Technology, Methods Reflect Industry Quest to Reduce Drilling Footprint
RPSEA's 2008 project, The Environmentally Friendly Drilling Systems Program led by the Houston Advanced Research Center, is featured in the July edition of the The American Gas & Oil Reporter.
Operators, service contractors, equipment manufacturers, and major university and research laboratories are teaming to devise innovative methods to reduce the environmental footprint of onshore drilling, completion and production operations. Examples include drilling multiple horizontal or directional wells from a single pad using smaller and lighter rigs, well site and road construction using low-impact technologies, small-hole coiled tubing drilling, “green” completions in shale gas plays, centralized hydraulic fracturing locations, and recycling flowback water from large frac jobs.
The term often used to describe the industry’s efforts is environmentally friendly drilling(EFD). But how does one go about determining whether a given method or technology actually reduces the environmental footprint of oil and gas operations in the field? The Houston Advanced Research Center–which was started by George Mitchell, the father of the Barnett Shale play 30 years ago–is working to develop an environmental “score card” to rate the impact of EFD efforts, according to Rich Haut, HARC program manager.
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HARC Eprint.pdf 559.809 KB (559809 bytes)
