Sootypaws Journal

I'm working on the fracturing posts related to the Berry Energy well in the Fernow Experimental Forest but wanted to, briefly, mention an important avenue of inquiry that will be just slightly touched on in those posts.

The pressures used to fracture a formation can be quite astounding -- sometimes over 5,000 pounds per square inch. Questions I don't have an answer to include, just how much pressure are casing and cementing geared to withstand? As blacksmiths we are very aware that there's a lot of crap steel on the market now, and has been for the past decade or so. I wonder how much of the casing and tubing used in wells is of domestic or foreign origin.

Drilling events where fracturing- like pressures can occur are called kicks. That's when a bubble or quite a large mass of underground hydrocarbons at high pressure rises to the surface. When this happens, the pressures can be great enough to cause the borehole to bulge as the bubble rises.

Obviously, at times, something has to give. Industry would like us to believe this never happens. The question is, just how common an occurrence is this?

Here's a link to a PowerPoint presentation on kicks for a petroleum engineering class. And this link will take the reader to a directory showing all the class directories available, and within those directories there are documents or further directories. Most of these classes are for graduate students and there's lots of math but what I look for is basic concepts.

Here are the links to blog posts on the Berry well at Fernow Experimental Forest so far:

Math Problem (about chlorides and measuring chloride load)
Oops! (Berry Energy's Discharge Monitoring Report)
Fernow Experimental Forest (about the Forest and some news links)
Liming the Pit (the purpose of hydroxide treatment)
SAR (sodium in drill waste and its negative effects)
What Happened at Fernow (what I believe caused the vegetation kill)