GREELEY (AP) – In 1969, scientists were looking for a peaceful way to use nuclear weapons. Applying them in the natural-gas and oil fields of northern Colorado seemed an ideal way to get to the fuels buried deep below the surface.
Project Rulison was born on the Western Slope, with a 40-kiloton nuclear test project.
There, they had the idea of using the bomb to unleash the natural-gas below. It worked, but a hefty dose of lingering radiation contaminated the gas, and cleanup continued until 1998.
Though that experiment was a “fail,” oil and gas phenoms are continually coming up with ways to meet new oilfield demands in an a more environmentally friendly way.
Look no further than the drilling rig.
Digging deep into the earth for the liquid du jour has catapulted from the ancient Chinese spring pole, to the cable rig with chisels drilling for brine, to today’s hybrid technology that creates a smoother, more efficient engine to drill tens of thousands of feet below the earth.
“The average person doesn’t realize the rocket science behind it,” said Bruce Wells, a former energy reporter who started the American Oil and Gas Historical Society in Washington, D.C. “It’s amazing how ingenuity kicks in.”
Drilling innovation got its start before natural gas and oil were “anything more than flammable curiosities found seeping from the ground,” Wells reports in his paper, “Making Hole,” which details the history of drilling for gas and oil.
Wells marvels at the discoveries, dating back to when a bent tree would provide the power to punch a hole in the ground to drill for brine water.
Innovations and inventions followed through the years, as the United States developed markets for kerosene, which around the turn of the century, lit street lamps. The invention of the light bulb would create a recession in the industry just before 1880, until modernization of the railroad industry and gas-powered car engines about six years later would again create demand for the fuels.
Decades would pass. Problems would be solved, and more issues would come up as the fuels grew harder and harder to come by.
Directional drilling came about in the 1970s; the ‘80s brought more innovations.
“They studied lasers for a while,” Wells said. Laser drilling technology, indeed, was studied as a tool for drilling in the 1960s, but it wouldn’t be until 2002 that the applications could be developed out of research from the Colorado School of Mines. Still, though, it’s not used much in the field.
None of it was born out of sheer ingenuity; the industry advanced much of the technology through necessity.
The latest advances being used in the Wattenberg Field are focusing on safer environments for workers, more energy-efficient systems to save on fuel use and emissions and noise reduction to please the neighbors.
Synergy Resources is using three automated drilling rigs in the field today, all which take the heavy work out of the hands of workers, who now control robotic arms to do the heavy lifting.
Ensign Energy, which owns the rig and whose employees drill the wells, laud their injury-free times with signs outside for all to see.
“It’s always in the hundreds of days where they haven’t had a reportable incident,” said Craig Rasmuson, chief operating officer of Synergy. “A lot of times, the issues they have are simple falls on an icy location.”
An added bonus with the ADRs is they’re natural-gas powered, which reduces emissions from the standard diesel engines. That lessens not only emissions, but noise complaints.
For a company like Synergy, which tends to drill closer to urban areas, that’s sacred territory.
Rigs powered by natural gas became a necessity in the oil fields of Wyoming, Ensign officials explain. There, under emissions scrutiny for the Environmental Protection Agency, the state banned diesel.
Rig operators developed the natural-gas powered rigs, and many just used their field gas piped in from the wellhead.
The necessity of greener engines will grow in North Dakota, by the year 2020, operators have to cut flaring – which NASA reported could be seen from space last year – by 80 percent.
But there are disadvantages with running gas powered rigs, explained KL Tipps, engineering manager for Ensign in Denver.
“They’re not good at low power,” he said. “Diesel will start from zero. Natural gas (won’t), and it’s just the nature of the fuel. Bigger engines don’t like light loads.”
Natural-gas engines don’t generate as much power as a diesel engine, so they have to be bigger to create the necessary horsepower to run the rig and the equipment.
“Early in the process, we put load banks, which is a means to generate heat and run engines and generators harder, so they don’t black out when you need load,” Tipps said.
Think of it in the analogy of a car: If you’re barely moving, but the car is in fourth gear, when you step on the gas, it lurches. If you’re in first gear and step on the gas, it takes off. Load banks are used to keep generators in the right area for when they need to step on the gas, and it can take off.
But, Ensign officials kept pressing; having load banks to keep the gas engines running was a bit of a waste of fuel. So they developed hybrid technology.
The company is now trying out its hybrid rig west of Mead. They tried in Wyoming with success, but drilling up there is different than Colorado. The rig has been running a couple of months, and crews are liking it, though some admit, they are a little intimidated by the new technology. It’s kind of like the first time working on a computer with its unfamiliar bells and whistles.
The hybrid rig looks much like any other. The one exception is a large, blue metal trailer sitting to the side of the rig. Inside, 134 lithium batteries sit in a cooled enclosure, delivering power when necessary, a process only visible through a computer screen that shows how the battery keeps the engines running efficiently.
An on-site electrical engineer from Canada monitors operations as it is still in the research-and-development mode.
“This is still in the infant stages,” said Jim McCathron, vice president of sales and marketing with Ensign. “It’s not a proven technology. We’ve proven it can work. Now, we have to prove how well it can work.”
McCathron explained the battery pack was a “wild hair” they had seven years ago. They started working with some companies, but the battery packs were cost-prohibitive.
“It was a $5 million project, and no one wanted to bite off a $5 million project. So we let it sit,” he said. “About two years ago, we got some interest. And suddenly, we got it put together.”
Rig operators say they don’t notice much difference in the rig’s operations – until they have to run on one generator. The battery pack keeps the operations running smooth. No lurching at all.
What operators like is how it dovetails with the so-called “social license” of drilling in today’s America, where they must be better stewards of the air, water and land. As drilling moves closer to the urban centers, the need for quieter rigs that use less fuel is growing.
“We developed this primarily for helping our gas engines perform better,” McCathron said. “If they’re running off a battery pack, they have immediate power. The beauty of it is it will work with diesel. They don’t care whether it’s diesel or not or if you’re on highline power.”
Highline rigs connect directly to the grid. In peak-usage times, battery packs could be especially helpful when there are power swings.
“This takes the peak out of it,” McCathron said.
The future is a continually evolving one, and one that will see a variety of innovation in years to come. Ensign officials would like to put more hybrid rigs out there and others that run directly off the grid. But economics have to make sense, too.
Until then, the process continues to get upgraded.
“Everything is just getting refined better and better,” said Rasmuson, of Synergy. “The oldest horizontal well is probably four years old now. Every week, I’m hearing something new that’s been tried. They’re not reinventing the wheel, just tweaking things.”
