Thursday, July 16, 2009
The geologists wiped themselves with bandannas, waiting for the core to come up.
David Newell, assistant scientist with the Kansas Geological Survey, was visibly breathless. Something no one had seen before was being lifted from about 1,200 feet under the ground.
“It’s like being the first person on a mountain peak,” Newell said.
The Kansas Geological Survey is drilling a hole in southwest Douglas County that will be about half a mile deep when finished. The project, funded by energy companies in Kansas, started on June 11 and will be completed in two to three weeks, Newell said. The drill brings up sections of the earth, called cores, that tell the geologists what is underground.
The core is the jewel of the find, Kevin Bailey, a geologist and owner of GeoCertified, said. GeoCertified offers hydrocarbon detection services for Western and Eastern Kansas operators. Most drills break the rocks into a “smorgasbord” of cuttings, Bailey said. The core drill brings up a pristine cylindrical piece of the earth that is an accurate representation of what rests beneath the surface.
The drill works by cutting a doughnut-shaped hole into the earth with a diamond-studded drill bit, Joe Anderson, the drill operator, said. The “hole” the drill bit cuts around is the core. The drill cuts in 20 foot segments, and a long chain brings the core to the surface.
At about 1,200 feet, the drill was cutting mostly through sedimentary rocks, such as sandstone and shale, Newell said. Newell said he had also encountered a foot of coal. Compared to the rest of Kansas, the northeast has a relatively scarce amount of coal, Newell said, and one of this project’s objectives is to find out why.
The coal the drill brought up was not valuable for burning because it was muddied with impurities, but it was valuable for the natural gas it gave off, Newell said, and natural gas burns cleaner than coal.
The gas is extracted by the drilling process because it decreases the pressure in the coal bed. Bailey’s company, GeoCertifed, runs a detector on the drill that sniffs out natural gas and coal while the drill is running.
“People talk abut climate change – we’ve seen it over and over in the geological record,” Rex Buchanan, deputy director of the Kansas Geological Survey, said.
In January 2001, a core sample came in handy in solving a natural gas leak that led to explosions in Hutchinson.
“People studied the core sample from the area to look at where it could be leaking,” Buchanan said. “You don’t know how valuable cores will be in the future.”
When the core came up, everyone gathered around it. Within the 20 feet of the core was two feet of gassy coal, which bubbled like Pop Rocks. Newell said he was thrilled.
Justin Schwarzer, Mucostah senior, worked as the driller’s assistant. He said he loved the job because there were always new cores coming up.
“I’m just like any other student working on campus, only my job is a lot more cool,” Schwarzer said.
— — Edited by Steph Schneider
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