The Good Neighbor

"Look for the helpers", Mr Fred Rogers

My best friend is a Colorado native. Her family has lived on the Colorado plains for generations. Their house stood by itself for decades, but recently a neighborhood was built around it. 

Her family business thrives. It provides a range of products that everyone loves and needs. 

She employs several people from the neighborhood. Her business helps sustain other local businesses. She pays taxes. For example, 10% of K-12 tuition for all kids in the neighborhood is indirectly paid for by her. She volunteers time in school to help kids read, and she helps raise money for a variety of good causes every year. She clearly cares about the neighborhood, and the neighborhood supports her.

Recently, however, her luck has changed. She loves home improvement and occasionally works on her house. Although she does her best to be quiet, not all projects can be done without anyone noticing. This is when a direct neighbor got upset about her activity. He decided to lobby the HOA to remove her from the neighborhood. Is this a reasonable course of action?

Of course, you know my best friend. She is Colorado Oil & Gas. She is a geologist, a landman, a fracker. Colorado is her neighborhood. In Proposition 112, on the ballot on November 6, Coloradans are being asked to ban her from the state. 

Would you ban such a neighbor from your neighborhood? Luckily, most people won’t. It is heartwarming that many Coloradans recognize the helpers. That’s why, amongst others, mayors, teachers, both Colorado Governor candidates, and a range of Colorado non-profit organizations oppose proposition 112.

This is because oil & gas brings huge benefits. Cheap and abundant fossil fuels have helped people around the world to live longer and more comfortably, has helped to reduce poverty, and has enabled modern life and a dramatic increase in human mobility while having an overwhelming positive environmental impact. Our industry has put more than $2,500 in the pockets of every American family every year since 2015 through cheaper oil and natural gas. And it has helped create jobs – efficient oil & gas jobs that on average generate more than 15x the energy per worker compared to jobs in renewable energy.  

As our industry has grown it has become more cognizant of its land use and its impact. We are the last to say we are perfect.  Some of the Shale Revolution newest changes associated with activity in urban areas originate from drilling and completion activities in greater Los Angeles, where the Wilmington Field has been operated for decades in the middle of a big city. As an industry we are working on some of the following tasks to continuously improve being a good neighbor:

• Smaller Footprint. First, the industry has made great strides to concentrate oil field activity to fewer well pads. A downside of this trend is that multiple wells are now present on a single pad, and that pad activity to drill and frac dozens of wells can now take a few months instead of a few weeks – before the pad is put on production for 30+ years. Once the wells have been put on production the surface impacts are minimal.
• Less Traffic. In addition to concentration of wells on larger pads, centralized facilities are now often concentrated on a small subset of all these pads. These centralized facilities comprise infrastructure for natural gas, oil, produced water, frac water and fresh water gathering in a single central place, dramatically reducing trucking traffic during pad development and production.   In addition, as the industry has evolved to pump each pound of sand with fewer chemicals, the number of trucks bringing chemicals to a frac location have also decreased. 
• Less Dust. Newly commercialized boxed sand solutions not only improve logistics and minimize dust and noise, but also reduce overall truck traffic through decreased waiting times for unloading proppant. 

• Less Noise. The newly designed Liberty Quiet Fleet provides 10+ dB noise reduction on frac pumps at every measured frequency from 20-20,000 Hz, as well as a reduction of 20+ dBC at the lower, most impactful side of the noise spectrum. This represents an overall noise reduction of at least a factor of 3x. As you can see in the nearby diagram, the impact of noise reduction from a quiet vs a conventional frac fleet is like the noise reduction you experience of a vacuum cleaner at 10 ft vs speech at 3 ft.  
•  Practically Invisible. In urban areas in Los Angeles, drilling and completion activities are in some cases conducted in permanent encasements, such as the inside of the Beverly Center, a shopping center in Beverly Hills that surrounds about 40 active wells. In other areas of LA, apparent office buildings contain a well pad with drilling and completion activity. As far as we know typical shale wells are not yet completed in these fully encased environments, but we expect this might become a workable alternative in urban areas.
• Farther Away. Alternatively, we expect a further reduction of impact associated with work from frac crews if they set up in a remote area and connect to other wells pads through buried high-pressure pipelines. This centralized “remote” frac approach has been used by the frac industry for decades in the Piceance Basin and various fields in the Central Valley in California and could be a way forward for future development in areas like the Colorado Front Range.

Oil & gas’ history of innovation will help us achieve these goals. In the meantime, our tax funding provides employment to more than 5,000 Colorado teachers. Our industry provides direct employment to 26,000 Coloradans, including about 1,100 Liberty employees in Colorado. Most of Liberty’s 2011 Original Crew members in picture below are Coloradans. We provide indirect employment to hundreds of thousands more – from waiters on the 16th Street Mall to pilots at DIA. 

Please, Colorado, keep these folks working. Keep energy abundant, reliable and cheap for everyone by allowing oil & gas development in Colorado and the United States. Keep my best friend in her beloved neighborhood. 

Recognize the helpers. Please vote no on proposition 112. Thank you.