The Old Gas Well

When we purchased our land in 1984 there was an existing gas well halfway between the hard road and the center of our property. At that time we could drive a car to the gas well without any problem. Since then the access road has gotten a lot worse. A whole lot worse.

This well was drilled in the mid-1960s by the same Company that wishes to drill a well on our property. We wouldn't mind quite so much except the Company has maintained the existing road so poorly, and there have been major problems at the existing well, that it's hard for us to be happy with the turn of events.

We took photographs in 1997, in the end of May, to document the condition of the road. We'd made a complaint to the state's Office of Oil and Gas about the road and felt that photographs would help show the poor maintenance. We never used the photographs for their intended purpose, but they make a good record of just how bad the road can get after a typical winter's use by the Company.

We have another set of photographs taken in February 2009 after a bulldozer was used to get a vac truck to and from the well site.

We returned to this site in the spring of 2009 to conduct an environmental assessment. This page from the 2009 Gas Well Study section of the site shows a little of what we saw and has a link for the download of the Environmental Assessment.

Note: The well access road was fully upgraded in April 2010 so it now is gravelled with a roadbed able to stand the weight of heavy vehicles. Two pages shows some photos of the work done.

		The well access road uses a road system that dates back to the 19th century. At one time this road was the way to reach the ridge and the farms there.
		The road is on unimproved heavy clay. In the winter the clay is susceptible to damage from water and traffic. The road that continues past the gas well to our property is hardly ever driven on in the winter, other than by ATVs, and doesn't show this sort of damage.
		Certain areas of the well access road have always had drainage problems since we moved here in 1991. There is a bank to the left of the photo and the ground is higher than the road on the right. That means water just sits in low spots.
		Eventually the Company put down some gravel in the worst areas and that helped but the parts of the road without gravel would look like this after a typical winter.
		Heavy equipment is generally brought in during the winter to remove the crude oil brine condensate from a tank at the well. It's this equipment that tears up the road in the winter.
		This September, after months of complaints, the Company extended the gravel from about this point to the light area in the distance in this photo. After they put a well on our property they've promised to gravel the entire road from our home to the hard road.
		This is how the well looked in 1997. The wellhead Christmas tree is just to the left of the small gray building on the right. The tank that holds the crude oil brine is toward the left and another building holds equipment the Company uses to monitor the well's natural gas production.
		This was taken from the top of the tank's ladder. The well head is to the left with just a bit of the shed showing. There have been a number of changes to the well over the years and we'll post photos of how it looks today.

This section of the site is devoted to the gas well that is going to be drilled on our property along with our research and findings.

The Gas Well main page

The Old Well

Gas Well Study

Reclamation

Drilling Waste Management

This post in the blog archive at LiveJournal shows the well as it was in 2008:

The Gas Well
9 September 2008