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Oil and gas drilling could soon have a smaller environmental footprint thanks to the unlikely collaboration among a team of students, a building materials manufacturer and a natural gas company.
A team of engineering and natural resources students from the University of Wyoming recently won a contest to design an environmentally friendly, low-impact road for trucks, equipment and machinery that cross delicate desert habitats to get to the thousands of drilling sites dotting the American West. Their idea: Use a completely recyclable, roll-out road and mat system that leaves no trace once drilling is complete. And the oil industry is taking note. Greg Schamber, a regulatory analyst for EnCana Corp., advised the students as they developed the technology during the yearlong contest and said his company is planning to implement some of their designs at Jonah Field, a massive natural gas field in western Wyoming"We're trying to test their designs and incorporate them into some of our operations," Schamber said. "Our goal is to reduce our footprint out here." The students' roll-out recyclable and reusable roads and mats do just that. Charles Dolan, the University of Wyoming civil engineering professor who led the students, said the students solicited a Wyoming start-up, Heartland BioComposites, to supply synthetic boards and mats -- made out of milk jugs and wheat straw -- for their roll-out temporary road and mat system to use in environmentally sensitive areas like Jonah Field. The synthetic boards are stronger than the currently used oak boards, which are imported from Louisiana, and they are more resistant to extreme weather conditions. Wood mats have long been used for roads and drilling pads, Dolan said. And Heartland has been developing synthetic versions of the mats for the past four years, said Heath Van Eaton, the company's president. But the roll-out road idea is completely new, Dolan said. "It's kind of a hybrid," Dolan said. "Using some old ideas and some new ones to solve old problems." Van Eaton estimated the mats would cost about 40 percent more than traditional oak mats, but notes the cost would be recouped because the mats are recyclable. Tackling the 'potato chip' problemThe old problem the students' design tackles relates to the geology of Jonah Field, which provides 1.5 percent of the United States' daily gas needs. "Jonah Field can be described like a bowl of potato chips," Dolan said. "Every time you hit a potato chip, you're hitting a lens of compact sand with gas in it. But to get all those chips, you're going to need a lot of holes." As a consequence, Dolan said, Jonah Field is dotted with 3,000 wells over a relatively small area, complete with cleared areas for roads and drilling pads for each well. The University of Wyoming team estimated that trucks and heavy machinery need to make about 8,000 trips to a well site to complete each well. Current road technology involves completely clearing areas, which destroys root and soil structure -- and critical habitats. The students' new design crushes grass but allows water and light through and keeps the root and soil structure intact. Grass and other plants can grow back in as little as a year, rather than 20 years if the road is cleared with a blade and bulldozer. Dolan said he is glad the students' designs have captured EnCana's attention and he hopes other industry players will take note, as well. He said the amount of area a company can disturb while drilling relates to the amount of area it has recovered -- or brought back to original conditions. If the roll-out road and mat system allows companies to recover more land quicker after drilling, then they can drill more. But he cautioned that the technology should be used to protect areas where drilling is already taking place, not as an excuse to drill in environmentally sensitive areas. "Just because we can make more environmentally friendly ways to go in and drill doesn't mean we should drill in areas that we shouldn't go into in the first place," Dolan said. Industry collaborationEngineering design, environmental consideration and industry collaboration are just what the contest's sponsors had in mind when they designed it. "This technology could have an enormous benefit for people working in industry," said David Burnett, a petroleum engineering professor at Texas A&M University and the director of technology at the Global Petroleum Research Institute, which co-sponsored the event. "So far, we haven't spent much money, and we've gotten great ideas -- and four dozen engineering students exposed to the concept of considering the [environmental] implications of their engineering designs." The Global Petroleum Research Institute's Environmentally Friendly Drilling contest was also sponsored by the Houston Advanced Research Center and Halliburton Energy Services. Halliburton donated $60,000 for prizes. EnCana's interest in the technology is a testament to the students' hard work, Burnett said. The company is currently working with Heartland BioComposites to tweak the students' designs for synthetic mats. The 8-foot-by-12-foot mats serve as buffers between the ground and the heavy trucks, tractors and rigs that sit or move over them for the duration of drilling. "We're excited about this -- using a product that's sustainable and made from annual, reclaimable materials," Heartland's Van Eaton said. His company primarily designs fencing materials from sustainable products and recently delved into the oil and gas drilling mats. "We're helping oil companies ... minimize their environmental impacts and reduce their impact on ecosystems," he said.
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