Wattenberg Field, Colorado
The Denver Post recently reported that Anadarko estimates between 500 million and 1.5 billion barrels of oil remain in the Wattenberg field in the Denver-Julesburg Basin in Colorado, thanks to the success of their horizontal drilling and fracing completion techniques in the Niobrara formation. Their first 11 wells started out with an average production of 800 BOPD.
Anadarko plans 1200 more wells in the Niobrara with TD’s below 6000′.
The Denver Post recently had a pretty well-balanced article about fracking. The article explains that the problems occur if the surface casing is not cemented properly, and the fracking procedure includes pressuring up the borehole to make sure the cement holds.
Often the problems are caused by surface spills and older wells that do not have cement jobs up to current day standards.
We used RockWorks15 and Google Earth (TM) to create a map of all of the 5+ magnitude earthquakes across the world in November 2011. You can visit our RockWorks data page to download the Google Earth KMZ file and the RockWorks data file.
http://www.rockware.com/assets/products/165/downloads/data/34/usgsworldquakes5+nov2011.zip
Once you load the KMZ file into Google Earth, more information about each quake is available by clicking on the symbols.