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digging for gas And now for Part 3 of an unplanned three-part series on energy development in this part of the world... Digging for natural gas. By far the biggest boom in this area for the past twenty years. Or, as some would say, the biggest boon. (Depending on where your paycheck comes from, and how much you enjoy the outdoor world.) Yesterday's pronghorn surveys started us in the middle of the largest gas field around. Twenty miles later, and we were still in it. Most of what you're looking at up there is 80-acre spacing, or eight wells per square mile. They want to go down to 40-acre spacing. Or closer. More than twice as many wells. Other fields have gone down to 10-acre or 5-acre well spacing. Biologists in those areas decry the destruction but really, once you drop down below 20-acres, is there anything left to save? I irritate them by pointing out 5-acre spacing in their fields is a good thing. There are a limited number of drilling rigs available in the world... so the more drilling rigs they have up in their country, the fewer there are to drill down here in mine. Oddly enough, there may eventually be a limit to the number of wells drilled. And that limit seems to be coming not from all the habitat and wildlife that is lost, but by... air pollution. Each drilling rig has to have one or more waste pits to catch the oil and sludge contaminated water from drilling. The volatile compounds evaporate away into the atmosphere. Most are supposed to pump out this waste water and retrieve the hydrocarbons, but that's expensive. Easier to ignite the pits, preferably in the early morning hours, to flare the waste away as smoke. Whether it's legal or not. We saw two pits flaring in just one flight. How large of a carbon footprint is that? Add to that the dust and compressor and pipeline stations and it is easy to see why these little survey flags for the next new well are more a death knell than an engineering accomplishment. |
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