Thursday, May 3, 2007
Gas companies need to reevaluate ways to recover natural gas from the Hugoton natural gas field, according to a recent study by the Kansas Geological Survey.
The natural gas field, the largest field in the western hemisphere, covers a nine-county area in Kansas and Oklahoma, supplying gas to 2/3 of the homes in Kansas.
Natural gas is methane used to heat homes and power gas stoves. With more than 12,000 wells, Hugoton has seen a decline in gas production throughout the years, resulting in the survey’s inquiry.
pullquote
Unless you change the types of wells you’re drilling, you won’t get it out any faster. You have to change something to produce gas more efficiently and economically.
- Martin Dubois, survey project manager
“People were thinking there is no more left, because the gas was slow to come out,” said Martin Dubois, the survey’s project manager. “It has slowed down so much that they thought maybe there is not much left to produce. The approach to get it out must change.”
Geologists predicted 65 percent of the field’s natural gas has been used since its discovery in 1922. However, Dubois worked to find where exactly the remaining 35 percent was located.
Dubois and his colleagues at the survey created a three-dimensional virtual rock model of the reservoir system in order to discover the gas concentration within the rocks levels.
Dubois said the type of rock in the field was important, because each rock has a different ability to contain and release gas.
A rock’s ability to contain and release gas depends on its pores. The rocks that had already released all of its gas had large pores, with high permeability, meaning a high rate of material release.
The remaining gas was stuck in low-permeable rocks with numerous smaller holes, causing the gas and the traditional wells that retrieved the gas to work slower and less efficiently.
Dubois said the wells in place would produce 50 to 80 more years worth of gas, but it might be more of a cost to the companies.
“Unless you change the types of wells you’re drilling, you won’t get it out any faster,” Dubois said. “You have to change something to produce gas more efficiently and economically.”
Dubois said the 35 percent of gas still left could be anywhere from 1 trillion cubic feet of gas to 4 trillion. To put it in perspective, Dubois said during the winter a typical house used 15 million cubic feet of gas a month. This costs about $10, depending on the company.
The gas field has the potential of heating a home for 6 million years, he said, or 6 million homes for a year.
Saibal Bhattacharya, petroleum engineer for the survey, helped with validating the reservoir model. He said a major achievement of the study was the discovery that two fields in the area weren’t working independently of each other.
He said that for years, the Hugoton field and Panoma field were thought to work separately. This affected the Kansas Natural Resource Council’s rules about wells and drilling. People who owned land in Hugoton could not profit from Panoma and vice versa. Bhattacharya said the survey’s study showed that the two fields were interconnected.
Gas from each field was coming out of the other, causing a combined piping effect. The council created new rules according to the study, which changed the way people were allowed to drill.
Bhattacharya and the six co-authors of the report are compiling all data and information for a printed release next year.
“As a small group that we were, we pulled off this huge project,” Bhattacharya said. “I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, but it didn’t take 20 people to do this. It was a big task, and we were able to do it.”
The co-authors include Geoffrey Bohling, Alan Byrnes, Timothy Carr and John Doveton, all scientists at the geological survey.
Ten industry gas companies provided the money for the research.
Kansan staff writer Danae DeShazer can be contacted at ddeshazer@kansan.com.
— Edited by Mark Vierthaler
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