Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Using Natural Gas To Power Rigs in the Bakken

Anyone following the Bakken boom know the challenge of powering the rigs. Here's an alternative: natural gas, being tried in Oklahoma.
SandRidge has agreed to let Green Field Energy Services Inc. provide power to a well in northern Oklahoma's Mississippian formation from natural gas being produced there.

SandRidge, which has struggled to get electricity to its well sites in rural Oklahoma and Kansas, also is using 43 natural gas generators to reduce its diesel usage, Dewey said.
Green Field is teaming with GE Oil and Gas to bring cheaper, cleaner power generation options to the oil field, the Louisiana-based company announced this week. SandRidge and Houston-based Apache Corp. will test the equipment in their operations.
Green Field announced this week it had signed a global supplier agreement with GE, which last year partnered with Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy Corp. to promote natural gas as a transportation fuel.
Chesapeake subsidiary Peake Fuel Solutions is marketing GE's modular “CNG in a Box” units to ease the spread of fueling infrastructure.
Go to the link for additional information.

Link to NewsOK.com.

It's a two-age internet article; near the end of the second page, third paragraph from the end, this paragraph:
Continental Resources Inc. has used natural gas to power a couple of its rigs in North Dakota, which helped cut fuel costs by about a third, said Rick Muncrief, the company's senior vice president of operations.
More at Green Field Energy services website.

8 comments:

  1. Off topic of this post,but I see that most of NFX permit's in NW Williams Co. are now canceled. If CLR did buy these acres, (Big Valley) does NFX have to cancel permits before CLR can proceed and re-permit??

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    1. Based on what I have seen at "Basic Services" at NDIC website, sometimes, the permit appears to have been simply transferred from Newfield to Continental Resources, so I don't think they are necessarily canceled. I have seen any number of wells that say original operator: Newfield; current operator: CLR.

      But it is very likely that Newfield is canceling these permits and CLR will go back, do their own surveys, etc, and get their own leases. But again, this way beyond what I should be talking about....just idle chatter, but that's how I see it.

      Maybe others with more knowledge, can chime in.

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    2. Thanks for your reply. One question, I have to wait until 5:00 P.M. my time to get the daily activity reports you seem to get them yesterday. What's up with that. HA.

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    3. Not "yesterday." Same day, just earlier in the day.

      If you subscribe to Basic Services ($50/year) the wells are updated first thing in the morning.

      So, the night before, I go to the NDIC confidential wells listing, and using "search" function, find the wells coming off the confidential list the next morning. If I remember. I put those on the blog to remind the next morning to check the "Basic Services" update on the wells.

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    4. I have Premium Services, did not realize that I could do that.

      Alot of fun watching the activity in the area. Williston is crazy, I go there once a week for beer, wine, and oh yea groceries. Anyway I really enjoy your site, check it several times daily.

      And now some WINE!!

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    5. I hope you have a mild winter. Good luck.

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  2. http://blogs.star-telegram.com/barnett_shale/2013/01/devon-energy-still-no-1-in-the-barnett-shale.html

    "Powell notes that the Barnett Shale was still chugging along at 5.2 Bcf/d in October despite the sharp decline in drilling in the field. Some of that doubtless is because wells drilled in the past were finally connected to a sales line. For example, Chesapeake only last year laid an 8-inch line to its Westgate padsite on the southern edge of downtown Fort Worth, and that well was drilled in 2008 and completed in 2009. See our item here. But operators also say that despite their deserved reputation for sharp production declines in the early years, Barnett wells are proving to be pretty decent long-term producers. We've run some numbers ourselves using Powell's data and wells that are 10 years old still produce 11 percent of their peak initial production, while those 20-30 years old are still producing on average 10 percent of their peak. Of the 85 Barnett Shale wells 20 years old or older, all but four were still producing in June, the latest month we have. They averaged 99,000 cubic feet a day."

    But don't tell the NYT.

    anon 1

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    1. Superb. You beat me to the punch. I was going to try to do a stand-along post on all the natural gas that was yet to be produced in the Bakken despite the fact that it's an oil field, not a "gas" field.

      That's why I've begun stating whether wells are hooked up to natural gas lines or not. It is clear from comments I get that folks don't understand the flaring issue in North Dakota.

      In a nutshell:

      a) companies aren't going to put in natural gas lines to remote wells until they have to (it's not economical to do so)

      b) once well density reaches a tipping point, the natural gas lines will be in place and more and more wells will be hooked up to a natural gas pipeline (as you note above)

      c) finally, by law/regulation, they can't hook up a natural gas pipeline (at least in North Dakota) until someone (like ONEOK) comes out and tests the natural gas before it goes on line and mixes with other natural gas "downstream." So there will always be some flaring, and in fact it gets worse as the boom accelerates and won't start coming back down until natural gas pipelines catch up with the drilling.

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