MOOSE KNUCKLE, Saskatchewan – In what could be a precedent-setting legal case, a 67 year-old Saskatchewan farmer is being sued by an oil and gas company claiming the farmer negligently damaged its reservoirs by injecting water into them.
The small town grain farmer, Bruce Floosky, believes that he has done nothing wrong by drilling and “home-fracking” a water well as part of an irrigation system for his 1/2 section wheat and barley operation. But Calgary-based Cheaterson Energy claims that the fracking process injected copious volumes of frac solution and make up water into one of its shallow gas pools, some 450 meters beneath his recently drilled well.
Mr. Jackson, head legal counsel for Cheaterson, had the following to say:
Mr. Tyrone Jackson III
My client’s PNG assets have effectively been vandalized and damaged by the careless, reckless, negligent, and downright arrogant actions of the Fifty Shades of Hay farm owners.
One of my client’s best shallow gas pools, which I understand produces a total of 2 mscf/d through 14,285 wellbores, has been completely destroyed because almost half of the existing wells are now loaded with water and a home-brewed frac solution, which we can prove came from the water well fracking. My client is seeking compensation for the costs to work over the wells, lost production, as well as punitive damages against the moronic actions taken by the farmer. – Tyrone Leroy Jackson III, lawyer
Cheaterson’s case was originally rejected by Alberta’s energy regulator, who cited that the company couldn’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the fracking fluids in its wellbores came from 50 Shades of Hay. But Alberta High Court Judge Richard George (brother of former Suncor CEO, Rick George) happily accepted the case, stating that, “historically, farmers do very little for oil and gas companies save for giving them grief. Now we have a farmer who has directly effected gas production in the region, and he should pay the cost associated with his project.”
But according to the Saskatchewan Farmers Association, whose entire membership stands behind Mr. Floosky, Cheaterson Energy will have an uphill battle against the Moose Knuckle-based farmer.
PNG representatives from WOOPS and CDOCA have demanded that the farmers frac solution is not privy to the same privacy regulations as oil and gas frac chemicals, and the courts should force the farmer to release data on the compounds he used.
They assert that if they had a chemical breakdown of the frac solution, they could identify what it was that plugged up all their permeability, and then procure a dollar figure needed for repairing the reservoir. This would be in addition to the 3 new wells required to pump the new production water out of the reservoir and into Lake Diefenbaker.
Rinney Smithson, P.Farmer
The idea that Bruce ruined their damn gas rocks is just stupid. Take your head out of your ass Mr. Oilman, and take a lighter to your farts if you want to see gas and hot air! You guys gonna show us a youtubey video next of your flare stacks shoots fountains of water up 50 feet? That gas field was drilled when my daddy was riding the damn horse to school, but these executive types think the gas lasts forever. It don’t, so shut up and leave Bruce alone. – Rinny Smithson, Moose Knuckle Regional Farm Advocate
The case is currently before the courts, and 2P News will be the first to report developments as they become available.
