“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. - See more at: http://aliceonline.com.au/2012/03/15/fracking-the-centre/#sthash.RFHWRyPG.dpuf
CTP Price at posting:
41.5¢ Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Held
