FRACKING EFFICIENCY DEVICE FROM STATOIL TO COME NEXT YEAR

or all the outcry over fracking, surprisingly little is said about flaring, unarguably the most wasteful, environmentally damaging byproduct of the new American oil and gas boom.

Thanks to a lack of pipeline infrastructure to move it and collapsed prices for natural gas, drillers across the Bakken shale of North Dakota–one of the richest oil finds of the new revolution–are burning off gas that surfaces as they pump oil from the ground. As The New York Times’ Clifford Krauss reports this morning, the glow from 1,500 flares across the region is not only more visible from space than the city lights of Minneapolis, but it also creates six million tons of carbon dioxide annually, the equivalent of three medium-sized coal-fired power plants.

Then there’s the waste. The burned gas, The Times estimates, could provide enough fuel to heat a million U.S. homes.

But Statoil, Norway’s national oil company, may have a solution. The company, which has been rapidly expanding its operations both on- and off-shore in the United States, has teamed with General Electric to develop a “compression box” for trapping and processing the gas on-site, allowing it to be used, rather than wasted. Krauss explains:

The first step of the process is to strip out of the gas valuable natural gas liquids like butane and propane, which can be used for petrochemical production. The liquids can then be put in pressurized tanks and delivered by truck to processing plants. The rest of the gas can be compressed and stored in what G.E. calls “C.N.G. in a box.”

The device was originally designed to be a mobile natural gas station to fill up cars, trucks and buses. But Statoil plans to use the boxes to fuel equipment, particularly drilling rigs that have already been converted to replace 40 percent of the diesel they burn with gas.

By Statoil’s calculations, if all the rigs in the Bakken were converted to run even partly on natural gas, more than 60 million cubic feet of natural gas — or roughly a fifth of the gas now being flared — could be saved every day.

The cost, Krauss says, is modest as well: About $1.5 million per unit. Statoil plans to have eight prototype units up and running by the end of next year.

Here’s hoping they work as well as planned, and other companies integrate the technology, too. No matter how plentiful natural gas has become in the United States, it is not infinite.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danbigman/2013/12/18/a-technical-fix-for-the-most-wasteful-damaging-part-of-the-fracking-boom/