US Energy Dept Project Promotes Low-Impact Drilling

DOE Project Leads to New Alliance to Promote Low-Impact Drilling
Alliance to Fund, Transfer Technologies to Minimize Environmental Impact of Drilling for Oil and Natural Gas

Washington, DC — A project supported by the Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has given rise to a major new research consortium to promote advanced technology for low-impact oil and gas drilling. Announced earlier this month by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) and Texas A&M University, the University/National Laboratory Alliance will fund and transfer advanced technologies to accelerate development of domestic oil and natural gas resources with minimal environmental impact.

The alliance has its roots in a project funded through the Office of Fossil Energy’s Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Program. The goal of the 3½-year project, which is drawing to a close, has been to identify and develop low-impact drilling systems for use in environmentally sensitive areas such as desert ecosystems and coastal margins. Among other accomplishments, the project has led to the creation of the Environmentally Friendly Drilling Program (EFD), which will continue with support from the energy industry and other government organizations after NETL sponsorship ends on March 31, 2009. The new alliance is part of the EFD.

"This is an excellent example of how the government’s investment in advanced, environmentally friendly technologies to develop domestic energy resources has encouraged industry interest and leveraged the taxpayer dollar," said Victor Der, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy. "Technology advancement is the key to simultaneously addressing issues of energy security, supply, affordability, and environmental quality."

According to Rich Haut, manager of the new alliance, its goal is "to fund the development of low-impact systems that can be used in environmentally sensitive regions and share the latest research findings concerning these systems with leaders of energy, academia, environmental organizations, and government. . . . We will consider all aspects of energy resource recovery, not only traditional oil and natural gas production methods but also unconventional production, such as natural gas from shale or coal-bed methane."

In addition to HARC and Texas A&M, founding members of the alliance include:

• Argonne National Laboratory
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Sam Houston State University
• The University of Arkansas
• The University of Colorado
• The University of Wyoming
• Utah State University
• West Virginia University

The new University/National Laboratory Alliance is an outgrowth of an NETL-supported project with Texas A&M University entitled "Field Testing of Environmentally Friendly Drilling Systems." The $2.3 million project, which started on September 30, 2005, and will end on March 31, 2009, has resulted in a number of other significant accomplishments. These include:

• Identifying more than 90 specific technologies related to the footprint of oil and natural gas operations that, if widely commercialized and applied, could help industry achieve more than a 90 percent reduction in environmental impact.
• Creating more than 20 jobs that lasted for the duration of the project, and contributing to future job growth by developing technologies to make oil and gas resources that are environmentally restricted today producible tomorrow.
• Establishing an Oil & Gas Desert Test Center near Pecos, Texas, on the edge of the Chihuahua desert, to evaluate low-impact drilling technology in desert ecosystems such as those found in the Western United States.
• Establishing a systems approach to optimize drilling decisions and ensure that the activities selected satisfy chosen criteria; the approach has been successfully used in the EFD program to determine the optimum system for a given site.
• Developing a small footprint, low-impact process based on sound engineering and biological principles to convert drilling wastes to a useable product.