Lake WIPP

Before drilling a deep hole for an oil or gas well the crew on the drill rig will bore into the earth with a large bit and then set in a casing. The casing keeps rocks and debris from falling down the hole and if gas or oil or water should rise up in the hole under pressure (a gusher) the well can be capped or "shut in." In 1982, a drilling crew set up a rig over a research well one mile north of the main waste-handling shaft at the center of the WIPP site. That well, called WIPP-12, had previously been drilled into the salt beds that would serve as disposal rooms but had stopped short of penetrating a thick layer of anhydrite rock below the salt layers, the Castile Formation,. The drillers had barely re-started the hole, boring down only a few hundred feet deeper, when an unmistakable sound rose up in the casing. Salt water under pressure rose up swiftly in the casing and poured out on the surface. Blowouts of brine such as this were not new to drilling crews in the Delaware basin. A large flow had been encountered at Belco, a drill site in a producing oil field southwest of WIPP, a smaller blowout of brine happened at the center of the first site that was selected for WIPP and brine flows, large and small, had been found at about a dozen other places in the basin.

Some of the other pressurized reservoirs had been small and flow had stopped after a day or two. At WIPP-12 the water flowed for six days until 1.4 million gallons filled a large pond that the media dubbed "Lake WIPP." The brine reservoir was obviously a large one and science managers ordered the well shut in.

WIPP is the center of a major petroleum discovery and the EPA hired experts to predict how many oil and gas wells would pass through the waste in the repository. EPA then set up a limit for the amount of waste that could be brought up to the surface in the cuttings without exposing the drilling crew to excessive radiation. If engineers have guessed right about gas buildup in the waste rooms and if the rooms stay dry (see Engineering a Fix), then the amount of waste brought up by the drill stays below the EPA limit. So far so good, and no sign of deception with an ordinary drilling scenario.

However, DOE and EPA stop at this point and have decided that the blowout at WIPP-12 was a fluke. They argue that when a drilling crew in the future bores deeper and when the drill stem hits the pressurized brine reservoir the crew will act prudently and shut in the well. Unlike DOE science managers, they will not allow the brine to flow freely at the surface. If they allowed the water to flow it would rapidly fill a pit, spread out on the ground, evaporate in the dry air over New Mexico, and leave a layer enriched in plutonium. The plutonium would soon be picked up by surface winds, blown around, and inhaled. This sounds like a "worst case," and it is, breaking the release limit set by the EPA. In the pressurized brine scenario, WIPP is a no go.

All vestiges of Lake WIPP have disappeared. The berms and the plastic liners that were hastily assembled to hold the escaping brine have been hauled away. No one even took a photo. WIPP managers claim that drilling methods in the future will be at least as good as or better than the methods used today and they reason that a drilling operator would probably shut in the flowing brine. I don't say that this couldn't happen. On the other hand, they themselves let the brine flow for days and created Lake WIPP. In a future case maybe the well will blow out on a weekend or a holiday and maybe the drilling crew will decide to cap the well a few days later. Maybe they will be curious and before abandoning their investment they will wait it out and see if the flow stops by itself. Maybe future technology is not all that great. Maybe the crew has set a poor casing, or no casing at all.

The borehole scenario adopted for WIPP illustrates a process that was repeated whenever the project ran into a problem that threatened completion; assume a best case.

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