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The Eagle Ford Shale

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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby Plantagenet » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 12:29:02

The EF wells only produce a couple of hundred bbls per day don't they? Pretty wimpy stuff for a blow out
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 12:45:42

P - Actually not they all aren't nasty bit a gas/condensate blow can be a lot more dangerous than just oil. Imagine lighting a spray from a can of hair spray vs. lighting a stream from a can of lighter fluid. Oil burns...NG has a tendency to explode once it mixes with the right proportion of air. And much worse when the condensate is atomized in with the NG.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 13:01:04

P - Finally some video. Not looking too wimpy, eh? LOL. If reported correctly they were still drilling at the time.

http://www.ksat.com/news/video-oil-rig- ... index.html
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby Plantagenet » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 13:06:26

WOW! That's impressive

Who knew they could get that kinda flow by fracking! Is it oil or NG?
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby John_A » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 13:34:14

Plantagenet wrote:WOW! That's impressive

Who knew they could get that kinda flow by fracking! Is it oil or NG?


If they were drilling, they weren't fracking. Most blowouts are drilling related, stopping a frack job is easy, you just back off the hydraulic horsepower and if the well is already loaded with heavy fluid, that fluid works wonderful for keeping the formation fluids back, plus if you are using water it isn't very compressible, you let it expand just a little and all the pressure goes bye-bye. Unless of course you are doing a BIG frack job, in which case YOU provided all the pressure in the system, and some chunk of that will probably come back, but we're talking water and sand, not formation fluids.

For a frack job to become a blowout the well would then need to absolutely unload all of this stuff before you would be looking at formation fluids rather than water and sand. And of course, there is this huge valve right there you can close until you decide how you are going to fix your now incomplete stimulation.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 13:38:16

P - If the reports are correct the well wasn't frac'd yet. They were still drilling. In fact, it hasn't been confirmed that it blew out in the Eagle Ford Shale. The well is a lot closer to me than the early reports indicated. Where they were drilling there's oil/NG reservoirs from 1,000' all the way below the EFS. It certainly does look like a NG/condensate burn from the color.

I’ve found it on a map and it is in an area with production as shallow as 1,000’. Take a kick at that depth and if the BOP’s don’t work you’ll be lucky to not be burned to death. In reality such shallow zones can be the most dangerous because companies don’t tend to watching too closely when they start drilling. If it did blow out in the EFS they may have hit a very nice naturally fractured section. Good news/bad news: they may have a nice offset well to drill…after they spend $10-20 million taking care of this problem.

Report from rigzone:

A drilling rig explosion was reported in Petersville, Lavaca County in rural South Texas Wednesday evening. There were no reports of injuries in what was being described as a “well control incident and fire,” and all personnel were safely evacuated, K Leonard, manager of public relations for rig operator EOG Resources Inc. told Rigzone.

EOG is coordinating its response with local fire department and emergency response personnel, and regulatory agencies have been notified, Leonard said. “EOG’s first priority in responding to the incident is the safety of personnel working on site, the responders who are providing assistance and neighbors in the immediate area,” Leonard said.

The incident occurred shortly before 7 p.m. Wednesday evening, Aug. 28, approximately 80 miles east of San Antonio between Shiner and Yoakum, in the Eagle Ford shale formation.
The fire is contained but is continuing to burn, and Wild West Control was called in to assist in the response effort. EOG is assembling a team of well control experts to safely control the well and extinguish the fire.

EOG said the cause of the incident was unknown at this time.





BTW I've mentioned areas in Texas where there is a lot of natural methane contamination in the fresh water aquifers. This well is in one of the worst areas. In fact just about 15 miles east a very nice NG field was discovered in the fresh water aquifer at 240’. As I’ve mentioned before one of the best areas to drill for deeper production like the EFS is where there is a lot of shallower production. Thus the common correlation between deeper drilling/frac’ng and fresh water methane contamination. But the classic causation problem: the contamination was there millions of years before the drilling began.

Won’t be surprised to hear about lawsuits over fresh water methane contamination as a result of the blowout. The trick will be proving which came first. Won’t be an easy sell for the landowner given the well documented history of natural contamination in the area.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby John_A » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 14:04:25

ROCKMAN wrote:BTW I've mentioned areas in Texas where there is a lot of natural methane contamination in the fresh water aquifers. This well is in one of the worst areas. In fact just about 15 miles east a very nice NG field was discovered in the fresh water aquifer at 240’.


methane in a fresh water aquifer? obviously this was from fracking activities, that is the only way methane ever gets into fresh water aquifers. You need to be properly re-oriented in eco-think Rockman. You must ALWAYS assume that natural gas in fresh water aquifers comes from human activities, if you do anything else people might suspect that what happens in the physical world happens just because it does, and eco-groups cannot solicit donations if it turns out that this is just how God does things.

Glad to hear everyone made it off the rig okay, some of those boys like land jobs because you can't run away from the platform, but you can hump pretty fast to get away from a burning land rig.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 14:12:01

John - Yep. been on a rig or two where the hands just stood there ground...no one wants to be the first to bolt. But as soon as the pusher says run you've never seen some over weight hands move so fast. I believe it was a Nabors rig.

Right outside of Shiner, Texas. Home of Shiner Bock beer...one of the smoothest around. Hopefully the well didn't mess up their water supply. Actually I worked the Shiner Gas Field about 25 years ago. Some pretty nice though small NG production up in the shallow section. It was about 30 years ago when a rancher in this county showed me how he could occasionally light some methane from his water well. Of course, there had never been any o/NG drilling around his property.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 15:59:41

looking at the size and shape of the "flare" I suspect that a lot of the contribution is due to surface equipment on fire. There is a lot of smoke which isn't that common when all that is burning is natural gas and the color of the flame suggest incomplete combustion IMHO.
In any event if this were a gas flare from a stack of that height it would likely equate to 10 or so MMcf/d which is well above what most EFS wells IP at.

As to
Proving it happens quite often will never stop the critics from pretending it is only because of neglect, negligence, mismanagement or is somehow caused by BP safety policies.


how does one occurrence in several thousand wells drilled successfully prove that it happens quite often?
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 16:23:43

doc - here's another still shot of the rig.

http://www.drillingahead.com/page/nabor ... n-eagle-fo

I blew it up the pic to see it better. Not sure whose white tanker truck that is but I don't think it's Halliburton. Also on the left it looks like a flare stack. I wonder if this was planned as a drilling-under-balance job. As you point out definite looks like equipment burning as indicated by the smoke. But also looks like a lot of gas coming out from under the Kelly. They say it was "drilling a horizontal Eagle Ford Hole" but I'm not sure they mean that it was hz in the EFS when it blew out. But notice no drill pipe in the derrick.

Probably get all the details in another few days.
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Eagle Ford Shale may soon reach 1 million barrels per day

Unread postby dcoyne78 » Thu 29 Aug 2013, 19:40:28

This is a cross post from my blog at http://oilpeakclimate.blogspot.com

That is 1 MMBO/d of C+C from the Eagle Ford play.

I have made a number of comments about the Eagle Ford Shale (EFS) and possible underreporting by the Texas Railroad Commission (TRRC) of crude plus condensate (C+C) output. See my comments at peak oil.com http://peakoil.com/forums/the-shale-oil-boom-paper-by-leonardo-maugeri-t68536-120.html (fourth comment by dcoyne78 on that page) and at peakoilbarrel.com http://peakoilbarrel.com/test-post/ (see my response to Mike's comment in the comments section.)

The first point is that the TRRC data for Texas(TX) statewide C+C is quite different from the data reported by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) for TX C+C.

Which data should we believe?

An article by Roger Blanchard posted at Resilience.org http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-03-19/commentary-texas-and-eagle-ford-where-the-action-is got me thinking about the discrepancy between the EIA and TRRC data so I downloaded data from both sources in March to compare with future data. I failed to realize at the time that I had some earlier data from Jan 2013 (which I have now utilized) and I downloaded more data in early August when checking on recent EFS data. A final download of TRRC data was done in late August.

rrceia4.png


My interpretation of this data is that the EIA data changes very little over time, but the TRRC data changes quite a bit. My conclusion is that when considering TX C+C the EIA estimate is much better especially in the near term where the TRRC data may be off by as much as 33 %.


When attempting to estimate the EFS C+C we must rely on TRRC data, but I decided to adjust the TRRC data for the EFS. I tabulate TRRC C+C data for both all TX and the EFS and determine the proportion of output from the EFS relative to the TX statewide total for each month in the data series. I call this % EF/TX (C+C) in my spreadsheets. Then I multiply this proportion by the EIA TX C+C estimate to get my EFS estimate.

Last month's data suggested the % EF /TX (C+C) was 36.1 % in May 2013, today's update shows a higher number of 37.8 % for May and 38.8 % for June, so the EFS estimate rises to about 955 kb/d for May 2013 and 998 kb/d for June 2013.

efsC+C4.png


A spreadsheet with the EFS data can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/dc78image/files-1

it is named "efsCCdata2.xlsx". Files are listed alphabetically and are downloaded by clicking the down arrow on the right side of the page (next to the X).

Note that I upated this post 8/29/2013 at 4:20 EDST because I found the EIA TX C+C data for June, the EIA data has not changed except for the added June data point for TX, the difference between the red dashed line and the blue line is due to an increase in the % of output coming from the EFS.

efspercent2.png


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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby Plantagenet » Fri 30 Aug 2013, 03:41:43

I sat some geothermal wells back when I worked for Unocal. All we had to worry about then was being scalded to death by steam.

That's a pretty impressive NG (?) blowout from a tight shale --- I must say---- I thought they wouldn't even flow w/o fracking
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Fri 30 Aug 2013, 09:10:24

P - Depends on the amount of natural fractures. Back in the 90's the Austin Chalk (a carbonate "shale") was one of the hottest oil plays on the planet. They drilled it horizontally to increase the odds of hitting those natural fractures. The problem with natural fractures is that they flow both ways: drill it with a heavy enough mud weight and you lose the mud (and perhaps the well) into the fracture system. So they came up with a solution: drill it with a mud weight not heavy enough to stop the flow of oil/NG. Yes...actually induce a controlled blow out while drilling. When such "underbalanced drilling" was done the well would flow oil and natural gas to the surface while drilling. The NG was separated and flared and the oil sent to tanks. You can imagine how nervous one might be on the drill site. Essentially what you're seeing in the current blow out but without the fire. At least not until someone screwed up.

But all shales are not created equal. While on contract at Devon they asked me to analyze Haynesville Shale well they drilled. They drilled it with an 11.5 ppg (pound per gallon) mud weight. When they frac'd and produced the well the pressure was equivalent to a 14.5 ppg. Their question: since they drilled the well underbalanced why didn't they see any indication of NG? I studied the core report and found that the rock they drilled had zero potential to flow NG. They could have drilled the well with no mud in the hole and they would not have seen any sign of NG. Apparently the frac job got them into a fractures system the well had completely missed.

Which indicates the problem with trying to analyze such plays as the Eagle Ford Shale. One well may intersect a very productive fracture system and require little stimulation. Another may hit no fractures. Frac the second well and they might tap into a great natural fracture system. Or they may hit very few natural fractures and have a poor well. We talk about "sweet spots" in such plays. Those are areas with high concentrations of natural fractures. A point for folks who haven't heard it before: you can frac a shale until the cows come home but if you don't tap into a naturally existing fracture you won't make a well. The shale rock itself isn't producing all that oil/NG. It is coming from those natural fractures that have taken millions of years to accumulate the hydrocarbons in them.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Fri 30 Aug 2013, 10:49:09

A point for folks who haven't heard it before: you can frac a shale until the cows come home but if you don't tap into a naturally existing fracture you won't make a well. The shale rock itself isn't producing all that oil/NG. It is coming from those natural fractures that have taken millions of years to accumulate the hydrocarbons in them.


this is incorrect. Although ideally it is good to have your created frac connect into a natural non-cemented fracture some distance away from the well bore it is not necessary. I have seen this countless times in wells fracced in numerous shales that we know have few if any natural fractures that are open. What happens is the created fracture intersects shale along its length that has high porosity but extremely low permeability. The pressure drop along the propped fracture allows hydrocarbons to flow from the shale in the immediate proximity of the created fracture into the fracture. Remember also that the created fracture is not simply a single thin knive edge element but tends to be more dendritic in nature with abundant microcracks connecting to the main fracture. The permeability although extremely low does allow for hydrocarbons to flow into the created fracture and microcrack network as you have now connected directly to some of the pore space storage. The difference in this situation versus a conventional reservoir is that because the permeability is so low there is a period of flush production which declines extremely rapidly until such time as the rate of production starts to match the rate at which the shale can still supply hydrocarbon to the created fracture (hence the flat part of the production curve at very low rates). Because of the relatively low area of communication of any given single frac with the shale reservoir there is a need to do multistage fracs in order to create as much reservoir contact as possible in a given well bore.
In actual practice operators tend to try to avoid the naturally fractured portions of shale reservoirs if at all possible mainly because if you happen to intersect a non cemented fracture in your well bore and cannot isolate it from your frac the results are almost invariably poor simply because your frac energy tends to go to opening and lengthening the natural fracture, lowering the stress differential that you create to the point that induced failure of the unfractured rock cannot take place. I've seen this happen via microseismic in a couple of Marcellus wells. As pumping continued you see a single zone begin to form and lengthen....it continues to lengthen well beyond the length of a fracture that you would create and the pressures do not build up as they normally would.
The Eagleford is one shale in which in some places it is not possible to avoid naturally occurring fractures. The advantage though is the naturally occurring fractures are not in the same orientation as the created fractures are (the natural fractures seem to be shear orientation whereas the created are in an extensional orientation). Hence it is still possible to create fractures without losing all of the buildup stresses to the natural fractures.
Reservoirs are always complicated and shales are no exception but it is incorrect to say that shales without natural fractures will not produce or that induced fractures that do not intersect natural fractures will not be effective.
A simple calculation to make is via fracture storage capacity. If you did that for any given fracture you would see that it is pretty impossible for fractures alone to contain the kind of hydrocarbons that are produced from a given well without some replenishment from the shale pore network.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Fri 30 Aug 2013, 12:50:32

"The pressure drop along the propped fracture allows hydrocarbons to flow from the shale in the immediate proximity of the created fracture into the fracture." I've never seen a single flow model that allowed the extremely low permeability of any shale formation to flow a commercial volume of hydrocarbons from the shale matrix alone. I would be thrilled if you could show me one
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby TheDude » Fri 30 Aug 2013, 19:35:32

The RRC has a page for Blowouts and Well Control Problems. Almost all of the EFS activity looks to be taking place in Districts 1/2/4 and the most recent incident they list in those areas was in Oct 2011. Most impressive given the frantic pace of work there, or are there tons more incidents happening that aren't blowouts/well control problems? I did find a news piece about how How many workers have died in the Eagle Ford Shale, namely 13 of last May, but that of course includes things like roughnecks being smitten with falling pipe so...
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Fri 30 Aug 2013, 22:50:11

Dude - Despite this recent blow out wells drilling for such reservoirs seldom blow out. Think about: they spend $2 to $6 million to frac wells to get them to flow oil/NG. IOW they often won't have much potential to "kick you". But it hasn't been confirmed that it was the Eagle Ford that came in. This area is notorious for shallow NG deposits. Just about 15 miles to the east is the Yoakum Field at 1100' that I worked on long ago. There's oil/NG in this area from shallow to over 18,000'. Just a weak guess but from the flame color it looks like oil and NG burning so I don't think it's that shallow.

But many blow outs have happened in shallow normal pressured reservoirs. The problem arises when they don't know the cut a shallow gas sand and pull the drill pipe out of the hole too fast. This produces a sucking action and will "swab a well in". When you take a kick shallow like that it can come in so fast there's no time to react.

How often? Obvious not often because you'll always see the headlines like this one. It won't bring much comfort for many folks but taking a kick is not rare. Taking a kick is the immediate precursor to having a blow out. The vast majority of kicks are stopped. These are called well control issues and you never see them reported to the public. On any given day in the Gulf Coast there are maybe as many as a dozens wells that take a kick. But the great majority on onshore injuries/fatalities do come from something being dropped on a hand or being caught between two big pieces of "dumb iron". Offshore typically more hands are killed in chopper crashes than on the rigs.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby SamInNebraska » Sat 31 Aug 2013, 09:20:24

rockdoc123 wrote:As to
Proving it happens quite often will never stop the critics from pretending it is only because of neglect, negligence, mismanagement or is somehow caused by BP safety policies.


how does one occurrence in several thousand wells drilled successfully prove that it happens quite often?


One occurrence in several thousand wells is "quite often" when ANY occurrence is too much. It is a matter of perspective. Blowouts are now equated with the sorts of bad behavior JohnA mentioned, when looked at from that perspective, any single occurrence is evidence of malfeasance of some sort. Therefore one time in thousands of wells, when thousands of wells are being drilled every month, means that a bad or incompetent act of some sort is happening every month! The human criminals causing these things must be brought to justice!

I agree the idea seems a bit extreme, but the idea that this is just part of the business of poking holes in the earth is not acceptable to a person who has decided that human activity of this type is a "bad", bad in the moral sense, activity.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby SamInNebraska » Sat 31 Aug 2013, 09:27:30

Plantagenet wrote:That's a pretty impressive NG (?) blowout from a tight shale --- I must say---- I thought they wouldn't even flow w/o fracking


They were producing natural gas from shale wells in Ohio and West Virginia before fracking was invented. Or horizontal drilling. Or before the Model T Ford. Or before WWI. Or before Spindletop and the invention of the rotary table.
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Re: Eagle Ford Shale Blow Out

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Sat 31 Aug 2013, 09:47:20

Sam - So I take it you consider ever accident evidence of malfeasance: every industrial accident, every airline accident, every school bus accident as wee as every other automobile accident. Or does your zero tolerance extend only to the oil patch? I don't mean to insult but you're borderline sanctimonious IMHO. Yes: I've seen folks in the oil patch take foolish/dangerous actions. Just as I've seen in every other human activity. I've run off more than a few hands/companies for not conforming to my safety standards. But accidents still happened. In just about every oil patch accident I've been involved with it was caused by human error. Not corporate policies, not poorly designed procedures, rarely mechanical failure. And I've yet to figure out how to drill a well with the aid of human beings.

As I've said before: the only way to prevent all future blow outs is to stop all drilling. And the only way to prevent all airline, school bus and all other vehicle deaths is to completely stop those activities. And while you're at it you might want to shut down all manufacturing activity in the US since it accounts for more deaths and injuries than drilling does.
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