Reprinted from Anchorage Daily News
COLLABORATION: Oil man says surface owners left out of equation in past efforts.
WASILLA – Coal bed methane is back.
Four years ago, Evergreen Resources sparked a firestorm of protest with plans to drill wells for the lucrative gas locked into coal seams across the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, even beneath private property.
Scores of angry landowners packed town hall meetings, spooked over perceived threats to drinking water and private property rights, of clanking industry in backyards and neighborhoods.
Effigies of local legislators – former state Sen. Scott Ogan, an Evergreen consultant, and state Rep. Vic Kohring, who sponsored legislation Evergreen helped write – hung outside one especially charged meeting in Sutton. Ogan later resigned, saying accusations he represented Evergreen over his constituents distracted him from his duties.
Amidst the fury, the borough enacted what at the time were the strictest coal bed methane laws in the country.
Evergreen ultimately left the state without sinking a single commercially viable well for methane, the chief component in natural gas.
Now longtime Valley resident Bob Fowler wants to drill the first of at least five coal bed methane wells in the Valley in a hay field along Trunk Road.
What makes Fowler think he can pull off what a big company like Evergreen couldn’t, not to mention avoid all that controversy? Technology and tactics.
“We incorporate the surface owners into our equation,” he said. “They precluded them from their equation.”
The Palmer High School grad moved with his family to Farm Loop Road in the 1950s. Fowler always kept a home here. And he just put those local connections into play.
Fowler Oil and Gas Corp. hopes to drill a single pilot well in the Mat-Su on 840 acres owned by Fowler’s friend Henry Kircher and three other local families. The four own subsurface mineral rights, too.
So they stand to make some money through royalties if the well pans out.
Evergreen, on the other hand, leased some 300,000 acres of state subsurface rights first, then started dealing with landowners. Many residents above the leased area did not hold mineral rights below, though the company’s first pilot wells did not face that problem.
A SUBTLE PRESENCE
The field sits along Trunk road, near Bogard Road.
From Trunk, all drivers will see is a gravel road where a grassy track is now, and a windowless Colony barn replica, according to documents filed with the borough.
Computers will monitor the action. A security system will preclude the need for fencing.
Fowler hopes to start sinking the well casing in September.
But first, the borough planning commission must approve a conditional-use permit. A public hearing is scheduled for Aug. 20.
So far, reaction has been quiet, compared to the last time around.
Still, this well site sits not far from the Colony schools and within a mile of 1,300 people notified by the borough.
Of 15 comments received as of Thursday morning, five nearby residents voiced support.
Merri Dias was among them. She and her husband, David, live along Trunk Road within a mile of the proposed well.
“Maybe he can come up to my 15 acres and make me rich, too,” Dias joked. “We’d have to really look at it. We have mineral rights.”
A Springwood Drive resident named George Taylor filed a “letter of non-objection” and said while he remained reluctant to support coal bed methane development in the rapidly growing core area, he had been impressed by Fowler’s straight-shooting manner.
CRITICS FEAR POLLUTION
The other 10 comments expressed avid opposition, including several that simply read “NO!”
The state is too big to allow a potential polluter in a populated area, said Doreen Toller, who lives about a mile from the well site. Toller and her husband run a cabin rental and tour company.
“If it’s proven and somebody can show me where it’s proven there’s no contamination, I might feel better,” Toller said. “But I’m not thrilled about being a test subject in any manner.”
Borough law prevents developers from drilling without a signed surface-use agreement from a property owner. The law also requires quarter-mile setbacks from homes, hospitals and schools.
Fowler has filed an application promising to comply.
Among other things, the company also filed the requisite emergency response plan, a plan for reclaiming the site once gas extraction ends and plans for a methane gas monitoring system.
Typical coal bed methane operations bring a warren of drill pads and roads, noisy compressors and millions of gallons of water wrung from coal seams and potentially contaminated. Fowler’s company will use a patented technology to avoid much of that, he said:
First, crews will sink a vertical drill casing about 3,500 feet into the ground, with extra protection for the water table down to 1,000 feet.
Then a company using a horizontal drilling technique will bore into coal seams sideways.
Typically, companies fracture seams chemically to free methane; Evergreen used hydrochloric acid in Colorado.
No water will be brought to the surface because it will be treated and injected below the coal seam into a sandstone layer. The relatively low-pressure methane won’t require noisy compressors.
FUTURE POTENTIAL
The company hopes to use the same strategy in the future at five other methane operations around the borough, at least, including one near hatcher Pass, Fowler said. No permit application has been filed.
A self-described visionary, Fowler is not an oil-and-gas guy; rather, he honed his skills in business. He serves as chairman and CEO of fowler Oil & Gas Corp.
The company just brought on a new president: Arlen Ehm, a petroleum geologist involved in Alaska’s oil and gas industry since the early 1960s. Fowler Oil & Gas shares some owners with a sister company called Native American Energy Group, which rejuvenates oil wells on reservations in Montana as well as uranium mining and conventional gas drilling.
Fowler doesn’t know for certain what he’ll find in that well. But based on a century of geological research, Fowler said, he is confident.
More than 25 coal seams 4- to 30-feet thick lie beneath those hay fields, according to corporate predictions.
Over 50 years, Fowler hopes to recover 85 to 90 percent of the estimated 382 billion cubic feet of gas trapped by water in the seams. The gas would be piped into a nearby Enstar line.
“We want this to be built on a real solid foundation,” Fowler said. “So everyone is as happy with the 10th well as they are with the first one.”
Find Zaz Hollander online at adn.com/contact/zhollander or call 352-6711.
Copyright 2007 The Anchorage Daily News (www.adn.com)