Stepping more lightly on the land

Energy firms working to ease toll on land air, water and wildlife

By Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 10, 2007 at 7 p.m.

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Photo by Matt McClain

Brett Middleton of EnCana Oil and Gas takes samples at a Rifle water treatment facility as Scott Patefield of the state health department and EnCana environmental engineer Richard Ayala look on.

Graphic by Michael Hall

Reducing the drilling footprint

RULISON — Touring the gas fields of Garfield County, Susan Alvillar talks proudly about the efforts of her company, oil and gas giant Williams Companies Inc., to step a little lighter on the land.

Over here, north of Interstate 70, Williams is working with the Colorado Division of Wildlife to improve winter range for mule deer, building ponds so they don’t have to cross busy roads for water and irrigating alfalfa to provide them food.

It’s part of the $600,000 the Tulsa, Okla.-based Williams has committed to assist the animals on once-undisturbed habitat where gas companies now reign. It also makes for wise public relations, with mule deer herds critical to the image and economy of western Colorado.

Over there, south of the highway, sits one of the company’s most advanced drills — a FlexRig that Williams leases for $22,000 a day.

It’s worth the money, Alvillar said. The rig can bore holes multidirectionally, drilling up to 22 wells from a single pad — where once each well required its own pad.

That, in turn, saves time, eliminating the ordeal of taking a rig down and moving it to a neighboring drill site. And the sooner drilling can be completed, the happier people living in the area are and the less disruption there is to wildlife habitat.

“The key to doing business with (this property owner) was telling him we could be off his property in six months,” said Alvillar.

Such advances mark the leading edge of work by some of the country’s largest oil and gas companies to ease their toll on land, air, water and wildlife.

Williams’ environmental efforts are part of the $1 billion it has invested in 2007 alone in western Garfield County, an area Alvillar calls the company’s “shining star” for gas production.

Williams has 13 rigs similar to the FlexRig operating in northwest Colorado’s Piceance (pronounced PEA-awnce) Basin. Each drills numerous wells, steering them thousands of feet outward to gather gas as far as a half-mile outside the rig’s immediate area.

That, in turn, allows Williams to use as few as four pads per square mile as opposed to as many as 16 per square mile using older technology, and reducing the amount of land carved up for well pads by about 70 percent.

Rapid improvements in directional drilling have spelled the end of an era where the only way to obtain natural gas was sinking a well straight down — again and again across the land.

Today, in more and more cases, wells are drilled from outside important wildlife habitat or scenic areas, then steered underneath them to draw out the fuel below.

Many of the technological advances have come in just the last few years, as complaints from citizens and pressure from activists and regulators have increased along with the number of wells, trucks and pollution. They include:

The ability to capture methane gas and other compounds that otherwise would escape into the air during drilling or from storage tanks and other sources, driving up pollution. As a bonus, vapors captured can be converted to product and sold.

The use of recycling water in gas production. Water injected deep underground to help free up gas is brought back to the surface, where it can be used in another well, cutting the amount of fresh water consumed.

Centralizing operations. Williams, for example, can send the fluids needed for the hydraulic fracturing, known as fracing, of more than 200 wells from a single site, reducing the need to move equipment and eliminating more than 350 truck trips per well. It also means a smaller well pad, since fracing equipment doesn’t have to be placed on each site.

Among Colorado operators, two companies — EnCana Oil and Gas and Williams — have garnered the most praise from regulators in recent months for their environmental work. But regulators and even the companies themselves acknowledge that it’s the bigger boys, with far more money, that can better afford to take the lead on greener drilling.

Drilling companies have won compliments, too, from wildlife advocates by opening up privately owned lands to hunters, as well as for collaborating with the state Division of Wildlife on projects to aid animals such as mule deer and sage grouse and improve habitat.

“It was decent of them to do that,” said DOW spokesman Randy Hampton, about Shell and EnCana allowing hunting access. “We see increased recreational pressure on all of public lands ... this was one of the best things that the industry has been able to do.”

Fossil fuel producers also have won praise from environmental groups for their use of solar energy. The industry is a major purchaser of solar arrays, with thousands of the panels powering batteries at well sites and other remote locales across the West.

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