Drilling.....Safer than walkin' across the street blindfolder.

My last couple of posts have been about drilling's interaction with the environment and regulations which are strictly enforced to protect it.  I will continue with that subject in this post and talk a little more about regulations.  There are basic steel pipes which are called casing and are set in the wellbore in order to provide zonal isolation as well as wellbore stability.  Surface casing is VERY important in order to isolate groundwater (drinking water) from drilling fluids and chemicals used to acid fracture or stimulate reservoirs.  Groundwater is typically around 100' deep and is often isolate by conductor casing which is the very first section of casing set when drilling.  State regulations vary, but a relatively standard regulation is that surface casing must be set minimum of 300' below the bottom of the ground water zone and cemented properly.  Cement bond logs, which are legally required, test the integrity of the cement and make sure complete zonal isolation is achieved.

Many people have accused drilling companies to have contaminated ground water, but the fact is that strict regulations and monitoring of drilling through permits has been in the industry for many years and continue to become more strict as the years progress in order to mitigate these problems.  Members of the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission presented in one of my classes this week and confirmed the increase in regulations of drilling are unavoidable.  These regulations include well spacing also, where wells being drilled have to go through a specific permit in order to ensure adequate acreage spacing between other wells.  They discussed a situation where a farmer's groundwater was suspected to have been contaminated with methane gas from a nearby well.  Immediate action was taken by conducting CBL's as well as sampling gas from the well and the farmer's water.  It was determined that a bad cement job of the casing had allowed gas to travel in between the intermediate and production casing and enter the water zone.  Cement squeeze jobs can be conducted in order to fix cement job problems such as this one, but the OGCC realized the matter was of huge concern and violation of regulations.  The operator of the well was required to plug and abandon the well and lose money from shutting down of production from the well as well as abandoning material costs.  Plugging and abandoning a well also has strict and strongly enforced regulations by states.  As Capt. Carbon Sequester mentioned on my last post, other industries have had failures as well such as the Minneapolis bridge collapsing.  Sure the bridges were subject to more strict inspections, but the civil and mechanical engineering industry did not take such huge hits as big oil companies, or small companies, have taken over many smaller incidents over the years.  Individuals need to become more informed about the regulations drilling operations are required to follow and possibly see the side that extreme caution is being take when trying to suffice the U.S.'s hunger for more oil by drilling oil and gas wells.  What do you think about that?