CHAPTER 01
The shot
December tenth, nineteen sixty-seven. Twelve thirty in the afternoon. Beneath northern New Mexico, a nuclear explosion tears through the rock. Its job is to make a gas well produce. This is Gasbuggy.
The shot sits roughly one point three kilometres underground, just beneath the gas-bearing Pictured Cliffs sandstone. Above it is a working landscape of wells, roads and forest. Below it, engineers are trying to give trapped gas a new route to the surface.
They will get more gas. What comes up with it will change the meaning of success.
CHAPTER 02
The letter
The idea had been around for a decade. In nineteen fifty-seven, El Paso Natural Gas approached Livermore scientists about using nuclear explosives to increase production. The federal Plowshare programme was looking for peaceful uses for nuclear energy. Here was a customer with a very specific problem.
A reservoir can contain plenty of gas and still be a poor well. Gas has to move through connected pore spaces and fractures quickly enough to pay the bills. Tight rock makes that journey difficult. Gasbuggy proposed creating a much larger underground collection zone.
That is the wager. Spend the energy in one enormous pulse, open pathways through the formation, and let the well collect the result. First, somebody has to prove what is already down there.
CHAPTER 03
Before the countdown
Two El Paso engineers, Cutler and Kendrick, later described the field work in their drilling report. Crews drilled test wells, recovered core, ran logs and measured gas flow. They tested water-bearing formations too. Those measurements would become the before picture against which the nuclear experiment was judged.
The site was in Carson National Forest, beside the Jicarilla Apache Nation. People used the surrounding landscape. The consequences of a test here would extend beyond the men assembling equipment at the wellhead.
CHAPTER 04
The people outside the fence
The health-surveillance team left a remarkable record. Before the shot, it counted people and milk cows within a hundred miles. It located mining and tunnelling operations. Staff collected water, milk and vegetation samples, building a picture of radiation levels before the experiment.
The gas company was watching a reservoir. The monitoring teams were watching a region. Air samplers, field crews and laboratories would have to answer a separate question: did anything escape?
At detonation, thirty-three health-surveillance personnel were on location, including monitoring teams in two aircraft. Their later report recorded no detected release following the shot. That finding concerns the detonation and its surveillance; the later production tests would deliberately bring gas to the surface.
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CHAPTER 05
The rock becomes the machine
The reported yield was twenty-nine kilotons. Deep below the site, rock was vaporised and melted. A cavity formed. Fractured material above it then collapsed into the opening, leaving a column of broken rock: the nuclear chimney.
The column of broken rock reached upward into the reservoir. Gas could enter the fractures, collect around the rubble and reach a well. The essential test was how much useful reservoir this disturbed zone could actually connect.
The explosion was over. The reservoir experiment was beginning. Crews now had to drill back into a subsurface that had been violently rearranged.
CHAPTER 06
Back into the hole
The re-entry record describes voids and broken casing. At one point the drill encountered steel damaged by the shot. Gas samples and pressure tests became clues to the connection between the well and the new chimney. Even that connection was difficult to interpret from the early measurements.
Eventually the gas flowed into production tests. The headline number sounded promising: Livermore reports output six to eight times the earlier rates. But a flow rate is only the first line on a sales sheet.
CHAPTER 07
The gas that came back
Laboratory analysis found radioactive constituents in the produced gas, including tritium and krypton eighty-five. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. Some of it was present in methane molecules. Contamination was mixed into the product the experiment was trying to recover.
The chemical mixture had changed as well. The laboratory report describes carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen diluting the formation gas. Repeated production altered the mixture and reduced measured radioactive concentrations. Gas quality was a moving target through the tests.
A stronger flow therefore raised more questions. How much energy did the gas contain? What was mixed into it? What treatment, handling and acceptance would be required before anyone could buy it? Those questions travel all the way from the wellhead to the customer.
At Livermore, an archive photograph shows JoAnn Rego adjusting a gas-analysis column while Gasbuggy samples are being studied. Her work sits at the other end of that spectacular blast: a sample, an instrument, a result. The fate of the gas depends on what those measurements reveal.
CHAPTER 08
Then came the water
There was another oilfield complication. El Paso engineers Dean Power and Charles Bowman reported an unexpected increase in water production. The water contained tritium, so handling it added cost and complexity. Their investigation found that condensation alone could not explain the volumes coming up the well.
They compared chemistry, pressure and flow. Their interpretation pointed to water entering from the Ojo Alamo formation through the well system. Later test results indicated the leak had been sealed. It is a recognisable well problem, made harder by radioactive material in the fluids.
They had detonated a nuclear explosive beneath a gas reservoir, and still ended up chasing a water leak. Every sample and every repair added to the real cost of the experiment.
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CHAPTER 09
The flare and the pipeline
El Paso’s nineteen seventy-three production report gives the commercial result plainly: the production gas was flared. None had been introduced into pipelines. Federal standards for introducing man-made radioactivity into natural gas had not been established.
The company said the volume involved did not justify the lengthy and expensive process of seeking the necessary federal action. It reported no plan to put the gas into pipelines.
The reservoir had answered one question. The business had several more. Gas at the surface still needed an acceptable product, a route to market and a price that covered the entire operation. Gasbuggy never became that commercial demonstration.
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CHAPTER 10
What stayed behind
Two further nuclear gas-stimulation experiments followed: Rulison, then Rio Blanco. Livermore’s historical account says the programme demonstrated technical possibilities without demonstrating economic viability. Plowshare ended in nineteen seventy-seven.
At Gasbuggy, surface cleanup was completed, while contamination remained underground in the detonation zone. The Department of Energy reports that sampled nearby producing wells have not shown radionuclides attributable to the test. Subsurface restrictions and long-term oversight remain part of the site’s history.
A Department of Energy site manager explained the distinction in this twenty-twenty film.
Ken Kreie, DOE site manager (original film audio, published 2020): “While there are below-ground restrictions, there are no restrictions for the site surface. The land is open range and used for livestock grazing and recreation.”
Gasbuggy leaves an unforgettable oilfield lesson. You can make the rock give up more gas and still fail to make a sale. In this experiment, the blast was only the beginning of the bill.