The proverbial writing is now officially on the wall for the oil and gas recovery industry worldwide when it comes to gas flaring, the standard practice of burning off excess gas that cannot be sent into pipeline infrastructure or condensed due to a lack of either immediately available/proximal pipeline hookups or LNG/CNG plant capacity. On April 17, 2015, CEOs of top oil-producing companies and senior government officials from the world’s top oil-producing countries, for the first time in the planet’s history, have come together to massively delimit gas flaring at oil production sites via endorsement of a sweeping new initiative.
United Nations Sec-Gen, Ban Ki-moon, together with President of the World Bank Group, Jim Yong Kim, launched the Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 initiative in conjunction with senior government officials and leading executives from sector majors like Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) and Statoil (NYSE: STO), collectively representing 40% of all gas flaring on earth. This initiative was already endorsed by ten major oil companies and nine countries, making this latest round of endorsements a clear indicator to the oil and gas industry ahead of the new international climate agreement set to take place this December in Paris, that gas flaring in the future must either be sharply reduced, or potentially devastating fees and fines will ensue.
Designed to curb the 140 billion cubic meters plus of natural gas flared off every year around the globe, which is enough to power the entire continent of Africa and which puts an estimated 300 million tons of CO2 directly into the atmosphere annually, this bold new initiative syncs up with the Obama Administration’s Climate Action Plan objectives. The Climate Action Plan is aimed at reducing methane emissions by as much as 45% from 2012 levels within the next ten years and the EPA has already moved to implement changes that have begun to impact the oil and gas industry. Enhanced regulations that went into effect as a result of the Climate Action Plan early this year, attached to the EPA’s standing 2012 restrictions, are focused directly on methane emissions and will continue to hit oil and gas producers who flare with increasing force as time goes by.
Adoption of costly technologies designed to reduce emissions will no doubt become an increasingly daunting budget line item for energy producers in the oil and gas sector and thus the pressure is now on for innovators in the space to offer a solution that can harness this waste gas, which will otherwise become a major capital sink. The stage is now clearly set for innovators like Well Power, Inc. (OTCQB: WPWR), which has exclusive rights to a proprietary Micro Refinery Unit (MRU) system in the state of Texas, where the company has already secured license. WPWR also has the right of first refusal to this technology in the remaining states where oil and gas output continues to mount, like North Dakota, which now represents some 12% of overall national production.
Texas alone was responsible for some 36.4% of the over 3.168 billion barrels of crude oil produced in the U.S. last year. With nearly 288 million barrels produced in January 2015, at an average rate of 3.46 million bbls/day, Texas now produces roughly 81.5% more crude oil per day than the entire UAE (United Arab Emirates), which produced some 2.82 million bbls/day as of December 2014. With so much activity in the state’s primary formations, the Eagle Ford Shale, Permian Basin and the Barnett Shale, Texas is the ideal location for Well Power to roll out their MRU technology, helping producers avoid costly regulations and generate substantial additional revenues streams at the same time.
Able to kill two birds with one stone, the skid-mounted MRU system is mobile, scalable and has a small overall form factor, making it quite easy to get into difficult operating areas, where it can allow large and small producers alike to sidestep regulatory flaring costs, while generating saleable product or consumable energy. By helping even unconventional production in harsh locations to be done in an optimally cost-efficient manner, the MRU will likely become a standard piece of the overall puzzle for the U.S. when it comes to maintaining its newly reclaimed title as the top oil producer on earth.
Able to process high gas flows of up to 250 Mcf, the MRU is an ingenious assembly of proven technologies, combined with a unique micro-reactor that makes it possible for the system to be transportable and economically feasible. This system is designed to offer producers who would otherwise have to flare waste, stranded, or even merely shut-in gas which is being withheld from production (often because it is simply not profitable to produce), the option to produce Engineered Fuels from the waste gas that can be sold for profit or consumed on-site, as well as clean electrical power that can also be used immediately by site hardware. Given the large energy requirements of a fully operating oil and gas recovery site, the logistical upside attained via employment of such a system should be immediately obvious.
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