New drilling technology aims to dodge pollution

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RIFLE - Getting to and extracting natural gas from miles underground requires an impressive blend of engineering, science and infrastructure. All that complexity also places profound, sometimes irreparable, stress on the surrounding air, land and water.

Many opponents to drilling on western Colorado's Roan Plateau believe it's only a matter of time until it brings an ecological catastrophe to that wilderness.

Energy companies and the Federal Bureau of Land Management, which will oversee any development on the plateau's public lands, argue enough protections are in place to ensure the Roan will not be seriously threatened.

Many conservationists simply point to an area west of the plateau for a symbol of the threats posed by energy development: Garden Gulch. It might be the most ironically named patch of real estate in Colorado.

Consider what airborne environmentalists discovered there last winter - a frozen waterfall, plunging 100 feet down the face of a sheer cliff.

It was chemical-laced runoff from a drilling rig on top of the cliff. Such rigs used temporary ponds to hold the fluids used in the drilling process.

This one leaked. So did three others in the Gulch last winter.

The waterfall would eventually be joined by a monolith of brown silt, also washed over the cliff, from a pipeline construction project.

Such silt can eventually wash down into a stream - choking the life from it.

The silt and the chemical runoff all went unreported for month, until spotted from the air.

Colorado Trout Unlimited's Executive Director David Nickum sums up the danger posed by energy development on the Roan: "You have an industry that, unfortunately, is chemical dependent and it's accident prone as we've seen by numerous spills in the area."

If inspections are the best defense, the odds don't seem to favor the environment.

Any drilling on public land will be inspected by the Federal Bureau of Land Management.

The BLM's Glenwood Springs field office is adding staff - 15 additional inspectors in three years, tasked with inspections all over the Western Slope.

Glenwood field office manager Jamie Connell, who oversaw the agency's development plan for the Roan, said, "Our number of oil and gas compliance inspections has gone up by 600 percent."

In all, 18 inspectors are currently responsible for over 1,200 wells - nearly 70 per inspector.

A 2005 study from the Western Organization of Resource Councils indicates an inspector typically visits around 60 a year.

Still, the agency is issuing drilling permits by the hundreds. The Glenwood Springs office estimates it will have issued nearly 800 drilling permits over the past two years ending this December.

David Neslin, director of the Colorado Oil and gas Conservation Commission, which oversees inspections on state land, thinks both the federal government and Colorado are fighting to keep pace.

"There has been a tremendous energy boom that we're experiencing and have experienced the past few years and we're in the process of trying to catch up with that," said Neslin.

That's why technology might be the biggest game changer.

The buzz term these days, for both energy companies and conservationists alike is "minimizing footprint." In short, it means drilling more wells using fewer rigs.

To do that, companies are relying on "directional drilling."

Unlike older rigs that had to drill straight down, the new generation can reach out, drilling horizontally, then vertically. They're able to send a shaft out a mile, then down another two miles to hit a 25-foot round target area of gas.

Like a piece of wet spaghetti, put enough length on the pipe and it will allow an extraordinary amount of flex.

Now rigs can drill in multiple directions, reaching more gas, without having to build more pads to support the drilling rig. Where there used to be 20 feet between wells and only about four wells per pad, companies can get 14 to 22 wells per pad.

Less pads mean a lot less impact on the environment.

Bigger companies like Encana and Williams now use a system of pipes to move thousands of gallons of fluids between central facilities and the well sites.

This eliminates the need for unsightly permanent storage tanks to collect the oil, gas and water that comes out of every producing well.

It also eliminates the need to truck huge quantities of drilling fluids to well sites, which according to Encana spokesman Byron Gales, is a "win for the air, for the wildlife and the landscape."

Encana and other bigger companies are also moving toward cleaner operating drilling rigs powered by natural gas.

"They are very talented teams that work in these areas and the innovations and ideas are incredible," said Gale.

As development grows faster than oversight, such talent may be the best hope for the Roan Plateau to avoid what grows in Garden Gulch.