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Thousands of Spills at US Oil and Gas Fracking Sites

posted by on Thursday February 23 2017, @07:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-just-sugar-water dept.

"exec" writes:

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39032748

Up to 16% of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells spill liquids every year, according to new research from US scientists. They found that there had been 6,600 releases from these fracked wells over a ten-year period in four states. The biggest problems were reported in oil-rich North Dakota where 67% of the spills were recorded. The largest spill recorded involved 100,000 litres of fluid with most related to storing and moving liquids.

[...] A [previous] study carried out by the US Environment Protection Agency on fracking in eight states between 2006 and 2012 concluded that 457 spills had occurred. But this new study, while limited to just four states with adequate data, suggests the level of spills is much higher. The researchers found 6,648 spills between 2005 and 2014.

"The EPA just looked at spills from the hydraulic fracturing process itself which is just a few days to a few weeks," lead author Dr Lauren Patterson from Duke University told BBC News. "We're looking at spills at unconventional wells from the time of the drilling through production which could be decades."

Patterson, et.al. Unconventional Oil and Gas Spills: Risks, Mitigation Priorities, and State Reporting Requirements Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.6b05749

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Thursday February 23 2017, @09:26AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 23 2017, @09:26AM (#470652) Journal

    TFA's claim of "up to 16%" is nonsense.

    Hmmm... numbers you say. Non-sense you claim.
    See that DOI link in TFS? It leads to an abstract, from where I'll be quoting:

    Rapid growth in unconventional oil and gas (UOG) has produced jobs, revenue, and energy, but also concerns over spills and environmental risks. We assessed spill data from 2005 to 2014 at 31 481 UOG wells in Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania. We found 2–16% of wells reported a spill each year. Median spill volumes ranged from 0.5 m^3 in Pennsylvania to 4.9 m^3 in New Mexico; the largest spills exceeded 100 m^3. Seventy-five to 94% of spills occurred within the first three years of well life when wells were drilled, completed, and had their largest production volumes. Across all four states, 50% of spills were related to storage and moving fluids via flowlines.

    Let me translate/contrast the above with your numbers

    1. the study did not surveyed the spills in the well dug by conventional means, only the spills at UOG.
      As such, your 1.6M active wells across al US is irrelevant, there's nothing to say the conventional well experienced or did not experience spills
    2. the study did not surveyed the spills at all the UOG wells in US, but only across 4 states.
        As such, your 100K total number of fracked wells is irrelevant, nothing says the ones on other states had or had not experienced spills

    Care to try again?

    Liquids: That could be fracking fluid, that could be oil, that could be wastewater, that could be any of a number of other things.

    Perhaps you'd be pleased to learn that the data is available online under the form of a interactive spills data visualization tool (map and graphs), the link being present in the quoted abstract - for the lazy, here it is http://snappartnership.net/groups/hydraulic-fracturing/webapp/spills.html [snappartnership.net]

    Using this tool, one can learn the number of crude-oil spills (counted for the surveyed wells) represent approx 34% of the total number of spill.
    And the largest uncontained crude oil spill (106K gallon) is bigger than the largest contained crude oil spill (20K gallon); fortunately, the uncontained one did not impact the water.

    Somehow, I find those maps more interesting than your numbers, I hope you won't blame me for this.

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  • (Score: 2) by arulatas on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:58PM

    by arulatas (3600) on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:58PM (#470717)

    Don't worry folks. Under the Trump EPA no reporting will happen so nothing to worry about.

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    ----- 10 turns around

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:36PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:36PM (#470760)

      Who told you Trump will keep the EPA?

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:10PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:10PM (#470799)

        He needs the shiny eco-labels to put on the buildings he^Whis children sell to millionaires.

      • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:57PM

        by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:57PM (#470824) Journal

        Good thing we have the public option for the clean water act. If the EPA stops enforcing it we can sue them ourselves.