by cw1074 » Thu Jul 11, 2013 6:34 pm
When these wells are drilled, surface casing is set that goes below the deepest aquifer so that the water is protected. The drill pipe is then placed back in the hole and the well is finished drilling. I have seen rare cases where something shifts underground and the production casing is damaged at a very deep depth after production has begun, but I've never heard or seen this happen with surface casing. I can assure you that contaminating the local drinking water isn't in the best interests of the oil companies, so they are going to take every single precaution they can from letting that happen. Also, you are talking about a part of the country that oil used to free flow into the environment and was found bubbling out of the surface of the ground. If oil was migrating to the surface in the 1850's, I can assure you that natural gas and methane were too. Do you think it just magically skipped the local aquifers without contaminating them? Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in Titusville, PA in 1859 to a completed depth of 69.5 feet. I can almost assure you that Oil, gas, methane, etc were all filtering into the local aquifers long before this well was ever drilled.