Water and other liquids run out of the Albanian village of Marinze, 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of the capital Tirana Thursday April 1, 2015. Albanian authorities are evacuating residents of Marinze following an explosion at a Canadian-owned oil well. No injuries were reported. A statement from the Calgary-based Bankers Petroleum Ltd. said an “uncontrolled leak of natural gas occurred during drilling operation.” (AP Photo/Hektor Pustina)
Steam, mud, gas and water (including possible fracking chemicals) exploded from a well in early April which had been drilled to a depth of 1600 feet. The explosion rocked the commune of Kuman located in SW Albania. The craters were 650 feet from the actual drill site. The terrorized inhabitants of the Kuman commune panicked while tons of clay fell on houses and their land. Walls of some of the houses cracked and large craters appeared throughout the village. Nearly 70 houses were damaged by gas explosions, 35 of them have grave and serious damages, three are uninhabitable, while the others will be assessed by a commission established by the region. Thankfully, no deaths or serious injuries were reported. The image above shows what appears to be a flash flood of fluids from the drill site.
A Canadian firm, Bankers Petroleum was responsible for the catastrophe and criminal proceeding against the company have been launched according to the Marinza, Fier Police Directorate. According to the Bankers Petroleum web site, "Bankers Petroleum Albania Ltd. activated its Emergency Response Plan as the result of an uncontrolled carbon dioxide release during the drilling of a horizontal well within the Patos-Marinza oilfield, with secondary communication to several nearby shallow wells. Bankers has regained surface control of drilling operations, returning most impacted residents to their homes, however, as a precautionary measure continues to maintain a small evacuation area immediately adjacent to the affected well."
Natural gas as a Bridge fuel.
Bill McKibben notes in Mother Jones:
Even as the price of solar panels has dropped, inexpensive fracked gas reduces the incentives to convert to sun and wind. And once you've built the pipelines and gas-fired power plants, the sunk investment makes it that much harder to switch: Suddenly you have a bunch of gas barons who will fight as hard as the coal barons Obama is now trying to subdue.
As it turns out, economists have studied the dynamics of this transition, and each time reached the same conclusion. Because gas undercuts wind and sun just as much as it undercuts coal, there's no net climate benefit in switching to it. For instance, the venerable International Energy Agency in 2011 concluded that a large-scale shift to gas would "muscle out" low-carbon fuels and still result in raising the globe's temperatures 3.5 degrees Celsius ...
Energy expert Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations has found that if we wanted to meet that two-degree target (and since just one degree is already causing havoc, we sure should), global gas consumption would have to peak as early as 2020. Which is, in infrastructure terms, right about now—if we want to be moving past natural gas by 2020, we need to stop investing in it now.
Robert W. Howarth, in his study A bridge to nowhere: methane emissions and the
greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas, and published in Cornell University's
Energy, Science and Engineering states the following:
Natural gas is often promoted as a bridge fuel that will allow society to continue to use fossil energy over the coming decades while emitting fewer greenhouse gases than from using other fossil fuels such as coal and oil. While it is true that less carbon dioxide is emitted per unit energy released when burning natural gas compared to coal or oil, natural gas is composed largely of methane, which itself is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. Methane is far more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than is carbon dioxide, and so even small rates of methane emission can have a large influence on the greenhouse gas footprints (GHGs) of natural gas use. Increasingly in the United States, conventional sources of natural gas are being depleted, and shale gas (natural gas obtained from shale formations using high-volume hydraulic fracturing and precision horizontal drilling) is rapidly growing in importance: shale gas contributed only 3% of United States natural gas production in 2005, rising to 35% by 2012 and predicted to grow to almost 50% by 2035 [1]. The gas held in tight sandstone formations is another form of unconventional gas, also increasingly obtained through high-volume hydraulic fracturing and is growing in importance. In 2012, gas extracted from shale and tight-sands combined made up 60% of total natural gas production, and this is predicted to increase to 70% by 2035 [1]. To date, shale gas has been almost entirely a North American phenomenon, and largely a U.S. one, but many expect shale gas to grow in global importance as well.