Extreme Reach Wellbores Require Extreme Water Use

Or, the march to the first billion gallon frac pad in Colorado

To understand the massive quantities of water that may be consumed to hydraulically fracture the 26 extreme reach wellbores at Draco, let’s look at the water used by the 394 hydraulic fracturing treatments logged thus far in 2024 to FracFocus, courtesy of the data wizards at Open FF who have made extensive inroads to sanitize and extend the FracFocus data.

Actual Water Use is Twice Estimated for Extreme Reach Wellbores

Let’s start with the upper extremes, as shown in the graph above. From the Cumulative Impacts analysis for the Blue Pad in Adams County, Crestone estimated they would consume between 102.9 and 147 million gallons of water to frac the 7 wells at Blue.

Crestone Peak Resources used a median of 47.7 million gallons of water per well and permanently poisoned 304 million gallons of water, more than twice their upper estimate!

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ECMC Complaints Analysis

As complicated and difficult as it can be to submit a complaint to the ECMC (fka COGCC) about an air quality, noise, or odor issue at an oil and gas facility in Colorado, the number of complaints lodged with any location is a good measure of the negative impact that oil & gas exploration has in our neighborhoods. With data obtained from the ECMC, here’s a data table showing the sites that logged more than 20 complaints of any kind since 2010.

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Water Usage for Hydraulic Fracturing in Erie, Colorado

This visualization shows the amount of water used to frac each of the wells drilled within the municipal boundaries of Erie, Colorado since 2017. The data is grouped by operator, with the most recently fracked wells shown first. In total, 626.48 million gallons of water have been used to frac these wells, with a median of 9.64 million gallons of water used to frac each of the 57 wells.

See also:

How much water does fracking use, Part VI

In Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V of this series, we showed that each hydraulic fractured well permanently poisons millions of gallons of water.

Once again, the Erie community is under assault with the 26-well proposed Draco pad and an additional 18 wells proposed to be drilled at the Coyote Trails pad. Let’s look at the data for the Cosslett East wells, completed in September 2023.

A total of 178,725,812 gallons of water were used to drill these wells, with a median of 13,261,197 gallons per well. This is 18.4% less than the median water use for the original Cosslett wells, but without completion information for these wells (the data is not yet available at the ECMC), it’s not obvious why. For reference, here is a visual representation of the two sets of directional wellbores:

A comparison of the directional wellbores for Cosslett (left) and Cosslett East (right).

Once the completion data for the Cosslett East wells becomes available, we’ll update this analysis.

See also:

The Plug & Abandon Process

This article is reprinted from the Winter 2018 issue of Elife.

In a recent tweet for the Erie Protectors (follow us @ErieProtectors), I mentioned that there are 13,103 producing wells in Weld County alone. Another 8,386 are shut in. Another 4,377 have been plugged & abandoned. Another 1,143 are currently being drilled.

Well statistics from the COGCC Daily Activity Dashboard, taken on January 16, 2018.

The numbers are staggering, especially when we get weekly reminders in the news of explosions, fires, spills, and releases of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at these facilities during their various stages of production.

This month, I’d like to focus on the last stage of production – the plug & abandon operation. OSHA has a concise definition of the process :

A well is abandoned when it reaches the end of its useful life or is a dry hole.

  • The casing and other equipment is removed and salvaged.
  • Cement plugs are placed in the borehole to prevent migration of fluids between the different formations.
  • The surface is reclaimed.

By the industry’s own admission, “end-of-well operations are often more difficult than initial well construction.” Let this be a cautionary tale told in three parts.

The Vessels Minerals site is 25 yards from the Aspen Ridge Preparatory School playground.

Crestone Peak Resources began plug & abandon operations at the Vessels Minerals site just east of Aspen Ridge Preparatory School on September 12, 2017. The same day, an observant resident filed a complaint with the COGCC about “an odor that is permeating from the site that can be smelled in the school parking lots.” When the COGCC sent out an inspector the following day, he had this to report in a notice of alleged violation (NOAV):

COGCC Staff also observed […] children playing in the playground and watching the rig crew’s operation, and volatile organic compounds (“VOCs”) visibly drifting toward the children in the playground.”

While Crestone took corrective action the same day and installed emission control equipment, they had every intention of venting VOCs 25 yards from a playground for 8 weeks while they conducted business as usual. The community was only made aware of the NOAV when an Erie Protector found it online almost two months later.

Lessons learned? If you see it, report it. The rules & regulations are inadequate to protect us. The industry has complete disregard for the communities in which they operate.

The “Oil & Gas Site” designation on the Erie Highlands Concept Plan

Our second tale comes from an idyllic suburban development just east of Grandview in Erie. The concept plan for Erie Highlands includes three innocuous “oil & gas site” designations in what appear to be pocket parks and open space. Imagine the surprise of recent owners of near-million dollar properties when fourteen characters on a pretty picture turned into a work over rig less than 100 yards from their back doors, especially when realtors had told them the wells were already plugged.

The workover rig at the William H. Peltier #2 site, originally completed in 1986.

Lessons learned? Do your homework. Self-serving realtors and developers have no interest in providing more than the minimal state-mandated disclosures about nearby oil & gas developments. They will pretend property values are unaffected and will deny community meetings to inform residents of O&G operations. When you’re looking for a new home, visit the COGCC online map at http://cogccmap.state.co.us/cogcc_gis_online/ and find out where historical, current, and future O&G development may impact you.

Saulcy 4-1 and surfacing liquid near well location.

Our final tale comes from Windsor, where in October 2017 “an old well that was plugged in 1984 began spilling oil on Colorado 60 east of U.S. 287.” Operators in the region were quick to respond to the well that had been drilled by an unknown operator in the 1920s or 1930s, but “an estimated 5 gallons to 6 gallons every minute” were spilling from the well.

Lessons learned? Oil & gas is forever. This blight upon our neighborhoods, open spaces, and environment has far-reaching implications. Operators come and go, but their impacts will remain long after we forget their names.

How much water does fracking use, Part II

In Part I, we showed how Crestone Peak Resources had used 160,349,639 gallons of water to frack the 13 wells at the Waste Connections and Pratt sites. Sadly, it gets worse. Between the Morgan Hills, Woolley-Becky, and Woolley-Sosa sites, Crestone Peak Resources used 225,137,194 gallons of water to frack 22 wells.

So all together now:

Crestone Peak Resources has used three hundred eighty-five million, four hundred eighty-six thousand, eight hundred thirty-three gallons of water to drill 35 wells on five pads in Erie, Colorado.

See also:

How much water does fracking use?

Recently, we stumbled upon FracFocus, an additional resource linked from the COGCC complaint site. FracFocus allows the public to view “Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Product Component Information Disclosure” documents that include some summary information for each well, as well as a detailed chemical composition of the fluids injected at each well head. We ran the numbers for Waste Connections and Pratt, and came up with a single catastrophic statistic: 160,349,639 gallons of water.

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Erie town trustees tell angry residents they were unaware of venting near school, launch probe

With the support of neighbors from surrounding communities, Erie residents voiced their concerns about the volatile organic compounds released at the plug & abandon operations near Aspen Ridge Preparatory School and the Kiddie Academy of Erie.

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