diggin a pit wv style
What 'cha diggin the hole for?
its a pit...they put a plastic liner in it and the drillin rig blows all the drill fluid and cuttings in it, when they are done we pump the water out and just fill back in over the mud left in the bottom and put it all back on or as close to original grade as possible
Ah yes, pit for the drill fluid and cuttings. I haven't worked around gas drilling before, do they use a "drilling mud" like Bentonite?
no, just water and compressed air
I got 'ya. That's the same method we used building lock chambers on the Ohio river to drill down to McNary clay then installing dewatering wells/pumps. I lugged around that dang 6" discharge line 'till I was sick of it! How many feet does a typical gas well go down?
They build pits similar to that but bigger to hold water to "frack" shale wells around me. They need over a million gallons of water before they start the pumping operation. Wells around here are anywhere from 4-12,000 ft deep. They are going to come back and drill sideways on some of the older wells to release more gas trapped in the Marcellus shale formation. Quite the operation to see when they set up to frack a well. I will try to get some pics in the next few months as they are staging equipment to do it.
the wells that we usaully deal with are about 4000-5000ft down and about the same horizontally, they are going back on alot of the old wells they drilled years ago, making the pads bigger and drilling 1-5 more wells like that on them....that pic there is of a smaller pit...only 40x80x14...most of them are 60x100x14 and you are right bill most of the water in the pits comes from when they frac it, i have seen those big setups they use for marcellus wells, its similar to what we use here but not quite as big i think the target formation here is devonian shale
Oil around here is at 800'-950'. I don't think it's a coincidence that is about where sea level was. Or at least thats where sea level was when it was here.
Hey gasfield, Who do you work for? Where's this location?
gasfield services inc. that one is in grapevine fork of beechcreek