Capped Oil Wells Beneath Homes & Ocean Can Blowout

Capped Oil Wells That Could Blowout in Redondo Beach & Hermosa Beach

Capped oil wells are a real danger in the South Bay.  Pat Aust the Redondo Beach City Councilman and former firefighter knows first hand of the dangers.  Hermosa Beach has a handful of capped wells and some are out in the Ocean as you can see.  However, Redondo Beach has hundreds of them underneath homes and Manhattan Beach has plugged oil wells at Mira Costa High School.  Here is an explanation to help you understand the potential threat to our community if slant hydraulic pressurized oil drilling is permitted underground.

Oil drilling blowout preventers (BOPs) can be used on the drilling site itself on the surface to mitigate risk.  However, blowout preventers CANNOT be used on capped wells or adjacent wells underground & in the Ocean.   If an adjacent capped oil well were to blow on the ocean seabed it would cause a massive oil spill and mess on up and down the coast.  The ocena seabed well could be capped but would required significant emergency effort (like the BP Spill in the Gulf) and would change the integrity of life in the South Bay as we know it.  If an adjacent capped oil were to blow underground beneath homes.  Lives and homes could be lost because an explosion is highly likely.  Residents in Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach who own homes over a capped underground well would never know about the problem until it is too late.  Do we really want to trust the that the integrity of the well was capped properly 30 or 40 years ago?

Crude oil is a flammable liquid consisting of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons of various molecular weights that are found in geologic formations beneath the Earth's surface. Because hydrocarbons and gas are lighter than rock or water, they often migrate upward through adjacent rock layers until either reaching the surface or becoming trapped within porous rocks (known as reservoirs) by impermeable rocks above. However, the process is influenced by underground water flows, causing oil to migrate hundreds of kilometres horizontally or even short distances downward before becoming trapped in a reservoir. When hydrocarbons are concentrated in a trap, an oil field forms, from which the liquid can be extracted by drilling and pumping at high pressure. The down hole pressures experienced at the rock structures change depending upon the depth and the characteristic of the source rock.  The deeper the well the more risky the operation.  E&B is proposing deep wells.

Blowouts happen all the time and are daily occurrence in the oil industry.  Don't convince yourself it can't happen here because Steve Layton knows too well from his Blowout in Louisiana which bankrupted Equinox Oil.

Here is another conclusion that supports this argument from the Coastal Commission.