A western Oklahoma hydraulic fracturing well caught fire in its early stages of drilling amid increasing public scrutiny of the controversial extraction process.
Oklahoma City-based energy giant Chesapeake Energy Corp. is investigating exactly how a well in Sweetwater, Okla. exploded last Thursday. The well is being dug by company subsidiary Nomac Drilling, LLC.
The well in question, Nomac Rig 17, located about four miles northwest of Sweetwater near the Texas-Oklahoma border, hit a pocket of pressurized natural gas and caught fire at approximately 6:00 p.m. last Thursday evening.
“Cleanup has already started, as has a very thorough investigation,” Chesapeake media relations director Jim Gipson said in an email conversation on Tuesday.
Gipson told The Vista that 810 feet of the initial well had been protected by steel-reinforced concrete casing. He said there had been no environmental impact from the blowout.
However, oil-and-gas industry publication Upstream published an article last week which quoted Gipson as saying that safety equipment which would have avoided the blowout had not been installed because surface casing hadn’t been set down yet. The story was cited on an environmental blog known as Earthworks Action.
The misunderstanding was a result of recent procedure changes in Chesapeake’s well construction.
Chesapeake developed a new casing system following an incident at a well site along the Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania in April 2011. They now start wells by laying what is called a “conductor casing”—approximately 800 feet of steel-reinforced concrete—and then drill down to 1,500 feet before adding the surface casing and additional safety equipment.
This well blowout is the latest in a series of PR shakeups surrounding the process.
In early December 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency published a draft report that linked fracking to groundwater pollution in Pavillion, Wyo. The report concluded that wastewater disposal pits near frack sites are a source of shallow groundwater contamination, but it was harder to determine if fracking caused any pollution.
Critics of the report, such as the Independent Petroleum Association of America-affiliated blog “Energy In Depth,” the governor of Wyoming, and the Casper Star-Tribune editorial board, call its findings “sloppy science” and “poor policy.”
The EPA is also working on a separate study on fracking, due to be released later this year.
Hydraulic fracturing Is a process that involves boring down into shale deposits thousands of feet below ground. The deposits are then horizontally drilled into, explosive charges perforate the formation, and a high-pressure mix of water and “proppant”—a substance Chesapeake says is mostly sand but which has been found to contain the carcinogen benzene—is forced into the perforations, expanding them and letting the gas out.
Fracking entered the public spotlight following the release of the 2010 documentary “Gasland,” though it has been a common extraction process since the late 1940s.
Last week, seismologists from Columbia University linked the creation and use of wastewater disposal wells near fracking sites to a series of earthquakes near Youngstown, Ohio, resulting in a statewide ban on the operation. Fracking itself was not seen as being responsible for the earthquakes.
Yesterday, doctors convening at the Mid-Atlantic Center for Children’s Health and the Environment annual conference in Arlington, Va., called for a nationwide moratorium on the extraction process so that researchers could examine if it had any adverse health effects.