Despite What Politicians Say, Hundreds of BC Gas Wells Leak Methane
When B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission identified significant methane leaks from hundreds of gas wells in 2013, the energy regulator withheld that information from BC Liberal politicians.
Members of the former Christy Clark government wrongly claimed that B.C. wells didn’t leak and that the province’s shale gas industry was “clean.”
The report, which looked only at the Jean Marie formation north of Fort Nelson, concluded that “there may be as many as 235 instances of visible gas migration and 900 total instances of gas migration in the north zone of B.C.”
Gas migration, a chronic and costly liability in the oil and gas industry and the subject of major petroleum textbooks, refers to steady or intermittent gas leaks that can be caused by the drilling, fracking or even cementing of wellbores which create pathways for leakage to the surface.
The leaking methane can travel along fractures or faults into soils, the atmosphere or aquifers which can absorb the gas and carry the contaminated water off to other areas.
(One recent study
confirmed that methane leaks from shale gas wells can travel great distances in aquifers and that regulators aren’t doing enough to monitor the risks to climate change or water.)
The 2013 commission report also admitted that the agency did not have “access to good research related to the effect of gas migration on aquifers in order to inform decision-making”— a deficit that, say critics, the commission has yet to correct.
Leakage rates from well sites can be so prolific that they make the impact of methane drilling and fracking as dirty as mining coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
"The scale of the leakage from BC’s 26,000 oil and gas wells is immense, poorly quantified and highly under-reported. It has implications for the shale gas industry as well as for repeated claims made by LNG proponents, including the current NDP government, that methane from northeastern B.C. is “clean.”
The commission has an incomplete picture on well leakage. The industry wasn’t required to report leaks until 1995 and only then prior to abandonment of a well."
More........
https://thetyee.ca/News/2017/11/23/Hundreds-of-BC-Gas-Wells-Leak-Meth/
Rising Methane Levels A Bigger Threat Than CO2 - Below 2C
Yet the current NDP/Green gov has failed to act on capping abandoned and orphan wells and Horgan is in support of the new LNG line.
