The Frackers

Aspen Public Radio

Published July 8, 2014 at 1:10 PM MDT

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Two rigs, the H&P 318 drilling rig with white derrick, and a yellow snubbing rig drilling out plugs from a recently fracked well. There are 22 wells planned for this pad.

Roger Adams

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Stacked drill pipe in the derrick of H&P 318 rig.

Roger Adams

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Snubbing rig, drilling out plugs from a recently fracked well.

Roger Adams

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Stacked pipe on the H&R 318 rig site.

Roger Adams

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A flowback operator monitors pressures as a well is brought into production.

Roger Adams

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Snubbing rig supervisor Trinidad Ramos.

Roger Adams

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Feeding pipe to the snubbing rig.

Roger Adams

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Feeding pipe to the snubbing rig.

Roger Adams

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Driller, David Duke, controls the drilling string and drilling bit thousands of feet below the surface. He steers while monitoring pressures, torque, weight, distance, speed, and many more parameters from the “dog house.”";s:

Roger Adams

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Drilling hand connecting well casing.

Roger Adams

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Drilling hands connecting well casing.

Roger Adams

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Halliburton pump trucks.

Roger Adams

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A completions hand monitors the water and sand slurry pumped through the manifold (center) into the wellbore at high pressure located nearly one mile away.

Roger Adams

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The first phase of treating produced water occurs in these skim tanks, where condensate is removed.

Roger Adams

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Recycled and cleaned produced water is aerated in collection ponds in preparation for use in future frack jobs. The brown color is caused by bacteria introduced by WPX to remove all of the hydrocarbons to a non-detectable level.

Roger Adams

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(Foreground) Halliburton frack fluid pumping trucks and manifold. Approximately one mile from H&R 318 rig.

Roger Adams

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A well pad with a portion of producing wells that have been fracked and wells undergoing completions. Once completed all that will remain visible are the rows of wells at the center of the photo.

Roger Adams

The word “fracking” has come to mean drilling in general for oil and gas-- and a major concern for communities and environmentalists in Colorado and elsewhere. In reality the process of hydraulic fracturing is a specialized procedure used to create cracks in shale deposits thousands of feet underground which in turn releases trapped natural gas. There are hundreds of fracked wells in Garfield County. Often you can see them from the highway. Recently Aspen Public Radio got a tour of a fracking operation run by WPX Energy near Parachute. These photographs by APR's Roger Adams are of WPX Energy's H&R 318 rig and the man who work on it.

The men work ten twelve hour days on and two weeks off. The low salary on this site is around 70K per year while some of the highly technical positions pay as much as 250K. Most of these workers live in Grand Junction, CO.

To hear APR's Elise Thatcher's report on this site click HERE.

For more on WPX Energy click HERE.

For more on hydraulic fracturing and the public disclosure of fluids used in the process click HERE.