Drilling advances

	Vol. 232 No. 1
JIM REDDEN, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Operators get a new tool to rate their HSE impact

The industry faces myriad uncertainties as we move into a new year, but two things we can all agree on are that HSE will be the acronym on everyone’s lips and that green will be the color of choice. Certainly, drilling safely with minimal environmental impact has always been at the top of industry priorities, but in the years ahead, all things related to health, safety and the environment will be in the foreground of oil and gas operations like never before.

Perhaps nowhere is that supposition more of a given than in the US, where operators in the Gulf of Mexico, the shale gas plays and everywhere in between are scratching their heads, wondering what new ground rules they should expect going forward. In an attempt to relax some of the ambiguity, the non-profit Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) is giving operators the opportunity to determine precisely how their drilling projects stack up in the eyes of regulators and the general public alike.

As part of the joint privately/publicly funded Environmentally Friendly Drilling (EFD) program, HARC is now seeking operators to participate in its Environmentally Friendly Drilling Systems Scorecard. The groundwork for the site-specific scorecard was laid two years ago to assess drilling operations and technologies with respect to air, site, water, waste management, biodiversity and societal issues, according to Dr. Rich Haut, manager of the EFD program.

HARC is seeking out operators to join in the testing phase of the new initiative aimed at further promoting advanced technologies for low-impact oil and gas drilling. The objective, it says, is to engineer a common methodology that can be employed across the US to document the environmental and societal tradeoffs associated with energy development.

The scorecard is a tiered system with up to five stars being awarded. Operators who use new-generation rigs, low-emissions power packages, advanced rigsite water management systems, and small surface footprints potentially can earn the highest (five-star) ratings.

HARC said land owners, regulators and the general public can use the scorecard to objectively assess operators’ environmental performance. Operators, meanwhile, can evaluate their own operations and compare them with industry best management practices.

 “The scorecard is similar to the successful US Green Building Council’s scorecard used in the building environmental arena,” Haut said in a HARC press release. “We started this effort over two years ago with a workshop that brought together more than 100 individuals representing industry, environmental organizations, academia, government and the local community. Through this effort we have identified key attributes that can be measured.”

Texas A&M University and HARC manage the EFD program, which counts among its participants an eclectic group of operators, service companies, academia, government laboratories, state/federal agencies and even long-time critics of the oil industry, such as Conservation International.

The program has examined a variety of technologies ranging from site access to modular, low-impact rig technologies —the latter, including alternate power sources, integrated waste minimization and reduced emissions. The eventual aim of these studies is to devise wellsite pads much smaller than conventional locations and capable of drilling multiple wells from one location. That work, investigators envision, hopefully will extend to water-intensive and controversial hydraulic fracturing operations in the shale gas plays.

Thomas Williams, managing director of Houston’s Nautilus International, who formerly worked for both the US Energy and Interior departments, was one of the creators of the EFD initiative. While HARC and Texas A&M are the primary managers of the program, Williams continues to focus much of his efforts on advancing EFD initiatives. He says the scorecard provides a means to show operator executives the true value of minimizing their environmental impact.

“The scorecard will help give us a way to articulate what we are doing to reduce the environmental footprint and actually judge it,” Williams told World Oil. “It will get the employees and the senior management on the same page so they all understand the benefits. With this, we can spell out that here are some things we can do to reduce the environmental footprint, and in the end it will be cost-effective, and at the end of the day we can all reward ourselves for doing the right thing.”

In 2010, the EFD program expanded to Europe as a means of “identifying and applying best practices in Europe as well as to identify new innovations and applications,” according to the EFD website. The European chapter is under the direction of Gerhard Thonhauser of Austria’s University of Leobe.

Williams said the flurry of activity in exploiting shale gas reserves around the globe is one of the reasons the EFD program expanded to Europe. With Poland and other countries in Europe accelerating shale gas drilling within their borders, the establishment of a European branch of the EFD program was a natural extension, he said.

According to HARC, the main objective of the scorecard is to provide a common lexicon that is easily understood by the general public, industry, environmental organizations and government agencies. The scorecard enables issues to be identified and measured so that they can be discussed and dealt with.

HARC researchers concede that the implementation of some technologies under consideration can bring certain environmental tradeoffs and potential costs. However, they contend that, in the longer term, the efforts are cost-effective—in large part due to synergies that allow various costs to be avoided. For example, drillsites with smaller footprints require less restoration once the drilling phase is completed to comply with regulations and lease terms.

While Williams agreed that EFD can bring economic benefits to operators, he said the real benefit goes much deeper: “We’re all doing this because it’s simply the right thing to do.”