A new study has warned that an absence of publicly available data on the UK’s onshore oil and gas drilling raises further question marks over the safety of future ‘fracking’ wells.
The study, headed up by Researching Fracking in Europe (ReFINE ), pieces together scientific papers, government reports and industry data in order to assess the implications for unconventional oil and gas exploitation, including shale gas.
Lead author, Professor Richard Davies, said: “The findings confirm that well barrier failure and well integrity failure is an issue and that publicly available data in Europe on this seems to be sparse.
“Data from the monitoring of active wells and periodic surveys of abandoned wells would help assess the impact of shale exploitation.
“It is important that the public should have access to this information.”
Professor Davies, of Durham University and ReFINE, said the study marked a “starting point” and that a “huge bank” of information had been collated.
While a lot of well data is publicly available in the US, he warned that it was not comprehensive enough for the researchers to distinguish serious and minor well failures.
“In the UK, wells are monitored by well inspectors but there is no information in the public domain, so we don’t really know the full extent of well failures. There were unknowns we couldn’t get to the bottom of.”
With plans to expand shale gas ‘fracking’ he advised industry in the UK to learn lessons from leaks and poor monitoring at existing onshore oil and gas sites.
The study has been published in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology.
