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Fracking the Centre
To frack or not to frack? For a post-Gasland public, that may be the question, but not according to the Australian operations head of Canadia-based mining company PetroFrontier, Richard Parkes. The real issue is how it’s done and how it’s regulated.
Interestingly, even some environmentalists like the Arid Lands Environment Centre’s Jimmy *****ing seem to agree – essentially. Like others who attended a talk by Parkes and Petrofrontier consultant Larry Franks at Charles Darwin University last week, *****ing was impressed by the company’s apparent willingness to operate responsibly and transparently.
But is Petrofrontier typical, and can other companies be expected to follow suit?
Discussion at the forum suggested that the Northern Territory Government is actually lagging behind companies like Petrofrontier in protecting the Territory’s aquifers from fracking (practised in various forms here for decades) in the broader context.
Petrofrontier boasts on its website that it’s “the first company in Australia to use unconventional horizontal drilling and open-hole multi-stage fracture stimulation techniques, which have unlocked tremendous production volumes from unconventional plays in North America.”
How PetroFrontiooer has been pitching its operations in the Georgina
The site of these literally groundbreaking developments is a few hundred kilometres north of Alice Springs in the Georgina Basin, where Petrofrontier has four exploration permits across an area of 13.6 million hectares.
The company is hoping to extract oil and gas from the basin; its initial forays have revealed the promising smell of hydro-carbon rich samples, which Parkes compared, with obvious relish, to the aroma of “old fashioned texta pens” or bitumen. Petrofrontier has described the oil resources in the basin as “huge’’.
Horizontal multi-stage fracking involves an ingenious process called “geosteering” in which the prospector drills down to a certain level and then manipulates the drill to take a 90 degree turn and proceed horizontally. After the hole has been created, Petrofrontier inserts casing with “packers” on it to the end of the hole. It then cements that casing up to the surface.
Fracturing the rock increase its permeability, thereby “unlocking” resources which weren’t available by “conventional” processes.
Parkes describes PetroFrontier’s design approach as “prudent” – “unlike some of the design approaches I’ve seen in other parts of the country. And that’s the way it should be done because you want to make sure you’ve got at least two barriers between anything that could potentially be polluted and where you are doing your work.”
PetroFrontier graphic illustrating horizontal fracking as proposed.
And the ingredients injected into the rock to “frack” it and release the hydrocarbons?
Besides sand and water, all “approved industrial chemicals, rigorously policed” and biodegradable, says Franks. It’s a fluid, that dates back to the 70s, when he says, “chemicals were pretty simple”.
Franks’ (slightly edited) description of Petrofrontier’s fracking process: What you needed to have is a very thick gel to carry your propant, which is sand, into the crack, so it won’t close up. We pump water until the rock cracks and then we follow it up with sand. If you just went to pump sand it wouldn’t pump anywhere, so we put in a gel, about the consistency of silastic when you first squeeze it out. The stuff we use is guar gum, the sap from a tree … and all it does is makes the water very thick. To give it better consistency (“crosslinking”) they put in a bit of citric acid or vinegar, to make it even stiffer.
They use sodium chloride or potassium chloride to get the right pH in the water in case the rock doesn’t like fresh water, They use glycols to prevent scale buildup, and they use other bactericides, which are the same things they use in detergents, to stop bacteria growing. Basically what we do is we pump that thick gel in there with the sand. We don’t want to leave the thick gel in there, so we stop, and the rock comes back and grabs the sand. And we’re left with sand with all this thick gel, but before we actually pumped it in the hole, we put some bacteria in it, fairly simple bacteria, and it breaks down the guar gums back to water again. The chains just break up and we float water back and leave the sand in the rock. It’s quite a simple process.
Franks favourably compared Petrofrontier’s operations with those portrayed in the movie Gasland, in which drillers used cheap chemicals such as BTEX after the Bush administration exempted them from environmental controls. As he put it, “that started to cause problems.”
“When we frack, we’ll probably pump for half an hour,” said Franks.
“They were pumping for two and three weeks, and when you pump for two or three weeks, all sorts of things happen. They were creating little mini-earthquakes because they were pumping so much fluid in the one place they were starting to relieve pressures.
“They were fracking right up to the surface because they weren’t really good in their engineering. A lot of crazy things happened. That’s why you saw in that movie, a lot of the gas bubbling up on surface, because they pumped for two or three weeks, not thirty minutes. I hate to think of the cost of that.”
Optimistic about the Georgina as it is, Petrofrontier still has a way to go before it decides to go into production.
Parkes sees the development phase as the place where both the economics and the “social licence” of the project can be destroyed, and therefore “the place where you have to be clever.”
“You just have to look at the coal seam gas situation in Queensland to see (what happens) if that process isn’t managed properly, and doesn’t involve all the community and all the competing landowners,” he told the forum.
“It really has to happen at the appraisal drilling stage. The people who are doing the petroleum work at that phase have to look at how they’re going to turn that commercial opportunity into a business that benefits everybody, not just them.
“Otherwise you could have a Queensland situation where you end up with a LNG (liquid natural gas) enforcement unit.
“It seems insane that a Government would have to start up that.”
As Parkes and Franks showed on Friday, Petrofrontier is being “clever” at the early stage of its project, not only by apparently doing the right thing, but by letting everyone know that it is.
But some in the audience seemed doubtful that the NT Government would take the lead to ensure other players in the Territory’s unfolding hydrocarbons scenario were as reasonable as Petrofrontier.
A lot of their concern centres around the fact that mining and petroleum companies are exempt from the Northern Territory’s Water Act. Critics say this means companies don’t need a licensed driller to drill a water bore, and aren’t required to meet the act’s regulations on pollution within the boundaries of their lease.
Companies are subject to Mines Department regulations regarding pollution, but, say the critics, management plans for particular operations are not made public – which means that problems that arise may also not be made public.
At Friday’s talk, former Water Resources Department head John Childs raised issues of “leakages and spillages” that had occurred in operations in the Mereenie oil and gas field, where fracking has long been taking place.
Childs said these were “never known” to Water Resources “because the regulation was all through the Resource (department), and I believe they had a different perspective on the potential impact of those. To my knowledge, when I resigned, some of those issues still had not been fixed.”
According to Franks (who used to work on the Palm Valley field), Santos, the operator and main owner of Mereenie, had been working to clean up the spill “for quite some time” by the time he had finished working at Palm Valley.
While pointing out that NT, WA and SA had petroleum regulations (“Queensland doesn’t; that’s why they have all the problems over there”), he said there was “no getting over” the fact that early wells at Mereenie had been “drilled on the cheap.”
“Here you have some definite guidelines you have to follow when you drill a well. At Mereenie they lived by the very margins of that, so casings only got 30 centimetres of cement around the bottom,” he said.
“The rest was left open, and that’s how the aquifer on the back side of the casing was allowed to corrode through the casing, and that’s when you had oil going into those very shallow sub-surface aquifers.”
He said “most operators (including Petrofrontier and Palm Valley) cement to surface, it’s a very small addition to well cost and it removes the aquifer from the back side of your casings, so the casings won’t rot.”
I quoted this discussion to Santos, and received this statement from a spokesman for the company.
Santos has stringent safety standards and practices across its operations that meet, and in some cases exceed, regulatory requirements.
The majority of the drilling in the Mereenie field took place more than 15-20 years ago. The last oil well was drilled there in 1997 and the last gas well in 2004.
Santos maintains absolute transparency with the NT Department of Resources on any historical incidents. There are no outstanding environmental issues at the Mereenie field.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has been used successfully in the Australian oil and gas industry for over 60 years. It is a process used sometimes to enhance the productivity of a well.
In the Mereenie field, Santos has used hydraulic fracturing in about a dozen wells with no adverse impact.
A spokesman for the Department of Resources said the issues raised were “historical” and had been dealt with by the DoR. He said there were no outstanding environmental issues at the Mereenie field.
“Santos provides regular updates to the department on their operations and are required to report environmental incidents,” the spokesman said.
The Arid Lands Environment Centre, however, is still concerned at the Northern Territory Government’s regulatory approach, and last year called for a moratorium on all fracking operations in the NT. ALEC is particularly critical of the fact that miners are excluded from provisions of the Water Act.
But when quizzed by ALEC’s Jimmy *****ing last Friday, the Petrofrontier representatives said they believed their operations would be viable even without the exemption.
Parkes and Franks seemed surprised to learn that because of the exemption they were not required to use a licensed driller – which they had been doing.
*****ing said after the meeting said ALEC’s call for a fracking moratorium referred to new projects, and it would be “unrealistic” to expect Petrofrontier to stop at this point, although he would like to see them taken at their word to operate voluntarily within the Water Act.
Interestingly, John Childs says this has already happened in some situations, when co-operative miners have volunteered to work with Water Resources, even though they didn’t have to.
But like *****ing, Childs is concerned that such “prudent” behaviour is a choice for mining companies rather than an obligation under Territory law.
- See more at: https://aliceonline.com.au/2012/03/15/fracking-the-centre/#sthash.O2nyrx6l.dpuf