Goetz Schuppan said he already has lost 15 older, vertical oil and natural gas wells because of nearby horizontal drilling activity, and he is preparing for much more damage in the near future.
Schuppan is president of Hennessey-based Singer Oil Co., which operates older wells in Kingfisher, Blaine and Garfield counties in the heart of the booming STACK play.
“So far, operators have been putting in one horizontal well per section. Now they’re putting in eight or nine more wells on the same section,” Schuppan said. “Some of our wells that survived before will not survive that kind of onslaught.”
Schuppan spoke Friday at the inaugural annual meeting of the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance, a group formed to represent the state’s vertical well operators, which tend to be small or family-owned companies. The group has grown to more than 300 members, most of whom attended Friday’s meeting.
Schuppan blames hydraulic fracturing on nearby new horizontal wells for flooding his decades-old vertical wells with high pressures and large amounts of water. In at least two cases, water and pressure from the nearby horizontal well caused Schuppan’s production storage tank to overflow.
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