James Conca

James Conca, Contributor

I cover the underlying drivers of energy, technology and society.

9/10/2012 @ 1:12AM |15,600 views

The Fracking Solution Is A Good Cement Job

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).

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  • It slices, it dices! … and 7% of all cement jobs will fail immediately, the rest will fail over the course of the next 70 years – according to the industry. All cement can shear apart in a big enough earthquake. It’s a big mistake to put that much faith in triple cement well casings. They all fail eventually.

  • James Conca James Conca, Contributor 1 year ago

    Yes, there will always be natural failures but when you start with a lousy job to begin with, it’s much worse. Cement is all we have for this and to think we will not be drilling at all would be a mistake. Strong regs would do most of it. But most cement jobs will not fail over the next 70 years, not sure who in the industry would say that. There are 2,000 year old Chinese cemented wells (they drilled to a half-mile with only bamboo) and many of them are still tight. Earthquakes are more destructive of the rigs and for open holes in ongoing operations. I have not heard of them causing issues with closed wells, but I will look into it in the next few days and get back to you. An earthquake shears the whole system, and it would take a ideally-configured one to open a well a sufficiently long-enough way up without shearing the open ends completely away from each other. The thing about a bad cement job is it’s often bad in many places and that’s why it fails.

  • Are you talking about the concrete jobs when you refer to “cementing”? Cement is just 1 component of a concrete mixture.

  • Harry Golden Harry Golden 1 year ago

    Nevermind, I just read your link to “cementing” for wells. Thanks for the article!

  • James Conca James Conca, Contributor 1 year ago

    Yes, it took me awhile to get the jargon straight as there are many types of cements, concretes, grouts, salt stone, cast stone, etc., all the same stuff with variations in components like gravel or sand aggregate, blast furnace slag, fly ash, silica fume, aluminates, etc.. To think that it started over 3,000 years ago is amazing. Even asphalt was used almost 5,000 years ago.

  • Your comparison to the Chinese wells fails for this reason. Those Chinese wells were not then subject to the 10,000 to 15,000 psi it takes to frack a natural gas wells. The failure rate in PA is truly alarming. There are 44 squeeze jobs in just one small town. As you clearly state, cementing is only one problem. Corrosion does and will occur with more frequency with time.

  • James Conca James Conca, Contributor 1 year ago

    Yes, just an analogy on time. But that’s why we need to develop real regulations that are strong enough, and that dictate sufficiently robust cement jobs that will work and that won’t need squeeze jobs every time but only once in awhile. The bottom line is drilling and fracking are going to happen, we need to do it right. And as much as evertone seems to hate regulations, it’s the only way to enforce it.

  • I’s only the gas companies that hate regulations. Those of us living in close proximity to gas wells would love some regulations. Especially people like me with drinking water wells. Personally, I’m a little tired of the rhetoric. They have touted “green frac” for over a year, but I have yet to hear of it being used in PA. They also declare they can recover fugitive emissions at a fairly reasonable rate, but again, they have yet to do that. If you have ever been up close and personal with these operations, you would know why they should be mandatory.

    I’m left to believe that these gas companies will cut corners everywhere they can.

    Each day news comes out that makes us more and more wary. This just came out today.


  • James Conca James Conca, Contributor 1 year ago

    Yes, talking about it and requiring it are two different things. Until regs are enacted, I don’t foresee anything being done.

  • I don’t think you realize the engineering aspect of this. If you filled a copper tube with cement. let it cure, and then bang it with a hammer, you will deform the copper and shatter or crack the cement inside. If there is shear in any micro quake you then have the same impact on the annulus. You are also not acknowledging the effects of pressure and settling which are documented aspect of gas drilling. You can “cap” a well only for static pressures, but the earth is never entirely static and the pipe always serves as a conduit for truly massive forces. This is why the gulf BP spill took so long to cap.