Abandoned Gas Wells a Problem for Current Drillers

Koabel well: not producing, not plugged, just forgotten and rusting.

In June, Shell was drilling a well down in Tioga county (PA) when a 30-foot geyser of methane and water shot up out of the ground. It was still shooting out a week later.

That gas didn't come from any of the wells that Shell was drilling. What most likely happened, say state regulators, is that the hydro-fracking activity at Shell's wells displaced shallow pockets of gas that moved underground until it found a route to the surface.

Those routes can be water wells and old or abandoned gas or water wells. The problem, according to Fred Baldassare, is that old abandoned gas wells can have leaky, rotten or even nonexistent casings. He should know, because he studied well problems for PA's Department of Environmental Protection for 25 years. Methane can eas­ily move into nat­ural faults and cracks, fol­low­ing a path toward the sur­face that can travel through aquifers - and that, he thinks, is most likely how gas ended up geysering 30 feet into the sky.

There are tens of thousands of abandoned, unplugged and forgotten gas wells in the Appalachian gas fields. The NY Department of Environmental Conservation's Division of Mineral Resources sees those wells as a major problem. Their annual reports list 4800 known abandoned wells, but state regulators believe there are at least that many (possibly more) yet to be discovered. They could be in forests, playgrounds, beneath backyards and even under buildings.

Living in the Drill Zone

Victoria Switzer speaking in Binghamton

Two years ago faulty cement casings of gas wells in Dimock, PA led to the contamination of water wells in one part of town. But the impact of drilling goes far beyond that, Victoria Switzer told a small crowd in Binghamton NY on Monday night, March 14.

Residents often don’t even know about spills nearby. Switzer related one incident when drilling mud spilled into a small stream that crosses her seven-acre wooded plot. “We found out about it months later,” she said. “My children could have been playing by the water and we would never have known about the danger.”

Switzer is one of the residents living in Dimock’s “affected area” – it’s an official designation by the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) she said. After her neighbor’s well exploded, Switzer and others noticed methane in their water. She showed a graph plotting the peak methane levels in the groundwater that she and her neighbors depended on for drinking, cooking and washing.

Cabot Oil and Gas, the company responsible for the gas wells, supplied affected homes with drinking water, filling large plastic containers called “buffaloes” and providing bottled water for drinking. But the families continued using their well water for other things. Then, 15 months later in April 2010 Switzer noticed that her groundwater looked “soapy”. She asked an independent lab to run tests and the results showed ethylene glycol, propylene glycol and toluene present in her well.

“I was lucky that I tested my water before they began drilling,” Switzer said, so she had data to back up her assertions that prior to the explosion her water was methane-free. Water tests don’t stop contamination, but they provide evidence that, in the case of Dimock residents, was needed to compel the gas company to provide drinking water.

The problem, Switzer says, is that we can’t live on bottled water for the rest of our lives, and the PA DEP isn’t forcing the gas company to provide a permanent solution to the neighborhood’s water woes. 

“Cabot boasts that they created 400 jobs in Susquehanna County,” Switzer said. “Twelve of those are people who deliver our water.”

This post is taken from a longer article about the importance of water monitoring published in the March 17 issue of Broader View Weekly. You can read BVW online at www.broaderviewweekly.com; gas articles also archived at www.tiogagaslease.org/broaderviewweekly.html

Cement Casings will Protect our Water ..... Just Ask Halliburton

Saturday I was at a meeting where a speaker, talking about hydro-fracking, emphasized the importance of casings in gas wells. A good cement casing will protect your groundwater from potential contamination, he said. The problem with Dimock was the casing, not the fracking, he insisted.

OK. So now in both PA and NY the regs call for cement casings in the gas wells. Layers and layers of protective casings. But, according to John Broder's article in today's New York Times, both Halliburton and BP knew weeks before the fatal explosion of the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico that the cement mixture they planned to use to seal the bottom of the well was unstable. And they still went ahead with the job.

It won't matter how many layers of cement casing they put in if the cement is no good.