As traffic whizzed by on Interstate 25, 12 trucks in a field near Frederick, each with a 1,200-horsepower motor, fired up and began pumping fluid out of 20-foot-high tanks and down a freshly drilled Anadarko Petroleum Corp. well.
The destination for the 450,000 gallons of high-pressure fluid was 6,000 feet below the surface, where it fractured the rock, releasing more natural gas.
More than 90 percent of the oil and gas wells in Colorado are hydraulically fractured, and with the announcement that there may be up to 1.5 billion barrels of oil in northeastern Colorado, there look to be many more “fracked” wells.
Sugarland, Texas-based Anadarko, which made the reserve estimate, said it plans to drill up to 2,700 wells into the potentially oil-rich Niobrara formation.
And there are about 20 other oil companies searching in the Niobrara from El Paso County to the Wyoming border.
Each of these companies is relying on horizontal drilling — where a well bore can extend a mile underground — and new fracking techniques.
“We are on the verge of a drilling boom, and the key is fracking,” said Mike Freeman, a lawyer with nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice.
“Fracking is bringing oil and gas development to regions and backyards that have never seen drilling before,” Freeman said.
It took Anadarko’s contractor, Superior Well Services, about a week to haul in the water, sand, chemicals and equipment for the frack, which would take just one day.
As it began, Jon Anderson, a senior completions technologist, sat before 10 computer screens in a trailer on the site.
The readouts showed details on things such as slurry rates, downhole pressure and wellhead pressure, and chemical mixing.
The first test was to pump in plain water at a pressure higher than would be used in the frack to check the well’s integrity.
“Take us to 50 barrels and line out there,” Anderson ordered.
Fracking has been used by the oil industry since 1949.
“There is no meaningful domestic oil and gas production without fracking,” said Tisha Schuller, president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, a trade group.
Still, as oil and gas development approaches more developed areas in Pennsylvania, New York, Texas and the Front Range, fracking has become controversial.
Environmental and community groups raised concerns about its safety, the toxicity of ingredients in fracking fluid and its impact on air and water.
That has led to a push for better data, disclosure and controls on fracking by state and federal agencies, including:
• An Environmental Protection Agency study looking at the impact of fracking on drinking water resources, from the acquisition of the water to the disposal of frack fluids.
A preliminary report is slated for next year and a final report in 2014.
• An EPA-proposed rule, expected to be adopted next year, limiting air pollution from oil and gas operations, including fracking.
• A Department of Interior-proposed rule for regulating fracking on public lands.
• A Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission proposal requiring drillers to file the ingredients of their frack fluids in a database with public access. A public hearing on the rule is scheduled for Dec. 5.
• A joint industry-state program in Colorado to test residential water wells before and after fracking. Companies responsible for 90 percent of the wells drilled this year are participating.
“It is a start, but more needs to be done,” said Gwen Lachelt, director of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project in Durango.
Among the needed steps, Lachelt said, are: requiring the industry to disclose all frack chemicals, even those claimed as proprietary, and larger setbacks to keep drilling and fracking farther from homes.
But the threats from fracking may be overstated when compared with other risks in oil and gas drilling, some environmentalists and researchers say.
“The term ‘fracking’ is being used for all the things in the process that can cause problems,” said Matt Watson, an energy-policy specialist with the Environmental Defense Fund, in Washington, D.C.
“Most of those problems have nothing to do with the actual fracking,” Watson said.
The biggest pollution problems have been caused by surface spills, abandoned wells and poorly constructed wells, which allow gas, oil and chemicals to escape, Watson said.
In 2007, there was an explosion in a home in Bainbridge, Ohio, soon after a well was fracked. Investigators determined it was poor well construction and too much pressure built up in the well that forced gas out of the well and into the house.
The largest fine ever levied against an oil company in Colorado — $423,000 — was for contaminating a drinking-water well with benzene from a leaking surface pit.
Checks for pressure, leaks
After holding the well pressure steady at nearly 5,500 pounds per square inch (about 170 times a common auto tire pressure) for an hour, Anderson got ready for the frack.
Before fracking in Colorado, a company has to check the concrete job around the well with a sensor that creates a log.
During the frack, the job must be monitored by a pressure gauge — if the frack fluid was to blow out, the pressure would drop.
Both the cement bond log and pressure records must be kept for state inspection.
What protects the groundwater as the oil well passes through the aquifer is the concrete and surface casing.
An audit of Colorado’s fracking rules by Stronger, an independent, nonprofit organization, noted that the state does not have minimum standards for surface casing.
Dave Neslin, director of the state oil and gas commission, said Colorado’s case-by-case decision on surface casing is effective.
On the Anadarko job, the recipe for the frack fluid was mixed in a large tank — sand, chemicals and water.
The solution was carried by the dozen pumps that fed into a manifold — which, like a cannon, shot the fluid down the well and out of small holes in the pipe, or casing, 6,000 feet below.
While water and sand make up 99 percent of the fluid — the sand is to prop open the cracks in the rocks — chemicals are added to improve efficiency.
Acid is added to help make fractures bigger. A “slickener,” such as a light oil, reduces friction on the water going down the pipe, and a soaplike surfactant makes it easier to pump the solution back up.
Also added are alcohol to limit corrosion and chemicals to stop clay from swelling and closing the fractures.
“There has been an evolution in fracking fluids,” said Will Fleckenstein, an adjunct professor at the Colorado School of Mines. “More chemicals are being taken out, making it more of a water frack.”
Part of the reason is to make the frack more environmentally friendly and part is economics, said Fleckenstein, who also is an industry consultant.
A horizontal frack consumes as much as 10 times the water as a traditional frack — 4 million gallons or more — and takes up to five days to complete.
“The cost of water and chemicals become an issue,” he said.
Secrets versus loopholes
Colorado’s proposed frack-fluid disclosure rule would require operators to file the quantities of fracking fluid and the breakdown of components with FracFocus.org — an independent Internet database used by several states.
“The one huge loophole is allowing for trade secrets,” said Mike Chiropolos, an attorney with Boulder-based Western Resource Advocates. “That has to be closed.”
The oil and gas association’s Schuller said the industry is entitled to trade-secret protection, just like any other industry.
“If it is used too much, the industry would be willing to revisit it,” Schuller said.
Even at the minimal levels reported — Anadarko already voluntarily files its fracking fluids with FracFocus — environmentalists voice concerns about the chemicals.
“Some of the chemicals may only be a hundredth or a thousandth of the frack fluid, but EPA measures the toxicity of some chemicals in parts per million and parts per billion,” said Lachelt, of the accountability project in Durango.
What to do with used fluids
Once the frack was completed, the process of removing the frack fluid, or the “flowback,” where the fluid was piped into large tanks at the far end of the field, began.
This is called a closed-loop system, where the fluid never touches the surface and fumes are contained in closed tanks.
The fluid then can be recycled for another frack job; left to evaporate in open pits, often at other sites; or disposed of in underground waste-injection wells.
In Colorado, 68 percent of the frack jobs in 2011 have used closed-loop systems, according to the state oil and gas commission.
In July, fumes from fracking flowback pits near Battlement Mesa in Garfield County were so strong they forced homeowners a half a mile away to shut their windows.
“The petroleum smell was overpowering,” said Bonnie Smeltzer, a Battlement Mesa resident. “If they are going to drill, they really have to do a better job.”
Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912 or mjaffe@denverpost.com
Numbers
99.4% Portion of fracking fluid made up of water — about 91.1 percent — and sand
4 million Gallons of water used in a horizontal frack, about 10 times that for a traditional vertical frack
