50 years ago a nuclear bomb was detonated under the Western Slope to release natural gas. Here’s how

[thackney]

50 years ago a nuclear bomb was detonated under the Western Slope to release natural gas. Here’s how poorly it went.
https://coloradosun.com/2019/09/08/50-years-ago-a-nuclear-bomb-was-detonated-under-the-western-slope-to-release-natural-gas-heres-how-poorly-it-went/
SEP 8, 2019

...But they all pale in comparison to the stab taken on Sept. 10, 1969, when the United States government asked the 270 residents of Parachute to leave their homes during the day while scientists detonated a 43-kiloton nuclear bomb 7 miles away and 8,400 feet below an arid, windblown site called Rulison.

The hope was the bomb — equivalent to 43,000 tons of TNT and larger than the one that devastated Hiroshima in World War II — would force commercially marketable quantities of natural gas from the fine-grained, low-permeability sandstone of the Williams Fork Formation of the Mesaverde Group....

...Mcqueary, an early environmental activist and member of the American Friends Service Committee, said his group was appalled by Rulison and the ultimate designs of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to develop 317 trillion cubic feet of gas by using 13,000 underground nuclear explosions.

“It was part of the thinking at the time,” said Mcqueary, 81. He said those behind Rulison were guilty of deadly hubris. “The scientists believed they could set off atomic bombs to make the Mediterranan Sea rise to irrigate the Sahara Desert and blast a new harbor on the northwest Alaska Coast.”

“They truly believed they could play God with what they invented,” he said....

[thackney]

The plaque marking the Project Rulison nuclear test reads, in part, “one 43 kiloton nuclear explosive was detonated in this well, 8,426 feet below the surface on September 10, 1969.” (Gretel Daugherty, Special to The Colorado Sun)

...All the attempts unleashed pockets of natural gas. At Rulison, a re-entry well produced 450 million cubic feet of natural gas in four separate production tests from October 1970 through April 1971.

The problem was, the freed gas was so contaminated by radiation it could not be sold for use on the market, Cole said. “It was an unqualified failure. It didn’t pan out economically or environmentally.”...

[IsailedawayfromFR]

What they also found out that instead of the prolific fracturing of the earth for miles around, the earth absorbed most of the shock of the explosion, so the frac network was limited in area.

To make matters worse, it made no difference whether fractures were created as the heat from the explosion turned the rock into impenetrable glass.  Description from one test at Gas Buggy.

The 4,042-foot-deep detonation created a molten glass-lined cavern about 160 feet in diameter and 333 feet tall. It collapsed within seconds.

BTW, I would not have wished to be drilling that reentry well as the returns upon drilling through the formation would have been radioactive.  What do you think, @Smokin Joe ?

And Rulison was not the first of the nuclear tests, as a total of 29 of them were executed.

https://aoghs.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/December-10-Nuclear-Frac-AO.jpg

[Smokin Joe]

It turned out the returns were, indeed, radioactive, and the gas produced by the initial efforts was too 'hot' to market.
While a "rubble filled glass chimney" would be extensively fractured, in and of itself, and likely as producible as a clean breccia (little to no matrix material, just angular fragments) there is a question of how extensive the reservoir would be outside the blast zone, and how much producible reserve would be present, even if the product wasn't too radioactive to market.
IIRC, this was up on the Book Cliffs near Rifle, Colorado. I recall seeing a low level disposal site on the edge of the Colorado River near Rifle, fenced off with the usual warnings.

One thing about experiments, though, sometimes they tell you what won't work.
This was one of those, like so many of the attempts to use nuclear devices for civil engineering, and like the others, a fine example of what not to do. 

[IsailedawayfromFR]

One thing about experiments, though, sometimes they tell you what won't work.
This was one of those, like so many of the attempts to use nuclear devices for civil engineering, and like the others, a fine example of what not to do.

You can take that statement outside of science and into history as well.

Things like social and political engineering with communism.  We need to remember failures so we do not repeat.

[Smokin Joe]

You can take that statement outside of science and into history as well.

Things like social and political engineering with communism.  We need to remember failures so we do not repeat.

I fully agree, but the first thing the proponents of failed policy do is erase any reference to previous failures of that policy.

It's like deja vu all over again out there.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

I fully agree, but the first thing the proponents of failed policy do is erase any reference to previous failures of that policy.

It's like deja vu all over again out there.

Hence the need to teach and understand history.

[Smokin Joe]

Hence the need to teach and understand history.

Unfortunately, the slate is being selectively wiped as we type. The (what passes for) history being taught is distorted through lenses of identity politics, fractional agendae, and communist ambition.

For those of us who can find willing ears, we need to pass on a closer version of reality than that being foisted on the youth of today. I haunt old bookstores for textbooks of history from before the 1930s, just because the 'take' on events past is so different, being unassailed so much by the current identity politics and distortions of today (granted, it's a different set of distortions, but definitely not the same as today's)

One must always keep in mind the history of any conflict (and human history is nothing, if not a series of conflicts) is written by the winners and will show that bias.