Welcome back to The Link-Up, your weekly rundown of our favorite stories from the past seven days in the oil and gas industry!
Canton Repository
Orphan wells are bad. Plugging them is good. And now, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources has the improved resources needed to make the world a little bit better, thanks to a revamped budget and plugging program. There are roughly 750 known orphan wells in Ohio (with the actual number likely higher than that), and each costs between $20,000 and $200,000 to plug.
U.S. Department of Energy
We've always known that we're amazing, but we can confirm that the U.S. Department of Energy (headed by secretary Rick Perry) does too, thanks to the DoE's report concerning an ethane storage and distribution hub in our region. Perry, of course, is a former governor of Texas, so when he says things like this, it's pretty high praise.
"There is an incredible opportunity to establish an ethane storage and distribution hub in the Appalachian region and build a robust petrochemical industry in Appalachia. As our report shows, there is sufficient global need, and enough regional resources, to help the U.S. gain a significant share of the global petrochemical market. The Trump Administration would also support an Appalachia hub to strengthen our energy and manufacturing security by increasing our geographic production diversity."
PennLive
While we're still extremely early in the process - filings are just now underway, with construction scheduled for 2021 - the new pipeline will eventually serve roughly 2.5 million homes in eastern Pennsylvania.
Journal of Petroleum Technology
It's almost like all of these stories are related. 🤔🤔
Governing
If the very smart people who work on such things can figure out a valid way to re-use fracking water and reduce the number of injection wells, it would be a total game changer. Obviously, a lot of drilling is done in pretty dry areas like west Texas and New Mexico (the latter being the focus here), making the acquisition and transportation of water pretty big business. And the disposal of it afterwards a pretty big problem. Further north it's been re-purposed as a de-icer, although that solution isn't particularly relevant in the scorching Permian Basin.
Could fracking water eventually be used by farmers, in factories, or even to drink? That answer isn't imminent, but stay tuned, because people are trying.
Martins Ferry Times Leader
We're such horrible people, part 388.
See you next week!
