The Kern County sinkhole in which a Chevron oil worker died last June was in an area with spills and seeps dating back to the mid-1990s – about a year after oil producers started using a controversial kind of injection drilling there, state regulators said in a report released Monday.
Meters used by oil companies to monitor ground movement in the area registered shifting underground in the eight days prior to and on the day Robert David Taylor died, the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources said in its report. Citing ongoing litigation, state regulators declined in a conference call with reporters to say whether that ground movement should have alerted Chevron to possible danger in the oil field.
More than a year after Taylor's death, regulators have not determined an exact cause of the accident, though they have generally linked the eruptions of steam at Chevron Well 20, where Taylor died, and elsewhere in the Midway-Sunset Oil Field to a kind of drilling in which steam is pumped into shallow rock to loosen heavy crude.
Tim Kustic, California's oil and gas supervisor, said sinkholes are "relatively rare." He said the agency is considering new regulations in a bid to "eliminate or curtail" seeps and spills of oil in steam injection operations.
"Our intent is to learn from this experience," he said.
The report said steam injection drilling started in the area around Well 20 in the mid-1990s and that spills and seeps began about a year later. It identified about 30 spills and seeps in the area. In most cases, oil and water flowed to the surface slowly, the report said.
Taylor was a member of an engineering team involved in building an underground containment system to capture seeping fluid and steam near Well 20 early last year, according to the report. He was checking steam coming from the ground in the area when he fell feet-first into a sinkhole, according to the report. His body was found 4 to 5 feet underground.
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