I couldn't see the article beyond the first sentence. Was it a study regarding a single well, for instance, Dimock, or broader based over a large number of wells?

Casing/cement cracks above the water table has always been the main fear, followed by surface spills and breaks. i.e. stuff that shouldn't happen. But when you drill 200,000 wells, it's gonna happen a couple of times.

Not to say that those failures are acceptable, but they are failures, and can be dealt with both in terms of punishment and engineering to prevent or minimize future failures. It should not be viewed as a systematic effect of drilling in general.

A lot of people don't get that with these studies. If you did a study on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf, sure, your gonna find how it released a bunch of oil. You can't take that and claim all deepwater drilling releases huge amounts of oil, though.

Anyway, my biggest concern was always the unmapped legacy shallow wells. Yeah, they're much shallower than the Marcellus stuff. But, they do effectively deepen the water table. Normally, a casing has to go deeper than the water table of the area. So long as the casing holds, nothing from depth is going to penetrate the water table. But, if that casing goes down below the NATURAL water table, but not deeper than the manmade water table (depth of shallow wells), then you'll pressurize layers that are vented artificially by nearby legacy boreholes, and you can get upwards migration of every nasty thing that comes up from depth. And there have been a few instances of such "geysers".

In which case, casings need to go deeper than historical shallow well drilling. Which is pretty deep.
 
The OP was asking if what is happening in Australia can happen here.
They are fracking the coal seam near the surface which is causing massive gas emissions all over the place.

It's apples to oranges.

But you brought up some excellent points about older un-mapped wells. That is a big concern for me as well, I've seen at least one of those geysers more than a mile from the nearest road. Freakin old well casing that had rotted off underground and now its an artesian well spewing nasty polluted water at 10s of gallons a minute.. at least! You can see a few gas bubbles too, but the nastiest are the other minerals like iron and sulfur being carried up from what was once below the separate from water table.

I can show you another one near that where the hunters would light it from time to time.

I'll bet there are tens of thousands of abandoned wells, many not mapped.

So lets say a drilling company comes in and drills a proper well close to something like that and their casing extends below the water table through the layer of impermeable rock as is required. All is well, right? (not pun intended) WRONG. The impermeable layer was already been breached by the nearby well. So unless that new casing and cement extends below the next layer of permeable rock, the nasties will eventually migrate through the permeable layer and up through that old abandoned well.

It's bound to happen, but can however be fixed.

Many of these old wells have been re-drilled and plugged with concrete over the past 30 years using grant money, but there is no way that have gotten all of them. I don't know if that one I mentioned above was plugged or not. I know of some near there (closer to roads) that were, but that one was way off the road and I haven't been back there in over 30 years. It was where I used to trap and hunt deer, but some private club had posted it years ago. Maybe they can make the club pay for it. :-x
 
It can happen when drilling water wells. Generally not to the degree in the video. But more common than most people are aware of.
 
I'm not an expert on fracking. The one thing that sticks in my mind from several years ago is the fact that they fought the government. They refused to disclose the ingredients of the fluid that they were pumping in the ground. (Industry SECRET)

If it looks like a duck...
 
barrybarry wrote:
I'm not an expert on fracking. The one thing that sticks in my mind from several years ago is the fact that they fought the government. They refused to disclose the ingredients of the fluid that they were pumping in the ground. (Industry SECRET)

If it looks like a duck...
Click to expand...

They have been disclosing for a number of years now. Some of that was trade secrets and some was hiding ingredients that were bad for the environment if leaked. I mentioned in posts back when that was an issue that my brother developed one of the fracking fluids for Halliburton back in the 80s. Used some of the same ingredients as toothpaste. The one he worked on was not harmful even if swallowed. There are some new gel types that are not environmentally harmful as well.
 
The one thing that sticks in my mind from several years ago is the fact that they fought the government. They refused to disclose the ingredients of the fluid that they were pumping in the ground.
Click to expand...

Not really a concern. Was waaayyyy overblown.

Trade secrets are normal in all industry.

First, you're wrong about refusing to show the ingredients. Ok, well, they did refrain from disclosing some ingredients, the ones that are not considered toxic. But they have always published the MSDS, which included all ingredients that are considered toxic by our government, the levels of toxicity and the potential effects on humans. That comes from OSHA laws, not environmental laws. And drillers were never excluded from OSHA laws.

Second, when political backlash came, they did indeed disclose all ingredients and their concentrations. And rather quickly.

So that whole hoopla was basically an effort to label drilling companies as secretive and actively evil. A smear campaign.

That's not to say there's no danger. It's just that they ain't hiding the danger. Basically, fresh frack fluid isn't very toxic. 99.9999% water and sand with a few mild chemical additives. Drinking it wouldn't really harm you (I'm sure it'd taste awful). The dangerous stuff is added by the earth, not people. Stuff down at depth that should stay at depth. And that comes up in the drill tailings during the drilling operations. And yes, after drilling, it's fracked, and some of it is dissolved in the USED frack fluid.

So you now have to get rid of a pile of toxic drill tailings as well as newly toxic used frack fluid.

As for the fluid, you can get rid of it via injection wells (putting it back at depth where it came from). That is probably safest, but is expensive, and in certain situations can cause seismic issues (see Oklahoma earthquakes).

You can get rid of it via water treatment, like sewage. The treatment wasn't designed to get rid of the nasties. But so long as the amount of fracking fluid remains small compared to the waterway it goes into, it's no so toxic that it can't be diluted. Remember, the nasty stuff is natural and already there in the rivers. You're just raising the concentration a little. And as long as you don't raise it above natural variation levels, all is well. The problem was that during the gas boom, so much fracking was going on that the volume of water being disposed of by a bunch of different companies was no longer inconsequential. Now your raising concentrations by a lot. And in downstream areas that received wastewater from a large number of sources, rivers began to exceed federal guidelines for the concentration of certain nasties.

Or, you can capture and re-use it. And this was billed as the way to go by environmentalists. Because now you don't need to take away as much water from lakes and streams to make the frack fluid, and you don't have to dispose of as much. But the drawback is that now you are indeed using toxic frack fluids, which is dangerous for workers, and in the event of a spill, more damaging environmentally. And with each fracking it gets more toxic. So even if you dispose of less volume of water, it's more concentrated with nasties.

And then the bottom dropped out of the industry. Wells that were already fracked are producing, but they haven't been drilling and fracking too many new wells cause the price of gas is down.
 
Yes. This is a release I discovered in the ANF in 2010. Reported it to DEP and about a month later received a letter confirming "via explosive gas test sampling" that it was indeed gas leaking from the ground.

 
salmonoid wrote:
Yes. This is a release I discovered in the ANF in 2010. Reported it to DEP and about a month later received a letter confirming "via explosive gas test sampling" that it was indeed gas leaking from the ground.
Click to expand...

OK, we all know this kind of thing exists. But what is the source?

Methane is odorless. If you smelled "natural gas," then it was from a ruptured pipeline. If odorless, we can probably rule that out.

So assuming no smell of "natural gas."

is it a natural vent?

From an old abandoned shallow gas well?

Any new wells in the area?

Are there even any new deep horizontal wells in the immediate area?
 
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