a revolution underground - a sneak peek

7/29/2019 A Revolution Underground - A Sneak Peek

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A Revolution Underground: A Sneak Peek

by CAEPLA

2012 Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowner Associations


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Unconventional natural gas has been called a geopolitical game changer, a low-emission bridge fuel so

abundant that it could meet energy needs for the next 100 years, enabling a smooth transition from

higher-carbon fossil fuels to clean alternatives such as wind and solar. In the words of Aubrey

McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy( one of the largest producers of natural gas in the U.S.),

unconventional gasspecifically shale gasd

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Copenhagen.

Just four or five years ago, the industry was having to look at importing gas simply to satisfy the

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Today the situation is very

differenta quiet revolution has occurred in the gas fields of North America. New techniques such as

hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling are accessing deposits of unconventional tight and shale gas,

and coal bed methane.

But those new techniques reveal a more troubling side to this quiet revolution. Unconventional gas is

accessible only because of technological advances in hydraulic fracturing, or fracing (pronounced

fracking, the word is now commonly spelled with a k, though the industry has long spelled it without a

k), a process which involves pumping millions of gallons of water, sand, and a proprietary mix of

chemicals deep underground at a pressure level high enough to fracture rock. This enables trapped gas

to flow into the long wells that have been drilled down vertically and then turned horizontally through

the shale at lengths of up to three kilometers or more.

Throughout the United States and Canada, a growing number of farmers, ranchers, landowners, and

others are claiming that hydraulic fracturing and related processes are the cause of health and

environmental impacts ranging in severity from headaches and skin rashes to contaminated water and

dead cattle to neurological disorders, tumours, radioactive wastes, and earthquakes. The oil and gas

ty that hydraulic fracturing is to blame, and to

dismiss as ignorant those who would stand in the way of unconventional gas development.

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Chesapeake CEO AD:/

CAEPLA (Canadian Association of Energy and Pipeline Landowner Associations), an organization that

believes in the importance of environmental stewardship and private property rights while at the same

time being pro-development, decided in 2010 that it was uniquely positioned to investigate the issue of

hydraulic fracturing. With the anecdotes of frustrated landowners on one hand and the inblanket denials on the other, an open and honest debate on the issue has been lacking. Such a debate is

sorely needed. In well-developed areas such as the Barnett Shale of Texas, drilling and fracing are

happening in proximity to airports, community colleges, and elementary schools. With tens of

thousands of unconventional gas wells projected to be drilled and fraced in areas such as the Horn River

Basin of British Columbia and the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania, New York, and other states, the


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potential consequences are too great for landowners and government regulators to accept such

development without a thorough investigation of hydraulic fracturing.

W> ts on

hydraulic fracturing and related processes, and determine whether fracing could in fact be responsible

for groundwater contamination and other health and environmental impacts. dW>investigation is a book,A Revolution Underground: The History, Economics & Environmental Impacts of

Hydraulic Fracturing, which offers an in-

safety of hydraulic fracturing, the volumes of water that fracing requires, the chemicals used in the

fracing process, and the methods used to dispose of fracing wastes (including injection wells, which have

been an alleged cause of groundwater contamination and elevated seismic activity).

Though CAEPLA is a Canadian organization, fracing originated in the U.S., and unconventional gas

development in the U.S. is several years ahead of Canadian development.A Revolution Undergroundis

thus focused primarily, though not exclusively, on the development of fracing in the United States. The

book also covers the rapid and massive expansion of unconventional gas exploration and development

worldwide, an issue that has generally received insufficient attention outside of the oil and gas

media publications.

Much of the information contained inA Revolution Undergroundcomes from original sources, and has

not appeared elsewhere. The following are just some of the questions and industry claims that were

investigated by CAEPLA, and that are covered more extensively inA Revolution Underground.

CLAIM: Hydraulic fracturing is 60 years old, and has been performed on more than one million wells.

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There have been hundreds of thousands of hydraulic fracturing procedures performed on wells in theUnited States and globally, and there have been essentially no instances of groundwater contamination

--ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson in May 2010

FromA Revolution Underground:

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jobs with current fra

comparison. According to Hydraulic Fracturing by George Howard and C. Robert Fast, which was

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first decade in which fracing was primarily used to increase recoverable reserves in tight formations.

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were performed every month; by 1966, the rate had declined to about 2,000 fracs a month.

, Surface Operations in Petroleum Production, Volume II

by George Chilingarian, John Robertson, and Sanjay Kumar, reveal that a typical frac job in 1955 used


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about 600 hydraulic horsepower [hhp] and 10,000 gallons of fluid. By 1972, it was roughly 1,250 hhp and

40,000 gallons of fluid. In other words, the half a million hydraulic fracturing jobs performed before

1970 used pumps with about as much horsepower as a Suzuki Bandit street motorcycle, and just enough

fluid to fill the swimming pool at a bed and breakfast. In contrast, in March 2005, Oil & Gas Journal

lage of

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258,888,611 gallons of fluid. Finally, only over the past decade has hydraulic fracturing technology been

combined with horizontal drilling, multi-well pads, and slickwater fracturing. Multi-well pads and cluster

drilling were introduced in 2007, and the multi-stage slickwater fracturing of horizontal wells was

introduced in 2002.

CLAIM: Hydraulic fracturing has never been the cause of groundwater contamination.

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high as 2 percent, resulting in thousands upon thousands of environmental disasters. To reiterate the

facts, there has not been 2 percent, .2 percent or.0000002 percent failure rate. The correct failure

percentage resulting in USDW contamination is 0 percent.

--Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission Associate Executive Director Gerry Baker in June 2009


Buried in a three-volume report to Congress by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from

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be produced, allowing migration of native brine, fracturing fluid, and hydrocarbons from

the oil or gas well to a nearby water well. When this happens, the water well can be permanently

damaged and a new well must be drilled or an alternative source of dr

The water well contamination occurred when Kaiser Gas Company drilled and fraced a gas well on the

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depth of 416 feet), according to an analysis by the West Virginia Environmental Health Services Lab of

well water samples taken from the property. Dark and light gelatinous material (fracturing fluid) was

found, along with white fibers. (The gas well is located less than 1,000 feet from the water well.) The

chief of the laboratory advised that the water well was contaminated and unfit for domestic use, and

that an alternative source of domestic water had to be found. Analysis showed the water to contain high

levels of fluoride, sodium, iron, and manganese. The water, according to DNR officials, had a

hydrocarbon odor, indicating the presence of gas. To date Mr. Parsons has not resumed use of the well


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The EPA account concluded with a now-startling admission from the American Petroleum Institute (API),

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water well] resulted from a malfunction of the fracturing process. If the fractures are not limited to the

QUESTION: Does the oil and gas industry have scientifically credible evidence that hydraulic fracturinghas never caused groundwater contamination?


, -repeated industry

^, ed the first commercial fracturing treatment in 1949, over 1 million

wells have been successfully fractured by the industry in the United States. Operators now fracture

about 35,000 wells each year in the U.S. with no record of consequent harm to groundwat

The asterisk is an informal citation of an article published in Oil & Gas Journalon November 17, 2008.

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seeking to further regulate hydraulic fractur& -

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Compact Commission [IOGCC] completed a survey of the subject, nearly 1 million wells had been

hydraulically fraced. US producers now apply the technique to about 35,000 wells/year, regulated by

states. There is no record of consequent harm to groundw

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and seven associate states that produce virtually all the domestic oil and natural gas in the United^

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The single-page survey results listed each state, the year in which the state began regulating, whether

fracturing was done in state and for how long, the types of wells in the state (gas, oil, natural gas from

coal seams), approximate number of wells fractured annually, total number of wells fraced in state, the

percentage of wells fractured, and whether any impacts had been reported. The last column simply

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The level of scientific rigou/K'

states surveyed, only four were able to provide a specific year in which fracing was first performed in

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In essence, Halliburton, the company which pioneered hydraulic fracturing, cited as its best source for

the safety of hydraulic fracturing a single-page, non-scientific survey of state governors and regulators in

when hydraulic fracturing was first conducted in their

state. The survey also pre-dates the explosion in shale gas development and the use of high-volume


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contemporary fracing techniques and frac fluids: the results were released in 2002, the year in which

horizontal wells and multi-stage slickwater fracs were first widely introduced.

The integrity of some state regulators had also been questioned prior to the survey. In 2000, Sheila

McClanahan of Buchanan Citizens Action Group of Buchanan County, Virginia, submitted a statement to

the U.S. EPA in which she alleged that over 100 documented complaints of adverse effects of hydraulicfracturing of coalbed methane wells had been received by the state, but were intentionally misclassified

and filed as impacts of long-wall coal mining.

QUESTION: Is there scientifically credible evidence that unconventional gas development has caused

groundwater contamination?


Cases of groundwater contamination related to hydraulically fractured natural gas wells have been

documented in academic journals as far back as 1983, when Groundwater Journalpublished the article

^' -Water Contamination Hazards Due to Gas-Well Drilling on the GlaciatedW

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Harrison, then a professor of geology at Allegheny College in

Pennsylvania.

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permits developers to market Medina gas at approximately double the normal price for new gas, making

Medina wells profitable despite high drilling and development costs. Because of the significant increase

in drilling activity, there has been limited but increasing ground-

QUESTION: Is hydraulic fracturing a precise science and can fracture behaviour be controlled?


The following slide was featured during a presentation at a Society of Petroleum Engineers luncheon in

Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2008:


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CLAIM: Hydraulically fractured gas wells use about as much water as a golf course.

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to fracturing. Any new water use in an area would create similar impacts a new golf course, shifts in

--Energy in Depth Executive Director Lee Fuller


Using the low-end estimate of three gas wells per spacing unit rather than eight, and conservatively

assuming that ,Z

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River play have together leased about 1.7 million acres, and are not the only operators in the region),

the estimated water usage totals are still difficult to comprehend. With 8,125 gas wells using 90,900

cubic meters of water per well (90,900 m3/well is the num^

hydrogeologist), the total water use for shale gas development in the Horn River Basin would be

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11in U.S. gallons or 738,562,500,000 liters.


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Continuing with the golf course analogy suggests a province taken over by a monomaniacal combination

of Tiger Woods and Kim Jong-il: 738,562,500 cubic meters is enough water to meet the daily needs of

1.4 million golf courses or the annual water needs of 3,835 golf courses. A search '

provides 3,269 private golf courses in all of the United States, a country which has more than ten times

the total land area of British Columbia and about 68 times its population.

Using the same land usage figure (50% of the Horn River Basin), but switching to the high-end estimate

of eight gas wells per spacing unit, the estimated shale gas development water usage in the Horn River

Basin would be 1,969,500,000 cubic meters of water, which is 3.7 million daily golf courses or 10,200

year-round golf courses in British Columbia. There are about 17,000 public and private golf courses in all

of the United States.

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and water use estimates, refer only to water use in the Horn River Basin. They do not include potential

water usage in the Montney formation. Even if unconventional gas development in the Montneya

land area seven times larger than the Horn River Basin with the same amount (700 TCF) of estimated

unconventional gas reservesuses 30% less water than is needed in the Horn River Basin, shale gas

development in British Columbia would still require more water than is used in a single year by all of the

public and private golf courses in the United States combined.

For more information on A Revolution Underground, please contact CAEPLA staff by phone at 306-522-

5000 or by e-mail at [email protected].

a revolution underground - a sneak peek

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