Category Archives: fossil fuels

fossil fuels, ocean pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution

Houston Business Journal: Black Elk plans to resume drilling at Gulf of Mexico explosion site soon

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http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/blog/drilling-down/2013/08/black-elk-plans-to-resume-gulf-of.html

Aug 28, 2013, 11:46am CDT

Deon Daugherty, Reporter-

Black Elk Energy Offshore Operations LLC hopes to bring its West Delta 32 oil platform back into production as early as next week, company executives said Wednesday during a conference call with investors.

The platform was the site of an explosion in November that resulted in the death of three contract workers in the Gulf of Mexico, 17 miles off the coast of Louisiana.

Art Garza, chief technical officer at Houston-based Black Elk, said he expects a final walk-through with federal regulators this week and that the Bureau of Safety Environmental Enforcement officials will permit the platform to return to service. Garza said that by next week, production could be up to 300 barrels of oil per day. In the following weeks, the company anticipates getting production closer to the 650 barrel per day mark.

Last week, a report commissioned by Black Elk said it was actions taken by poorly trained subcontract workers hired by a contractor, in violation of a construction contract, that led to the deadly explosion.

The platform’s return to work comes at a crucial time for the company. Black Elk reported first quarter revenue was down $22 million compared to the first quarter of 2012, and revenue for the first six months of 2013 was down $55 million compared to the same period a year earlier.

Bruce Koch, Black Elk’s CFO, said production was down from last year’s 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day to about 10,000 barrels in the second quarter 2013. The company is moving toward producing closer to 13,000 per day or more by the end of the third quarter.

Garza said bringing West Delta back online will help to mitigate the declines. The company also expects to benefit from a $50 million capital program signed in March with Platinum Partners Value Arbitrage Fund LP, as well as its $50 million sale of four noncore Gulf of Mexico properties to Renaissance Offshore LLC in Houston.

What’s more, the company is reducing its general and administrative staff by 25 jobs in August – a savings of about $4.5 million, Koch said. That leaves about 120 people left at the company.

Deon Daugherty covers energy and law for the Houston Business Journal..

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, fracking, natural resource management, oil pollution, tar sands

West Virginia Public Broadcasting: WV, ND face similar environmental concerns with drilling industries

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http://www.wvpubcast.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=31440

Drilling
Ashton Marra
An advertisement advocating for flaring in the Bismarck, ND, Airport. State officials say they’re beginning to look at regulations to curb the practice in the Bakken shale region.

By Ashton Marra

August 28, 2013 · West Virginia and North Dakota have one thing in common – an economy that relies on extractive industry that each state taxes. Last week legislators from West Virginia met in North Dakota learn more about that state’s Legacy Fun, but as the meeting progressed, the focus changed from talk about the savings account to the industry.

The environmental concerns of the two states with very different topographies are similar when it comes to the oil and natural gas industries.

Shale is one common element when it comes to oil and gas extraction in the two states. West Virginia’s natural gas production is based on the hydraulic fracturing of Marcellus shale. In North Dakota, oil comes from the Bakken shale formation, and the portion of the Bakken situated in the state is about the same size as West Virginia.

As with any extraction industry, environmental concerns are always a high priority for the governments regulating them. North Dakota’s industry is regulated by the state Department of Mineral Resources.

“Right now, the environmental concern is flaring,” said Lynn Helms, the director of the department.

Flaring is the process through which natural gas and other byproducts are burned as waste at the well site before the crude oil reaches the surface.

David Manthos is with the Shepherdstown-based group SkyTruth which studies the effects of activities like mining, drilling and logging using satellite digital mapping technology. Manthos said Skytruth has seen the impact oil drilling has had in the Bakken region.

“Thirty percent of the natural gas produced in the Bakken is being flared and the annual emissions are equivalent to the annual emissions of one million automobiles,” he said Tuesday. “So, even if it’s working optimally, it’s producing enough carbon dioxide to offset some of the benefits we would hope to obtain by extracting natural gas.”

Manthos said the practice does not happen as often at wells in the Marcellus region because natural gas is the sought after resource, but one industry representative said it still occurs.

“We do some flaring, but we do it to burn off impurities,” said Corky DeMarco, Executive Director of the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association. “They’re doing it because natural gas is a nuisance to them.”

DeMarco said those impurities are methane, butane, or associated gases that flow up from the ground with the frack water before the natural gas starts to surface, and if they’re not disposed of properly they can pose an explosive safety risk for works at well sites.

North Dakota’s Helms said DeMarco is right, natural gas can be seen as a nuisance for drillers who are after oil. Some forms of natural gas produced in the Bakken are more expensive to capture than they’re worth on the market so they burn them off, but the state is now starting to reassess the regulations surrounding the practice.

“I met with my Commissioners (of oil and gas) and told them that we’re at a stage in the Bakken and Three Forks where they need to reevaluate flaring policy and make some changes to reduce the amount of natural gas that’s being flared,” Helms said.

Both states deal with water issues as well. In fracking, chemical laced water is injected into the shale to release the gas or oil.

“The water issue is the most universal one across the board with hydraulic fracturing whether it’s here or at other locations,” Manthos said. “It’s the surface and groundwater contamination that could occur.”

In West Virginia, drilling companies run into the topographical challenge of finding flat land. They either have to build well sites in valleys close to streams or high on ridge tops. In both cases, the possibility of run off contamination has to be considered.

Run off is less of a concern on the flat plains of North Dakota, but both states share the issue of transportation, getting the water to and from the well sites.

Bakken shale is 20 percent salt, so tap water is used to dissolve it to get to the oil, but, much like West Virginia, the water is brought back up to the surface and trucked from the site.

Helms said it takes 2,000 truckloads of water to get just one well site on production in western North Dakota, prompting the state to look at other options.

“We’re trying to work with industry and get pipeline systems in place for moving the water to and from the wells. If we can do that number of truckloads goes from 2,000 down to 850,” he said. “So, we eliminate way over half of the truck trips and that will have an enormously positive impact on, not the truck industry, but obviously on dust, traffic and road infrastructure. Environmentally, it’s just absolutely the right thing to do.”

North Dakota plans to use public private partnerships to build many of the pipelines, but Manthos isn’t sure that is the solution for West Virginia.

“They’re at least a bigger engineering challenge to build pipelines. I do know there are locations where pipelines are being used and if that does reduce the amount of truck traffic than that by itself is progress,” he said, “but the fragmentation of constructing well pads, especially up and down some steep hillsides. So, there’s just as much of a concern that a hillside could slip in the process of building a pipeline.”

Still, Helms said all of the issues, environmental, economic and social, have to be balanced in order for the industry to be a success in any state.

“If you overemphasize environmental or social you can make it uneconomic. If you overemphasize the economics, you can make it something that is environmentally bad or socially bad for the people and all three of those have to be looked after.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, oil pollution, tar sands

Scientific American: Groundwater Contamination May End the Gas-Fracking Boom

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=groundwater-contamination-may-end-the-gas-fracking-boom

Well water in Pennsylvania homes within a mile of fracking sites is found to be high in methane
By Mark Fischetti

September 12, 2013 issue

In Pennsylvania, the closer you live to a well used to hydraulically fracture underground shale for natural gas, the more likely it is that your drinking water is contaminated with methane. This conclusion, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in July, is a first step in determining whether fracking in the Marcellus Shale underlying much of Pennsylvania is responsible for tainted drinking water in that region.

Robert Jackson, a chemical engineer at Duke University, found methane in 115 of 141 shallow, residential drinking-water wells. The methane concentration in homes less than one mile from a fracking well was six times higher than the concentration in homes farther away. Isotopes and traces of ethane in the methane indicated that the gas was not created by microorganisms living in groundwater but by heat and pressure thousands of feet down in the Marcellus Shale, which is where companies fracture rock to release gas that rises up a well shaft.

Most groundwater supplies are only a few hundred feet deep, but if the protective metal casing and concrete around a fracking well are leaky, methane can escape into them. The study does not prove that fracking has contaminated specific drinking-water wells, however. “I have no agenda to stop fracking,” Jackson says. He notes that drilling companies often construct wells properly. But by denying even the possibility that some wells may leak, the drilling companies have undermined their own credibility.

The next step in proving whether or not fracking has contaminated specific drinking-water wells would be to figure out whether methane in those wells came from the Marcellus Shale or other deposits. Energy companies claim that the gas can rise naturally from deep formations through rock fissures and that determining a source is therefore problematic. Yet some scientists maintain that chemical analysis of the gas can reveal whether it slowly bubbled up through thousands of feet of rock or zipped up a leaky well. Jackson is now analyzing methane samples in that way.

Another way to link a leaky fracking well to a tainted water well is to show that the earth between them provides pathways for the gas to flow. Leaky wells have to be identified first, however. Anthony Ingraffea, a fracking expert at Cornell University, is combing through the inspection reports for most of the 41,311 gas wells drilled in Pennsylvania since January 2000. Thus far, he says, it appears that “a higher percentage” of Marcellus Shale fracking wells are leaking than conventional oil and gas wells drilled into other formations. Stay tuned.

This article was originally published with the title Fracking and Tainted Drinking Water.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, marine pollution, natural resource management, oil pollution

Motherboard.vice.com: ACID FRACKING–Oil Companies Want to Drop Acid in California

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http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/california-wants-to-drop-acid-for-oil
August 26, 2013

By Brian Merchant

Image: Flickr
Nobody seems to like fracking these days, so maybe they’ll like dropping acid better. That’s actually the strategy a crop of oil companies are planning to use to get at the vast store of oil underneath California’s Monterey Shale rock formation. There’s some 15.4 billion barrels of oil locked away down there, and oil companies are keen on fracking for it. Not only is fracking unpopular in the resolutely liberal state, but it’s simply not working well, either.

See, hydraulic fracturing-the practice of blasting a volatile chemical cocktail thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface-has been thoroughly demonized by rural landowners, environmentalists, and a persuasive documentarian or two. But practically nobody outside of the oil industry has even heard of its ascednent alternative, called “matrix acidization.”

Oil companies are fixing to drop huge amounts of hydrochloric or hydroflouric acid on subterranean rock formations, in order to dissolve the rock and clear the way for extraction.
“There’s a lot of discussion around the Monterey Shale that it doesn’t require fracking, that acidizing will be enough to open up the rock. I think it could be a way to unlock the Monterey,” Chris Faulkner, chief executive officer of Breitling Oil and Gas, recently told the San Francisco Chronicle.

But acidizing isn’t new. The practice has long been used to make old wells more efficient; oil companies flush acid through the pipes to clear out the gunk that gets stuck in the pipes; it’s like Drano for Big Oil; a big acid bath colon cleanse. As an official Haliburton document on acidization notes, “If a well is plugged with an acid soluble scale such as carbonate scale, then acid can be very effective at removing the scale and restoring production.”
Haliburton also explains that acidization can be used to amp up production. Matrix acidization can yield “a significant improvement in production over ‘non-damaged’ conditions,” according to the dcoument. “As such, carbonate acidizing can be truly thought of as stimulation.” In other words, using hydroflouric acid even when a well’s not jammed up can increase its productivity.

Of course, there are great dangers that come with acidization, too. A recent Next Generation report by Robert Collier points out that hydroflouric acid “is also one of the most dangerous of all fluids used in oil production-and indeed in any industrial process. It is used in many oil refineries nationwide to help turn oil into gasoline and other products; while accidents are rare, they can be fatal.”

Collier notes that righ now, “large amounts of HF (precise volumes are an industry secret) are routinely trucked around California and mixed at oilfields. Critics call it a disaster waiting to happen.” He also notes that there have been a handful of accidents already, but no major disasters. Nothing like the tragedy last year in South Korea, where a leak in a hydroflouric acid container claimed the lives of five oil workers and sent two thousand people to the hospital. It also dessicated crops and left a path of destruction in the area; the government was forced to declared the region a disaster zone.

A single Google search for ‘hydroflouric acid’ brings up dozens of images of gruesome acid burns, and will ensure you never forget how dangerous the stuff is-it will also remind you that it’s the stuff that Walter White is after in Breaking Bad, because it’s used to make meth, too.

And yet, as of now, acidization is almost entirely unregulated. As with fracking, oil and gas companies currently aren’t required to disclose exactly how and where they’re engaging in acidization. The industry has been hoping to keep a lid on the practice, keenly aware of the vitriol fracking has attracted from environmentalists, activists, and appreciaters of non-flammable water everywhere. As a result, no one is really sure which acids oil companies are using where, or how each company is actually engaging in acidization.

California state legislators hope to put an end to the secrecy, however. A group of lawmakers working on a bill to make fracking more transparent is aiming to include rules for acidization, too.

“We have to get this right,” state Senator Fran Pavley, the head of the senate committee on natural resources and water, said at a hearing in Sacramento, according to Reuters. “Regulators must also keep pace with changing technologies.”

Especially when that new technology involves dumping untold amounts of acid on California. Acidization may have been used to improve well output in the past, but it’s never, to my knowldedge, been used to dissolve enough earth to open up a 15 billion-barrel oil reserve. Oil companies are about to drop a hell of a lot of acid.

By Brian Merchant 8 hours ago

Special thanks to Richard Charter

BP Spill, fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, ocean pollution, offshore oil, oil pollution

New York Times: Gulf Spill Sampling Questioned

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I’m with Rikki Ott….the seafood and water quality in the Gulf was worse than reported by official agencies and that is no surprise to anyone paying attention. DV

U.S. Coast Guard, via Reuters

BP spill
Fireboat crews battling a blaze at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, off Louisiana, on April 21, 2010, a day after the rig exploded, killing 11 workers and resulting in the blowout of an exploratory well owned by BP. Ultimately, roughly 200 million gallons of crude oil gushed into the gulf.

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: August 19, 2013

An analysis of water, sediment and seafood samples taken in 2010 during and after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has found higher contamination levels in some cases than previous studies by federal agencies did, casting doubt on some of the earlier sampling methods.

The lead author, Paul W. Sammarco of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, said that dispersants used to break up the oil might have affected some of the samples. He said that the greater contamination called into question the timing of decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to reopen gulf fisheries after the spill and that “it might be time to review the techniques that are used to determine” such reopenings.

Eleven workers died and roughly 200 million gallons of crude oil gushed into the gulf after a blowout at an exploratory well owned by BP caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to explode on April 20, 2010. Nearly two million gallons of Corexit, a dispersant, were sprayed on the surface or injected into the oil plume near the wellhead.

In all, more than 88,000 square miles of federal waters were closed to commercial and recreational fishing. Some areas were reopened before the well was capped three months after the blowout; the last areas were reopened a year after the disaster.

Like other studies after the spill, the new analysis, published last week in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, found that components of oil were distributed along the Gulf Coast as far west as Galveston, Tex. — about 300 miles from the well site — and southeast to the Florida Keys.

But the study found higher levels of many oil-related compounds than earlier studies by NOAA scientists and others, particularly in seawater and sediment. The compounds studied included polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are classified as probably carcinogenic, and volatile organic compounds, which can affect the immune and nervous systems.

“When the numbers first started coming in, I thought these looked awfully high,” Dr. Sammarco said, referring to the data he analyzed, which came from samples that he and other researchers had collected. Then he looked at the NOAA data. “Their numbers were very low,” he said, “I thought what is going on here? It didn’t make sense.”

Dr. Sammarco said that a particular sampling method used in some earlier studies might have led to lower readings. That method uses a device called a Niskin bottle, which takes a sample from a specific point in the water. Because of the widespread use of dispersants during the spill — which raised separate concerns about toxicity — the oil, broken into droplets, may have remained in patches in the water rather than dispersing uniformly.

“Sampling a patchy environment, you may not necessarily hit the patches,” he said.

The plastic that the bottles are made from also attracts oily compounds, potentially removing them from any water sample and leading to lower readings of contaminants, Dr. Sammarco said.

Riki Ott, an independent marine toxicologist who has studied effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska as well as the BP spill, said she was “totally shocked” when she read the high numbers in Dr. Sammarco’s study.

“To see NOAA doing this, that’s inexcusable,” Dr. Ott said, referring to the use of Niskin bottles. “It has been known since Exxon Valdez that this spotty sampling does not work.”

A spokesman for NOAA said the agency would not comment because it was involved in a legal review known as a Natural Resource Damage Assessment to determine how much BP must pay for restoration work. But BP, in a statement, noted that tests on seafood by NOAA and other agencies consistently found levels of contaminants 100 to 1,000 times lower than safety thresholds set by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Dr. Sammarco suggested that more continuous monitoring of oil spills should be undertaken before fisheries are reopened. “It’s a good idea to follow these things long term, to make sure the runway is clear so people are safe and the food is safe,” he said.

Julia M. Gohlke, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who conducted an independent review of seafood safety after the spill, said that while decisions to reopen fisheries are currently based on fish samples only, “it seems like it would definitely be important to keep looking at water samples as well.”