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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Allen" data-source="post: 345671" data-attributes="member: 389">TFX,In order to lead you to what's most likely the problem here, let me as a geologist give you some things to think about. Maybe 10 years ago I was reading some frac'ing reports on wells in ND, I believe they were Whiting wells.  Anyway, Whiting installed sensors to detect the distance away from the well bore the fractures extended.  If I remember correctly, a little over 2,000 ft was the most I ran across in that report.  Can they do it farther than that, absolutely.  And two wells within 4,000 ft of each other can certainly have fractures that intersect.  I've heard several times of older wells adjacent to new wells where they had to shut in the older wells to avoid them pulling in sand. Importantly though, you must always remember that these wells are in the same geologic formation.Continuing on the geology part here, yes...people try really hard to not induce fractures of a vertical nature.  The reason for this is because as we all know, oil is lighter than water.  It usually is "trapped" right under a nearly impermeable rock formation.  In this case, the wells are in the Bakken Shale, and while shale is generally fairly impermeable, shale is a very fissile rock.  Which simply means it's really easy to break.  Other geologic formations, such as limestone are much more difficult to fracture, probably by a few orders of magnitude.  This suggests that one can easily fracture the shale without fracturing an immediately overlying rock formation so long as you know their respective shear strength.  Just don't exceed the sheer strength of your caprock, because if you do...your oil will literally start floating upwards.  I worked on a fracture job as a work-over rig floorhand back in the 80s when we did exactly this.  We turned a 150 barrel a day well into a 40 barrel (I'm just fudging the numbers, but you get the idea) most likely because we fractured its caprock.  Wasn't until I actually went to UND for geology that I figured out what happened.Anyway, I would be hard pressed to believe the oil development has anything to do with your well problems.  So let's look at what may be the possible contributors to your well problems.You say you "pumped the well hard".  What exactly do you mean by that?  Did you install a larger, higher volume pump?  Because if you did, that's all I would need to hear to know the problem.  Wells by nature have more design concerns than the average homeowner would necessarily know about.  Well screens can be made out of PVC or stainless steel, but they are supposed to be sized according to matrix of the aquifer.  The well screen and its surrounding packing material are intended to not allow movement of the aquifer matrix (sand, silts, clays, etc) into the well.  If a person over pumps a well, you can cause cavitation in the well screen as water velocities are too great.  This will quickly cause damage to the well screen which now allows in larger particle sizes, etc.  Just to be clear, well screens and their gravel pack do fail on wells at random times for no apparent reason.  I'd argue that they were headed for failure already and the homeowner just didn't recognize the symptoms, but I kind of think you saw the symptoms and that's why you have filters on your home's water coming from the well.  It's most likely been failing from the day it was first installed.  It just took XX years for it to get bad enough to create a problem.At this point, it would appear that whatever the cause, your well is on limited time.  Sorry man...</blockquote>

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