Compiled by Staff

Garfield County in Talks with Regulators About  Drill Pit Liners

RIFLE — Garfield County and the state’s oil and gas regulators are involved in extensive discussions about what to do with drilling pit liners — the large rubbery sheets covered with sludge, in some cases with toxic material, that are a byproduct of the gas drilling industry.

Used in gas-drilling pits around Garfield County, the impermeable liners may end up being buried in place rather than disposed of in a local landfill, if one idea floated by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission takes hold. Or, the liners may end up in a specially designed landfill site built just for that purpose, as a way of keeping potentially hazardous hydrocarbons and other substances from getting into regional groundwater supplies.

The liners have been banned from the county’s landfill facilities since early July, when the Garfield County commissioners were told they are too bulky, and possibly too toxic, for the landfill staff to deal with effectively. A COGCC meeting in September is expectd to address the subject of pit liners as part of the agenda.

Aspen’s St. Regis Resort Gets Solar Thermal System Installed

ASPEN - Altech Solar recently completed  a solar installation at the St. Regis Resort in Aspen. Utilizing custom solar thermal technology, the system  has already significantly reduced  the resort’s dependence on natural gas.

In the application, more than thirteen hundred solar e-tubes mounted in solar array panels on the resort’s main building roof heat a liquid solution housed in vacuum tubes, resembling copper and glass torpedoes, to temperatures exceeding two million BTU’s (British Thermal Units) per day. The heated solution circulates through manifolds mounted at the top of the solar array panels. A sophisticated digital system custom programmed by Altech Solar regulates pumps, valves and water quantity to maintain the desired range of water temperature for each specific use such as domestic hot water for the resort’s guests, the resort’s spa, the heated pool, whirlpools and the snowmelt system.

“I am very pleased with the savings they were able to obtain with the limited roof space of the St. Regis, as it is currently the largest Solar Thermal project in the U.S.” said Steve Herrera, President of Altech Sola. The company expects to install a larger thermal solar system at the Grand Hyatt in Aspen because it has more roof space available.

XCEL Partners on West Slope Solar Power Plant Project

Xcel Energy, Inc., is teaming with Abengoa Solar IST, a Spanish company with U.S. headquarters in Lakewood, in the first U.S. project to integrate an industrial-sized solar power plant into a conventional power plant.  The $4.5 million demonstration project is being built at the Cameo coal-fired power station near Grand Junction in order to test whether heat from the sun can be used at an existing coal-fired power plant to generate electricity.

When complete by the end of the year, the test facility will use mirrors aligned in a parabolic trough to concentrate the sun’s heat on pipes that hold fluid. The fluid will transfer the heat to water, producing steam to spin a turbine and produce electricity.

The project boils down to whether it is feasible to used sun-sourced steam alongside coal-produced steam to operate a power plant. The two companies hope an added benefit will be  using the sun’s heat to reduce carbon dioxide emissions at the power plant. According to Xcel, the Cameo plant processes roughly  900 tons of coal per year, and can produce about 77 megawatts of power, enough to support 77,000 homes, using coal.

Once in operation, the test facility is expected to be able to produce about 1 megawatt of power, enough to support 1,000 homes. Funding for the project is through  Xcel’s “Innovative Clean Technology” program.

David Wilks, Xcel’s president of energy supply, said in a statement, “If this demonstration works, we may be able to implement this type of technological advance in other coal-fired power plants to help further reduce carbon dioxide emissions in Colorado and possibly other areas of our service territory.”

“Proper use of the solar thermal energy produced at these facilities can improve plant efficiency while lowering CO2 emissions. The successful integration of solar and coal technologies will encourage more widespread use throughout the utility sector,” said Ken May, director of Abengoa.

Natural Gas Production in Colorado and Rockies Finally Seeing Decline

Rocky Mountain operators are just now seeing natural gas production begin to decline, almost a year after they began idling drilling rigs as prices at the wellhead plummeted.

Prices may fall even farther, however, because the volume of gas in underground storage is above the average of the last few years and Colorado figures show production was still growing in this year’s first and second quarters, said Alan Harrison, vice-president, Denver region/Piceance basin, Williams Exploration & Production Co., Tulsa.

The Colorado rig count peaked at 140 in the second half of 2008 and fell to a low of about 40 in recent weeks, Harrison noted at the Summer NAPE E&P Forum in Houston. Williams, lead operator in the Piceance basin in Garfield County, Colo., is running 8 rigs, down from 28.

Various operators have shut-in at least 300-350 wells in each of the Barnett, Piceance, and Fayetteville plays, said Bob Fryklund, vice-president, IHS-Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Harrison predicted that the rate of decline will steepen fairly rapidly but didn’t estimate a time frame.

In the Piceance valley area, Williams has driven costs down to a low of $1.6 million/8,000-ft well by drilling as many as 22 wells/pad, pumping frac jobs from 2 miles away from the rig, and drilling, completing, and producing gas simultaneously from the same pad, Harrison said.

It also built a 3,200-ft tunnel and a road with drillsites along switchbacks to access 60 otherwise undrillable locations in the highlands part of the basin.

Hydro Power in Roaring Fork Valley Closer to Reality

Carolyn Sackariason reports in the Aspen Times that the preliminary work to build a voter-approved hydropower plant under the Castle Creek Bridge is under way, and it should be up and running by next year, according to city officials.

John Hines, Aspen’s renewable energy utility manager, said the 1,880-square-foot facility will go through public review for final approval starting next month. If it’s approved by the Aspen City Council, construction could begin as early as the spring.

“It will probably be Christmas time before we know if it’s a go,” he said. “We are hoping to have it commissioned next fall.” That will have been three years after the majority of Aspen residents voted for the facility and issued $5.5 million in bonds to pay for it.

There has been minimal opposition to the facility, but some people are concerned about a decreased flow in the nearby stream because water will be drained out of it to generate power. Hines said the city will host a neighborhood meeting after Labor Day in which a hydrologist and an engineer will address water-flow concerns.

When completed, the 1.05 mega-watt facility is expected to increase electric production by 5.5 million kilowatt hours annually.

City officials say that switching from primarily coal-fired energy purchases to hydroelectric power production would eliminate an estimated 5,167 tons of CO2 emissions — representing a 0.6 percent community-wide reduction in carbon emissions based on the 2004 greenhouse gas emission inventory.