Wyoming Natural Gas Leak Under Control

* Natural gas leak capped on Wyoming well

* Well control operations to continue next 24 hours

* State oil and gas supervisor says leak may continue

By Selam Gebrekidan

NEW YORK, April 27 (Reuters) - Workers curbed a natural-gas leak from a stricken Chesapeake Energy Corp well in Wyoming about three days after a blowout, the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission said on Friday.

Boots and Coots, a pressure control company owned by Houston-based Halliburton and contracted by Chesapeake after the well blowout on Tuesday, was pumping drilling mud into the well a day after its efforts were hampered by wind and adverse weather.

The well stopped leaking natural gas earlier on Friday, the Commission said. Chesapeake had lost control while installing a well casing.

"I anticipate that some additional natural gas may be released periodically from the well during the next few days," Tom Doll, state Oil and Gas Supervisor said in a statement.

He added the well will be filled with drilling mud by late afternoon and control operations will continue for the next 24 hours.

Chesapeake and its contractors are applying a process that resembles BP Plc's "Top Kill" effort that failed to stem a deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago.

On Thursday, Chesapeake had said wind speeds and direction were unfavorable for it to regain control of the well.

Cleanup of the spill will begin after the natural gas leak is safely controlled and technical experts will inspect the drilling rig and associated equipment over the coming days, Doll added.

He added investigations into what caused the blowout will begin following cleanup and repair work.

Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake is the No. 2 U.S. natural gas driller. Chesapeake had another natural-gas well blowout in Pennsylvania a year ago.

Chesapeake shares rose 0.97 percent to $17.73 in afternoon trading.

Also on HuffPost:

From our partners

• Widespread Greenland Melting A Sign Of Things To Come - Climate Central
• How Two Determined Sisters Set Up A Pet Rescue Pipeline To Colorado - Mother Nature Network
• 11 Images And Facts About A Misunderstood Creature - Mother Nature Network

Comments

[1differentdrummer]

06:35 AM on 04/30/2012

Scavenging up resources is more important than the environment and people.

[James Wills]

12:43 PM on 04/29/2012

And Halliburton finds yet another way to make a buck .

[Zariana]

01:15 PM on 04/29/2012

They are controlling an environmental disaster and saving people's lives. You make that sound like a bad thing.

[Mountain Mike]

09:49 PM on 04/29/2012

There is one little thing, they are the cause!!!

[AnswerMan1]

11:54 PM on 04/29/2012

Halliburton is an oil field services company. Boots and Coots is a pressure control division that is called in when these situations occur. This is like demonizing the mechanic for making a buck off your car when it breaks down. Don't be so quick to drink the liberal kool aid genius

[1differentdrummer]

06:31 AM on 04/30/2012

Odd, I haven't seen anyone passing kool aid around.

[James Wills]

12:39 PM on 04/29/2012

There go the roaming deer and antelope. Time for some discouraging words too. Lots of change since the song was written.

[sachazg]

11:16 PM on 04/28/2012

This is not a SAFE energy alternative. Not one has died from SOLAR or WIND energy options. Let's take this country towards a sustainable future.

[oil patch]

10:48 AM on 04/29/2012

that's funny because these people died in solar and wind energy options:
http://www.reliableplant.com/Read/28054/OSHA-cites-LM-worker-fatality
http://www.osha.gov/dep/greenjobs/solar.html

[Mountain Mike]

09:51 PM on 04/29/2012

They died during construction, I don't suppose you would understand the difference.

[idyl]

06:09 PM on 04/28/2012

It sounds pretty similar to the following incident:

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201103050508

40 miles east of Yellowstone Park: "The blowout happened when the well's steel casing and cement surrounding the casing ruptured underground …It's still unknown if the pipe or cement was defective or if human error was involved."

Residents continue to be concerned about pollution and well water contamination: "the people who live in Wyoming's Line Creek Valley still wonder four years later if their lives will return to normal."

[Zariana]

01:09 PM on 04/29/2012

If they were running casing at the time (per the article), it's more likely that the zone they were getting ready to case off is the culprit.

[Bob Hazard]

04:46 AM on 04/30/2012

The manmade hole in the ground was the culprit.

[chefmudshark]

12:29 PM on 04/28/2012

Say good-bye to your water supply.

[Robert Rowley]

11:25 AM on 04/28/2012

Two blow outs in the past year. So, tell me again why we are going to allow the XLpipeline to be ran through sensitive habitats and how they can guarantee it won't leak and cause a disaster? Think about this, shale oil is a lot thicker crude and much more abrasive. It will require higher pumping pressure to move the oil and cause more ware and tare to the inside of the pipes. Ware + tare + higher pumping pressure = eventual failure.

[RSGmusic]

11:58 AM on 04/28/2012

Correct Robert Rowley

They are trying to route the pipeline to less sensative areas. The Plains in the whole
region is basicly a sponge.

Live Long and it good health.

[Zariana]

09:53 AM on 04/29/2012

For Chesapeake, I think this actually makes 3.

Nice segue to a completely unrelated issue.

[mumi009]

10:37 AM on 04/28/2012

Natural gas is methane gas. It's a worse climate kller than CO2. Just because you don't see it and the pictures are not as dramatic as those of the Deepwater Horizon, it is very deadly.

Besides having an above ground effect a blowout can occur underground and rupture the drill hole casing allowing methane and flowback to enter groundwater.

Man, you guys are poisoning yourselves! Are you that desparate for fossil fuels? That's worse than being a drug addict who neglects his health as long as he can get the next fix.

[D-Driller]

11:48 AM on 04/28/2012

If there is casing in the hole, then the water zones are covered up. The max shut-in casing pressure is taken into account in well control equations, and if necessary, the pressure will be bled off to keep from exceeding that number and/or the casing burst pressure, which is quite significant. Downhole blowouts do occur, but that was a phrase you read somewhere and thought you understood what it meant but actually don't. Here is what it is: Sometimes, you run into a situation deep in a well, particularly when you are drilling through a transition zone, that a productive interval will be much higher pressure than one right above it. If that is the case, then you can't really raise the MW to kill it, because you will break down the formation above. If the pressure differential is enough, the lower sand can actually flow fluid into the upper sand. One way to combat this is use the venturi effect to pump lost-circulation material into the wellbore, with the thought that the fluid going into the weak sand will take some of the material with it, plug itself off, and then you can shut the well in and kill the well. This does not happen at the surface or near-surface, it does not happen in surface casing, which covers water zones, and it does not rupture casing.

[energydem]

06:47 PM on 04/28/2012

I leave the drilling specifics to D-Driller, from whom I always learn something. I can discuss methane emissions, however, and much of what you say is not correct. Methane is not a "worse climate killer" than CO2. It is true that it is about 20 times more powerful than CO2 but it has a much shorter residence in the atmosphere than CO2 -- 10 years roughly for methane compared to 150+ for CO2. That is why all the GWP formulas are weighted more to CO2 than methane -- because scientists consider it a much more serious problem. And the "deadliness" of methane compared to oil in an ocean environment is silly -- you don't get an wild-life threatening slick from gas unless it is wet gas. Finally, producers have economic incentives to capture methane -- it has value. If they lack infrastructure or other incentives to capture and sell associated gas, they tend to flare it which means CO2 emissions, not methane emissions. Also, methane leaks at a drill site can be dangerous, providing an additional incentive for capture, use, flaring and other proper handling.

I dare say that if you drive a care or heat and/or power your house with something other than nuclear, renewable or hydro generated electricity, you are using fossil fuels. And you can't reliably use intermittent renewables without backup firming generation, which is almost always gas generation.

Perhaps a little less advocacy reading and a little more technically based energy information is in order.

[mumi009]

05:38 PM on 04/29/2012

part one
Your explanation and that of D-Driller sound very good, and I appreciate the technical descriptions. In theory and maybe in many practical situations it does work as you both describe it.

BUT, people screw up, cut corners and don't follow procedures. See Deepwater Horizon. Blowout valves untested, only one chamber in use. That puts into question the safety of all drilling platforms. See gas drlling platform owned by Total that leaked large quantities of gas for days, if not weeks. In both cases the peoplle responsible for the drilling were not in control of the accident. I saw pictures of driling activities in Texas, taken by representives of the German mining authority (pro drilling, mind you. The guy was kind of amazed at his own photos) that show a drill site that looks like it's in a gravel parking lot, not 200 yards from a hospital and right near a busy thoroughfare. Do you want to tell me this company is using best practices and heading safe drilling technology? We have test wells in Germany, drilled by ExxonMobil and RWE Dea that leak drilling mud. Pipelines used to transmit flowback from fracking wells leach fuids containing benzene and toluene. Valves and pipes leak. And these guys are supposed to be the poster children of drilliing.

[mumi009]

05:39 PM on 04/29/2012

part two

My figures for CO2 residency are 30 to 95 years not 150 as you stated. By definition, CO2 has a GWP (Global Warming Potential) of 1 (one). Methane has a GWP of 72 in a time horizon of 20 years. That makes it in my book just as bad if not worse than CO2.

Underwater leaks of large quantities of methane are just as catastrophic for marine plant and animal life. Missing are the gooked up beaches and birds that make for good TV news.

If the gas that is flamed off at oil drilling sites were to be "bottled and sold" there would be little if no need to drill for shale gas or tight gas.

[s allin]

10:42 PM on 04/27/2012

one of the downsides of fracking is the unburned gas released. when combusted, it may only produce half the emissions of coal, but when it escapes unburned the greenhouse impact is on a scale of 25:1 versus CO2. and that's a conservative estimate.

[D-Driller]

11:49 AM on 04/28/2012

It's quite wasteful as well. It would be helpful if "green" engineering companies would help design ways to capture any gas released.

[bcstractor]

06:17 PM on 04/29/2012

No it would help if gas companies cared enough to do a proper job. If you have a gas leak at home they'll throw you out of the house.

[JGBKIDS]

09:37 PM on 04/27/2012

they know the leak poses no threat to drinking water...... based on what?

[oil patch]

10:35 AM on 04/28/2012

because the surface casing that isolates the freshwater zones was already cemented

[blurredmolly]

11:03 AM on 04/28/2012

by Haliburton? that's comforting.....

[RSGmusic]

12:00 PM on 04/28/2012

Have you ever seen how druy it gets in the region?

The foundation will crack four sure in many places.

[Mountain Mike]

09:55 PM on 04/29/2012

Based on they will lose money if they tell the truth!

[CalvinLeman]

09:33 PM on 04/27/2012

Who knows what the ground water feels?

[oil patch]

09:10 PM on 04/27/2012

big red saves the day!

[Reality always bites]

04:28 PM on 04/27/2012

If it is natural gas why not let nature take control.
(Oh I forgot- it is a natural product that people pay for- same as water)

[Kenz300]

04:22 PM on 04/27/2012

We need sane sensible regulation.

[blurredmolly]

11:04 AM on 04/28/2012

there has to be a better way than fracking.

[D-Driller]

11:51 AM on 04/28/2012

Fraccing is the best way. Very effective in releasing a lot of gas for production. What we really need is better cementing technology, which is, as you know, the cause of contamination.