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The Fracking Solution Is A Good Cement Job

This article is more than 10 years old.

It‘s not that drilling for oil and gas is bad. It’s not that drilling has to result in environmental destruction. It’s just that sometimes it turns out that way because a few key people are greedy or just plain lazy, from the management down to the field workers.  But I say it’s all up to the cement job.

Cementing fills and seals the annulus between the well casing and the drilled hole. It isolates and segregates different subsurface zones and rock units, it controls corrosion, and it stabilizes the well, the pipe and the rock formation itself.

Cement forms an extremely strong, effectively impermeable, seal from a thin slurry that can be pumped pretty easily anywhere, and is the ideal material for this purpose (Cementing). True understanding of cement came from the oil industry over the last hundred-plus years and without cement, there would be no drilling.

Cementing is an essential activity in drilling a well, usually coming at the end of operations and at the time that everything is wrapping up and everyone’s wanting to move on to the next well.  As such, it’s sometimes botched. A lot more time and money is then spent fixing it, or worse, recovering from a horrible aftermath.

We know these cementing materials very well. We can deal with an amazing number of conditions and weird circumstances. When we want to. When we mess up, we think we can always do a squeeze job to repair, redirect, seal or otherwise fix the job afterwards. But this is familiar stuff, and should not fail if done appropriately.

But cementing is not easy and it takes some time and some money.  Not much compared to the drilling itself or to the value of the oil or gas obtained, but still significant. And for that reason, the cement job is susceptible to the same boneheaded decisions that are made to save a buck but end up losing billions.

This is an ideal situation for strong regulations. Unfortunately, the cement job is not regulated, not even the cement composition. Sure, drillers are urged to follow guidelines of the main industry trade group who certainly knows this better than anyone else. But self-regulation has never been a good idea. Bridges and roads have quite strong federal controls on the use of cement and making concrete. Why can’t the oil and gas industry? It won’t cost that much and it really would remove the majority of the risks.

A case-in-point is the recent BP Deep Water Horizon blow-out (NAE Report).  While many remember the failed blow-out preventer and bad judgement all-around, a sloppy cement job in the Macondo Well, meant to save a couple of days and a few hundred thousand dollars, failed. This allowed natural gas to migrate up the hole and explode at the surface. Together with other causes, this debacle will eventually cost over $100 billion, and has contaminated a huge swath of ocean and Gulf coastline, and killed eleven people.

For what? To save a few days and a few hundred thousand dollars? To quickly wrap up and get out of there? Thinking they could do a squeeze job later if the cement job failed? Cementing is the way you finish this up, or save it for later drilling as was the case for the Macondo. And $100 billion would pay for guaranteed good cement jobs on over a million wells (Bad Cement Jobs).

Which brings us to gas fracking. Hydraulic fracturing pumps many thousands of gallons of mainly water and sand, with a few chemicals, at high pressure into tight gas-bearing shale deposits (hardened muds), creating cracks that allow gas to flow back up the well to the surface (Shale Shock). The sand gets stuck in the cracks and keeps them open.

But if the well is not cemented properly, the gas leaks out into the other units, particularly drinking water aquifers, as it comes back up the well. Lots of outrage has been directed towards the fracking itself, but the worse culprit is a bad cement job (Faulty Wells, Not Fracking). Almost all of the TV spots, heart-breaking stories of homeowners, and burning faucets are actually from bad cement jobs, not the fracking.

There are disputes over how many wells have bad cement jobs. Scott Anderson, of the Environmental Defense Fund, says up to 15% of cement jobs are bad, whereas Ray Walker of the drilling industry quarrels with that number, thinking it’s less than 1% (Fight Over Fracking). In fact, the problem is getting so visible that even Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon formed an anti-fracking group (Artists Against Fracking).

We can do this better.  Not only better, but near-perfect. If, and only if, we insist on good, careful cement jobs. And the only way to insist is with regulations that have some teeth in them. Even the father of modern fracking, George Phydias Mitchell, thinks so (Chris Helman).

Because gas is starting to dominate our national energy mix, I’d say it’s worth the cost of getting the cement job right, right now.