EAST TENNESSEE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
October 2020 Virtual Meeting
Monday,
October 12, 2020
6:00 - 7:30 pm
Note: ETGS members will receive an email with info for logging into the meeting.
OCTOBER PRESENTATION New: View Video!
Long term effects of a leak in a gas storage well within the Bammel gas storage
field, Harris County, Texas
By
Richard Merrill
Abstract
Early one
morning in the late summer of 1944 young Eugene Klein walked out of
his north Harris county farm house to discover the family's, hand
dug, well was overflowing from the ground. Some time later that
week, his brother Calvin found a portion of Spring-Cypress road that
ran along their farm was burning and would not go out. Both of these
seemingly un-related phenomena were produced by one of the largest
underground blow-outs in history where over 30 billion cubic feet of
natural gas was injected into the shallow water aquifer that
supplied much of Houston and Harris County. Much later, in the
summer of 1999, a small boy residing at the North West Pines mobile
home park walks, carrying his tackle box and fishing pole to a pond
near the entrance of the park. The pond is circular, with steep
sides and full of muddy water.
All three of these events occurring in north Harris County, Texas
are linked by an event that was slow to be detected. That event was
an underground blow-out in the Bammel gas storage field just south
of Cypress Creek parkway (formally Farm to Market road 1960) in the
northern portion of Harris County, Texas, about 25 miles north of
downtown Houston. Although this uncontained release of natural gas
has been controlled, many reminders of this event are still with us
today.
Biography
Mr. Merrill received his B.S. degree in
Geology from the Ohio State University in 1964. After a year working
for a geophysical survey crew, and as a well site geologist, he
attended graduate school at The Brigham Young University in Provo,
Utah, receiving a M.S. degree in Geology in 1972. He went to work,
in 1967, for Shell Oil Company in their New Orleans offshore office
where she spent 12 years in various geologic and Petroleum
engineering positions, in both domestic and international regions.
From 1978 until his retirement in 2005 he held management positions
in several independent Oil and Gas entities in Houston. The last
several years of his career was as a consulting geologist and
geological engineer concentrating on economic evaluations of
petroleum producing properties, including a year evaluating
properties in the former Soviet Union.
After spending 35 plus years in the humid south, he escaped to an
aviation airpark in Chuckey, Tennessee where he loves with his
lovely wife Virginia, his airplane and his miniature dashound
"Charlie".
Greetings, and welcome to the October 12, 2020 ETGS virtual meeting.
We hope you, your family, and your colleagues are staying healthy.
As a courtesy please mute your cell phone or the microphone in your laptop/tablet to minimize background noise and feedback echos. We will also make an effort to mute all participants - at least until the presentation is finished. Please use the chat feature to type any comments or questions you may have. We recommend that you send questions for the speaker to "everyone" so all participants can see the question. In the interest of time, we may hold the Q&A at the end of the presentation.
We will create a virtual attendance list. It is not always possible
to tell who is participating, especially for those joining by phone,
so please email
etgs@live.com
to be listed on the attendance sheet. Let us know exactly how your
name should appear on the list. We will add a note explaining the
lack of signatures due to COVID-19-induced distancing and have an
ETGS officer sign as usual.
Thank you for your patience and understanding as we try this online
format. As always, we welcome and appreciate your feedback and
suggestions for improvement.
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Page updated October 12, 2020 |