So clean it up, figure out what happened and let’s get fracking.
The Calgary Sun reports,
Hydraulic fracturing of an oil well in southern Alberta could have caused an oil well blowout a kilometre away, according to provincial regulators.
Friday afternoon, a landowner in the Garrington area west of Innisfail spotted a pumpjack spewing what appeared to be oil and chemicals onto his neighbour’s field.
Black fluid from the well sprayed 15 metres in the air until the man was able to alert a hydraulic fracturing crew working on a nearby well for Midway Energy…
The incident could have repercussions around North America as the industry grapples with rising public discontent over rapidly increasing use of the technology to unlock shale gas and oil reserves.
Fluids blasted deep into the earth under high pressure appear to have intersected underground with the second well, forcing oil up through the well bore at explosive rates.
“We’re still not quite sure what happened,” said Scott Ratushny, Midway Energy’s chief executive. “We’re still investigating it, but something allowed the frack to carry into the same zone, 130 to 140 metres away (underground)”…
Did they get a survey of the nearby wells and the depths and directions to which they had been drilled – BEFORE they started injecting? Two wells can be a mile apart on the surface, but inches apart downhole…